A single figure dominates the beginnings of video art in Britain - David Hall....

His early experiments with broadcast television are unique...

Michael OPray, British Film Institute Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1988.

For [Hall].. the video medium was an unexplored territory for artists, its codes
yet uncracked. He argued that video art was integral to television and not just its
technical by-product. TV - and its subversion - was where video's vital core was
located, well beyond the ghettos of film co-ops, arts labs and art galleries. This
view opened an unusual space, somewhere between high art formalism (which it
resembled) and the mass arts (which it didn't). Anti-aesthetic and anti-populist -
conceptual art with a looser, dada streak....
AL Rees, Monitoring Partridge catalogue, University of Dundee 1999.

In 1971 David Hall made ten TV Interruptions for Scottish TV which were
broadcast, unannounced, in August and September of that year (a selection of
seven of the ten was later issued as 7 TV Pieces). These, his first works for
television, are examples of what Television Interventions, as they came to be
known, can be. Although a number of interventions have subsequently been
made by various artists, the 7 TV Pieces have not been surpassed, except by
Hall himself in This is a Television Receiver (1976) and Stooky Bill TV
(1990)...
Nicky Hamlyn, Film Video and TV, Coil magazine 9/10, London 2000.

"...Although each Piece has its own specific quality and repays repeated viewing
in varying degrees, Hall has insisted [that] 'the pieces were not intended as
declarations of art in their own right, they did not assume that privilege. They
were gestures and foils within the context of..TV. They needed TV, they
depended on it.' Hall is critical of specialist arts programmes [art galleries on air]
which 'call the few and exclude the many', and in a letter to Studio International
[March 1972] Alistair MacIntosh, curator of the Edinburgh event, echoed Hall's
strictures. He pointed out that the Pieces reached 'an audience of 250,000 per
night. They didn't know what they were looking at and didn't expect it, so all the
rubbish surrounding art was circumvented.' "
Mick Hartney on TV Interruptions 1971 in the book Diverse Practices: A Critical
Reader on British Video Art (Arts Council of England/ John Libbey) 1996.

... The idea of inserting them as interruptions to regular programmes was

crucial and a major influence on their content. That they appeared unannounced
with no titles (two or three times a day over ten days) was essential. To get a TV
company to agree to show them, and with these conditions, was a coup...
The transmissions were a surprise, a mystery. No explanations, no excuses.
Reactions were various. I viewed one piece in an old gents club. The TV was
permanently on but the occupants were oblivious to it, reading newspapers or
dozing. When the TV began to fill with water newspapers dropped, the dozing
stopped. When the piece finished normal activity was resumed. When
announcing to shop assitants and engineers in a local TV shop that another was
about to appear they welcomed me in. When it finished I was obliged to leave
quickly by the back door. I took these as positive reactions...
David Hall in 19.4.90 - Television Interventions catalogue, 1990.

Tap is probably the most well-known of the 7 TV Pieces. Unseen hands

place a tap inside a glass tank, framed so that the tanks edges coincide with the
sides of the TV. The tap is turned on, filling the space with water until it itself is
submerged. The tank continues to fill until the meniscus - the surface line of the
water - rises out of view. The tap is withdrawn and turned off, leaving that most
forbidden of things, a blank silent screen. After a pause of several seconds the
plug is pulled and the tank empties, now with the meniscus cutting acoss the
screen at a 45 degree angle. Beyond the reference to the box as as glass-fronted
container, the piece serves to demonstrate how framing is crucial in determining
how we understand an image, and hence how meaning is created, not just by
what framing includes, but also in the sense of the editorial function is performs.
This leads to a wider reading of the work as a critique of the largely invisible
editorial practices of programme makers and indeed the TV institutions...
Nicky Hamlyn in Coil magazine 9/10, London 2000

...the Pieces [were not] calculated simply to alert or confuse the TV audience. In
one [Two Figures] the respective stillness and frenetic movement of the figures
in a room depended for its perceptual effect on a complex interpretative process
on the part of the viewer whereby the reading of the technical manipulation of
the scene - i.e. the unnatural acceleration of the moving figure - is subverted by
the prolonged stationary presence of the seated figure. In this Piece - in my
opinion the strongest - by juxtaposing within a single scene a figure whose
behaviour is largely cinematically-generated with one whose appearance
suggests the medium is transparent, Hall brought vividly to the fore the inherent
contradictions of that medium.
Mick Hartney in Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art,1996.

Traditional artforms can no longer compete with the Media. Today the Media is
all-powerful. It cautiously embraces art and quickly discards it in this throwaway
culture. The Media has taken the place of art. It sees itself as culturally
independent, yet totally depends on the culture that surrounds it. This is its
sustenance, and traditional artforms are devoured along with other cultural
activity. Of all the Media television is undoubtedly the key mediator, even the
climatic controller, of present-day culture. That I should adopt TV as my artform -
as the vehicle for an alternative mediation or critique of that culture, and by
implication of TV itself - was highly appropriate...
David Hall, Video Art Plastique exhibition cat., Herouville-Saint Clair, France
1991.

The pieces were not intended as declarations of art in their own right, they did
not assume that privilege. They were gestures and foils within the predictable
form and endless inconsequentiality of TV. They needed TV, they depended on
it...
David Hall on TV INTERRUPTIONS 1971, 19:4:90 Television Interventions cat.,
Channel 4 TV and Fields and Frames, Scotland, 1990.

When I made sculpture in the sixties I photographed it, but two dimensional
pictures said little about my work. However, if people didnt see the sculpture
they more or less believed they had if they saw the photographs. They made
judgements about it, they were used to that from looking at images. I decided
they were probably more important than the sculpture and turned to making only
photographs.
I then recognised the illusion was even more convincing when it moved and had
sound, so I started to make films. But I wasnt always interested in making the
illusion convincing, if it was it would be like looking at something else, not at a
film. I used illusion only as a means to see itself. If I had denied using it
altogether it would be very convenient and true to the mechanics and process of
film, but illusion would still be there because people wanted it to be. They
expected that from looking at films. I became very interested in their
expectations, but did not necessarily want to give them what they might expect.
..I soon became interested in television. TV as a medium (and its offspring
video) was a different proposition. Viewing TV was not a special event with a
captive audience like film, but it reached everyone... and with TV people mostly
got what they expected...[and] my interests in film transposed to TV. But the
context was very different and the work had to respond to that. TV art was
something else...
David Hall, Structures, Paraphenalia and Television, Sign of the Times cat.,
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990.