Eidotech, a German video art presentation company, has used to Adtec Digital’s media players for the integration of museum and gallery installations featuring South African video artist Candice Breitz. The signEdje high-definition media players are said to “fit the niche perfectlyâ€.
“Video art is becoming increasingly prominent, and we have seen a rise in integration of these types of installations,” said Joachim Abrell, CEO of Eidotech. "We continue to integrate projects for artists with Adtec’s playback systems as the signEdje fits the niche perfectly."
There is a shift amongst video artists toward full high definition productions: working with full HD cameras, providing the post production content in HD, and creating the demand for the gallery presentation to be delivered in HD.
When making equipment decisions for these installations, the important features are frame accuracy, playback quality, and user friendliness for administration.
"The high definition image quality and synchronisation work wonderfully for this application. These integrated art projects will be travelling the globe to prestigious museums. It is important to integrate a solution that is easily set up and performs without malfunction for months at a time for these travelling exhibits," said Abrell. "Furthermore, if an issue arose with signEdje, the players can be accessed from anywhere in the world."
Synchronous playback is utilised as an artistic medium by Breitz in installations such as Factum, Working Class Hero, and Queen. These installations contain between seven and thirty large flat screen monitors whose images sometimes seem to interact with one another or with the viewer. For these installations, Eidotech created the synchronicity by configuring the signEdjes either in an independent cluster or joined in an intranet with multiple sync groups. In the second case, a remote computer is used for maintenance, with all the files stored on it.
"I’m still trying to figure out the relationship between my portraits and series like Pop Idol or Big Brother, where humiliation is part of the deal. Like those programs, my portraits explore the widespread longing for 15 minutes of fame, the desire to appear on TV at any cost," said Breitz in a 2005 interview in Modern Painters.
The signEdje is a digital media player for MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 AVC/H.264 high and standard definition file playback and IP stream decoding. The signEdje automatically scales the content to match the output target up to 1080i60 for outstanding HD playback. It can be easily configured using the included web-based control application.
Video artist Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1972 and is now based in Berlin, Germany. In 2007, Breitz won the Prix International d’Art Contemporain l Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Her public collections reside in Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany), MoMA - Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), and FNAC - Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (Puteaux, France), as well as Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (St. Gallen, Switzerland).