Georg Winter

TV-Channel Bugacs-Puszta UCS, 1988

The field test called TV-Channel Bugacs-Puszta, 1988, recorded Georg Winter’s early research in the new media field established in 1992 by the foundation of an office: ‘Ukiyo Camera Systems. Development office for camera technology and new media’. The TV-Channel Bugacs-Puszta, constructed as a tribute to the artist’s family, which has links with Hungary, consists of a roughly carpentered, rectangular wooden channel, open on the inside, roughly fixed to a backpack frame. Associated with all this is a simple map of Hungary on the wall, with the little graphical area of the country the family comes from circled and highlighted. A photograph on the map shows Georg Winter carrying the Channel on his shoulder, and also his grandmother, who is looking through it. This seemingly absurd situation has a hard political core: until well into the 1990s private television was a rare privilege in Hungary, in the same way as access to the media all over today’s world – whether as a user or an author – is kept from many people for ideological or politically repressive reasons.