In this T.V. display system we have set out to explore some basic problems which we believe will be met increasingly by the designer in the near future.

At the moment there is very little opportunity for those of us who are concerned with the control and rationalisation of the plethora of material and information made potentially available to us by current media, to take a cool look at display systems which utilise the media involved at anything like their maximum potential. The advent of the multi-screen movie and audio-visual presentations on a large scale and in considerable number at the Montreal Expo has shown us that film used as part of a controlled related system suddenly takes on a whole new set of properties. For the first time we saw the concept of film as environment tentatively explored in a public situation. The Expo experiments are obviously only the very first steps in developing a whole range of systems which allow us as audience to become involved ourselves in the process of relating together the program material displayed to us. So far the medium used most widely has been film. However in many ways film being a basically linear medium is strictly limited if the requirement is for a really flexible system. A far more flexible medium is T.V. which, at the moment, is still normally thought of the single channel box, but which whilst utiliising other media such as film as content allows us far more opportunity for selection. If we then consider T.V. used in display systems monitoring a number of channels concurrently from a variety of sources, both from national and international news and entertainment networks and also from personal close-circuit and video-tape and even generated by computer, we can see what colossal potential there is in the medium. So in the not so distant future we can expect to have to deal with the multi-channel multi-media situation both professionally and as an involved audience in our own homes, and one suspects at times the distinction between producer, and audience may become blurred.

This leaves us with the problem of controlling and making sense of the vast possibilities a new concept of media systems offers us. We have devised a display system which allows us to have a look at some of these problems, and a programming system which we hope may give us some clues to their solutions. We have resisted the obvious temptation to indulge in aesthetic juggling of rectangular T.V. screens in neat geometric displays, (although we may introduce a program which does this at some stage). Instead we have created a wide open situation in which a constantly changing stream of images from a wide variety of sources flicker across the screens. Various channels are then automatically selected from this material and the images displayed together in series of programme patterns.

Dennis Crompton