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SOHO QUBED

Bob Brewin 

When Kellogg's invents a new sugar coated cereal, Procter and Gamble comes up with a new "magic" laundry detergent or Haynes decided to market a different kind of pantyhose, the people who live in Columbus, Ohio, more often than not get first crack at these products and packages. That's because Columbus, as flat any non-descript a city as anyone will ever see, holds a special place in the hearts of the sopa, cereal, cookie and other disposable products packagers - it is the home of the Perfect Sample
Take all the divergent racial, cultural and socio-economic factors that make up the American melting pot and look for the paces where this national diversity is reflected in microcosm and Columbus is it. Columbus has Wasps, whites, blacks, hispanics, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, straights, gays - you name it, Columbus has it in an almost exact proportion to the scattering of these groups in the country as a whole. Therefore, Madison Avenue and manufacturers agree, if a product can make it in Columbis, it can probably succeed in the rest of the country.
Video artist Jaime Davidovich, founder and director of the Artists Television Network and producer of the Artists Television Network and producer of Soho TV, a New York scale show devoted to video art, decided to use the perfect sample Colombus represents for the same reason. He wanted to find out if there was indeed a market for his art form outside the often incentous world of artists and galleries that makes Wooster Street the video art capital of the country. So, last November Davidovich took 14 programs from the Soho TV series to Columbus and tested them on Warner-Amex Cable Co.'s QUBE cable television system. 
From November 1979 through February 1980 Davidovich, via one of the "cultural" channels on the QUBE system, exposed the Columbus audience to the works of video artists usually only seen in New York galleries. Columbus TV screens, usually a conduit for commercial-free movies or imported over-the-air signals, came alive with the video works of Ruth Rotko and John Keller, Vincent Trasov's My Five Years in a 1, the story of a Vancouver, B.C. mixed media artist's campaign for mayor while dressed as Mr. Peanut and an interview/preformance tape with composer John Cage. These taped, plus other programs in the series such as a Live From CBGB work by Edit Deak definitely stretch the limits of what television is and fitted in well with Davidovich's plan to use the most unique feature of QUBE, its instant response polling capability, to fins out whether video art has wide appeal.

Away From the Gallery
This test is crucial to Davidovich, who spends a lot of time pondering his chosed field and wondering about its future. He believed that video art must shift its focus away from gallery-type showing and developing into a medium that can be seen on the home screen. "Video art has to be focused in a way that it appeals to a wide number of people," he said. "I don't think it really is a gallery type of art. People don't want to spend a long time looking at monitors in a gallery. Most people related to television as an instrument in their home, and artists have to figure out how to get access to that home set."
So, two-thirds of the way through SoHo TV's two'month rune on QUBE, Davidovich did a live show with the self-explanatory title, Soho Wants to Know. Using both the QUBE response buttons and a call-in format, Davidovich sought to find out what his audience thought of video art and whether it thought it deserved a place on the television medium of the future, cable, whose huge channel capacity offers room far more than just sitcoms or Westerns.
The instant results served up by the QUBE computer confirmed Davidovich's belief that there is a market for video are beyond the galleries of Soho. These results also pinpointed further areas of video are for Davidovich to explore - for video art is an art form that creates its own paradox in his mind. "Usually the artist in other media only creates for himself, but in video art you are really working with a medium that can go directly into people's homes, whether they choose to have it there or not. So, and this is what makes video art different from other arts, you should tailor your works to the needs of the audience."
According to the QUBE computer, a full 22 percent of the audience watching Soho Wants to Know thought that Soho TV and the video art it presented in its run in Columbus was "a good alternative" to regular TV. Further, an additional 23 percent of the audience of (it's hard to determine how many of QUEBE's total subscriber base of 30,000 plus was watching this program because Warner-Amex refuses to release audience figures) thought that video art "has potential." Only 12 percent of the QUBE audience thought that video art was "too far out" and the same percentage thought that video art "doesn't belong on TV."
While a network probably would not be satisfied with only 45 percent of an audience really liking a show (that is the number of QUBE subscribers who thought Soho TV was "a good alternative" or "had potential")
Davidovich points out that the world of 

APRIL 30 - MAY 6, 1980 
SOHO NEWS