Thomas Tadlock

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini — to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.

By means of a console with innumerable knobs, switches, dials and other mysterious looking controls, three small TV monitors and a system of mirrors and color filters, Tadlock is able to compose on a TV screen constantly moving and changing colorful kaleidoscopic images. In ' accomplishing this, Tadlock uses all or part of three separate live broadcasts. It is now possible for this artist (or any other using the Archetron) in effect to create simultaneously works of art on TV screens in countless homes, thus making Nam June Paik's "Silent TV Station" possible. All that is needed is for a broadcasting organization, a closed circuit TV company or a cable TV company to avail itself of this remarkable development.