The little cameras to which we have all become so accustomed in banks, bars, shops and the subway have extended public space to include those darkened chambers where cathode-ray ghosts of living passers-by flicker anonymously on banks of monitors. Images in this new public space have as little individual meaning as the abandoned tram tickets collected by Kurt Schwitters for his collages 60 years ago.

But while Schwitters' collaging of "found" objects into artworks is not usefull as a method for treating "found" electronic material, his discovery that political, social and cultural statements could be made by changing the context of these bits of industrial/commercial rubbish remains as relevant as ever.

This project therefore sets out from the formal premise that electronic systems in public spaces (video surveillance systems being only one of many) can be treated as "found" objects in the sense of Schwitters' Merz (Kommerz) Kunst. But, in order to develop the social/political statements which form the content of this kind of work, a form must be found that will generate the necessary contextual transformation. With electronic media this seems to be only possible when using the medium in which the material is discovered ... for example: with computer communications for data processing or video for video surveillance systems.

My intention in this project was to have the images from the monitors of the central monitoring chamber of the Vienna U-bahn system broadcast live during the pauses between the programmes in the evening television programme, extending the public space of the U-bahn system into the living rooms of the million or more people watching the second channel of the Austrian national television network.

The broadcast took place on June 16 1981 - but with two changes demanded by the ORF: 1. at the begining of each transmission a title was played over the image for about 10 seconds and 2. I was obliged to appear on the eveing news program (10 vor 10) and discuss the piece.

(Robert Adrian, 1981)