Talking to a child of the smartphone generation about Teletext is a bit embarrassing. It’s like telling them that people used to listen to music by slotting temperamental spools of tape into mechanical bricks – bricks powered by AA batteries that lasted twice around a C90 as long as you didn’t rewind too often. They will believe you because they have seen pictures, but they will also look at you with faint disdain that you were once part of a world so backward, and suggest with a faint shake of the head that you really should have been doing much better, much sooner.
But what do these callow youths know? Teletext was ace. A text-based page, beamed into your telly through the antenna, and rendered in style so blocky it looked like it was made from electronic LEGO. Looping pages of breaking news, recipes, horoscopes, the lot. This is how we found out the footy scores before push alerts and learned of celebrity deaths that weren’t important enough to interrupt Eastenders for. Lo-fi Twitter for the analogue generation, but without having everyone’s opinion on the matter shoved in your face. No trolling or mass outpourings of grief. Just a silently revolving wall of information.
Teletext is not dead yet, either. Reports of it’s death, while not greatly exaggerated, are still a bit premature. Helsinki-based FixC lead up a group dedicated to preserving the media for reasons best known to themselves, but probably a mixture of nostalgia and irony. They have set up the virtual Museum of Teletext Art, and are holding the third annual International Teletext Art Fair (ITAF2014) at the Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin, and the MuseumsQuartier Wien, Vienna, showing off what is possible (and what is not) in the way of pixillated pictures. As well as the physical events (running until 14 September), artworks are being broadcast on the ITAF teletext pages of several broadcast networks and online teletext services in Europe, creating a revolving gallery on your screen. ITAF is inviting user submissions of pictures of the art being viewed for the ITAF In the House spin-off, and participants who email a qualifying pic will be sent a jute bag in the post.
Two is better than one
by Nadine Arbeiter
Dance
by Michaâl Borras a.k.a Systaime
Equations
by Francis Hunger
Thread of Fate
by Raquel Meyers
Untitled
by LIA
1,3,4,5,6
by Erkka-Nissinen
Sugar
by Juha van Ingen
