Infermental 4

Lyon, France, 1985
102 contributions, 14 countries, 7 hours

Editors FRIGO (Gérard Couty, Mike Hentz,
Christian Vanderborght)
Supervisor Astrid Heibach

„You will never understand it if you don’t feel it“ is Frigos’s explanation of the term media-mystic and can at once stand as motto for the entire issue.
It was always a concern of INFERMENTAL’s to make correlations clear and to show new tendencies. The task of putting things together in order to make a statement must be achieved by every magazine regardless of the medium. A magazine on video tape has it, in this respect, more difficult, because of the sequential nature of the medium, than a printed magazine which may be read from front to back or this way and that. According to the technical possibilities and showing practices to date, the magazine on video tape dictates the interrelations between the contributions far more clearly to the viewer – at least as long as the wish of the initiator of INFERMENTAL, Gábor Bódy, is not reality: that is not 6 or 7 U-matic video cassettes shown one after the other to the public rather a video-disc for home use which allows every title to be chosen; comparable to having an encyclopedia on your bookshelf. How distant, unfortunately, this dream remains is evidence in the just as sudden (at least in Europe) vanishing appearance of the medium video-disc.
(Dieter Daniels)