Felix Gets Broadcasted (2007)
By Mark Leckey
In his video "Felix Gets Broadcasted" (2007), Mark Leckey explores the history of the moving image. Based on photographs that document the television experiments conducted by America’s National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in the late 1920s, the artist attempts to trace the course of the first television transmissions. While today’s electronic television works with cameras, early television images were scanned by a mechanical scanner and then transmitted. The central element of this scanner was the so-called Nipkow disk, on which holes are punched in a spiral arrangement. Each hole is exactly one hole-width deeper on the disc than the previous one. The subsequent image field is as large as the distance between two consecutive holes. When the disc is rotated, a hole thus moves from left to right through the scanned image window. This process repeats for each line of the image in each second. Light reflected from the object can thus be scanned over the entire image with a single light-sensitive selenium cell line by line – in 1928 there were just 30 lines – and converted into a continuous electrical signal. (1) In the experiments of the 1920s, Otto Messmer’s cartoon character Felix…
Watch Felix Gets Broadcasted on Fast Ubu