The Pan-pan Show

'The Pan-pan Show' consists of live video with a mix of live and prerecorded audio for broadcast and searches for signs of intelligent life on the Internet. Regarding the 'Pan-pan' warning - there is the possibility of pending danger, but currently no immediate danger of loss of life.

The equipment used to create The Pan-pan Show is entitled Conspicuous Surveillance (for Art Gallery duty) - Video Totem, which consists of the Ikegami black & white one inch Newvicon tube camera, that is good for shooting in low light, in its day it was a high end surveillance camera. The camera is mounted on a motorized degree adjustable pan, that is mounted on a nine inch black & white underscan screen monitor. The camera is cabled directly into the monitor, for broadcast a cable goes video out of the monitor to the analog/digital converter and then into a computer.
(Unfortunately in February 2015 Justin.tv closed down and The Pan-pan Show's video archive was lost.)  Example of The Pan-pan Show Internet broadcasts - late night live panning video broadcasts from my second floor studio apartment corner or Birmingham Street & Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Fall 2008 - Winter/Spring 2009), as audio, prerecorded art lectures were mixed with live street sounds, mics hung out over the sidewalk to record the loud drunks heading home from the downtown bars who kept me awake after 2am when these live broadcasts occurred.  For studio use, most times there was no broadcast, no recording made, I just liked having the moving live video image on this totem scanning back and forth in my studio while listening to the drunks on the sidewalk below; it kept me company late at night.
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Conspicuous Surveillance (for Art Gallery duty) - Video Totem - (In this photo camera scanned inside/outside studio, corner or Birmingham Street & Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Conspicuous Surveillance (for Art Gallery duty) - Video Totem title dated from the early '90's, was created to sit on a plinth in group shows as "kinetic sculpture", to protect the other works.  It was made from the equipment used in another project, Mobile Scanner, 1986, a conspicuous surveillance mobile unit, that was created for conspicuous urban public street presence during Expo '86 in Vancouver, BC
  Mobile Scanner, 1986  photos by Theodore Wan

The year before Expo '86 I had worked with Ian Murray & John Watt (The A/V Force, Toronto), involved with the thematic video research & shoot of "Trains, Boats & Planes" in and around Vancouver, B.C., video that was to be used on the "Videowall" at the Expo '86 Canadian Pavilion.  Thinking about the expensive high tech spectacle aspects of the "Videowall", I reassembled old video equipment I still had from the 1970's to create a modest mobile public video totem.

Videowall Expo '86 Vancouver B.C.
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Mobile Scanner downtown Vancouver, 1986 - the Mobile Scanner was positioned in various locations where recordings were made, I don't believe I saved or exhibited any of the videotapes. I also used Sandy Wilson's car, which had an open roof for the Mobile Scanner, to be mobile while panning city traffic during rush hour.
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  From the Mobile Scanner in 1986 to the Mobile Camera Obscura in 2016, see current projects








A millennium ago a Muslim scientist in Cairo—Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (or as he is known in the West, Alhazen) was the first to describe the camera obscura.
 
Summer 2016 Plan:
ICA•RDI The Pan-pan Show will broadcast on the Internet live from the location of the mobile ICA•RDI Embassy (i.e. the ICA•RDI administration office, art studio, art chamber presentation space, & camera obscura)