'Hidden Signals': TeleText Workshop

Thursday 11 November 2021, 1pm–3pm

Jarrko Räsänen and Raquel Meyers will deliver a teletext workshop as part of Tilt [at Windmills], an exhibition curated by Mirjami Schuppert, with works by Fionnuala Doran, Paul Moore, Robin Price and Jarkko Räsänen.

During this workshop Raquel Meyers and Jarkko Räsänen will give an introduction to TeleText, also known as broadcast teletext, and how it can be used to create teletext art. This is an online event, suitable for ages 18 and over and will take place via Zoom. A computer and access to the internet will be required for the session. Order your free ticket from our online shop here.

The workshop:

The initial starting point for the Teletext workshop will be animals, as Jarrko’s work CryptArk in the exhibition Tilt[At Windows] deals with animal footage. Participants can look for inspiration from Cryptark online version of archival clips: a collection of "animal videos” from 60’s here.

During the workshop participants will be using an online editor available here; and downloadable CebraText for Windows. Ctext can be downloaded from here. Participants can choose which they would prefer to work with. During the session Jarrko will use Ctext (link above) and Raquel will demonstrate with some of the online editors too.

You can find more about the options for editors from an introduction by Dan Farrimond here.

Jarkko Räsänen is an artist working with photography, moving image, and sound art. His work is computer-based, using algorithms that create new visuals from already existing images and moving images. He is interested in questioning the realism connected to image files that we consume by deconstructing them in the spirit of glitch art – despite this his work is more related to conceptual art via the strict structural operations he uses in programming them, rather than to errors. He wishes to bridge the coder-aesthetics to the traditions of experimental cinema and informalist & impressionist painting. He graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Time and Space Art department in 2011. During his studies he also spent a semester at the University of Arts Berlin. Räsänen’s works have been exhibited as part of Ars17 Kiasma, Moscow 4th Biennale, Anthology Archives New York, Videotage Hong Kong, Ars Electronica Linz and he has had international exhibitions, including Elevator Gallery London and Salon Dahlmann Berlin.

Raquel Meyers is a Spanish artist who defines her practice as KYBDslöjd (mecanografía expandida), which can be roughly defined as <manual skill with a keyboard> that materializes text characters and typing beyond the screen, and questions our parasitic relationship with the technology. KYBDslöjd is not merely an arbitrary intervention: it’s based on and refers to the typewriter, Concrete Poetry, Demoscene, and Brutalism. The typewriter contributes to the execution, while poetry contributes to a system, a brutal language that should be learnt. The characters are used without ornament, like concrete in Brutalist architecture, capturing the spirit and the contradictions of its time.

Raquel belongs to a generation which, above all, has been electrocuted by technologies; she believes that irony and cynicism seem to have taken us to a precarious state of acceptance and resignation. She works with so-called obsolete technologies like Commodore 64, Teletext, Typewriters, and Fax.