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[[image]] What do you like most about Soho TV? 1. See new art 42% 2. New TV formats 30% 3. More enlightening 13% 4. Viewers choice 1 15% 5. Viewers choice 2 0% What do you like least about Soho TV? 1. Too slow 41% 2. Not logical 13% 3. Too intellectual 18% 4. Viewers choice 1 28% 5. Viewers choice 2 0% narrowcasting - that is TV focused toward special interests - cable is bound to bring about, 45 percent of an audience is actually very good. The live QUBE poll Davidovich conducted also, in his mind, debunks some of the criticism delivered at video art that only a limited number of people really want to look at it. According to the QUBE poll, 42 percent of the viewers, when asked "What do you like most about Soho TV?" answered they liked the opportunity "to see new art," with another 30 percent saying they liked the opportunity "to see new TV formats." Interpretation of Poll When asked what they liked least about Soho TV, 42 percent of the QUBE audience - almost predictably for people reared on TV an an action medium - said that it was "too slow." Taking these results, Davidovich argues that this admittedly limited QUUBE poll shows: - The audience for new forms for television is not as limited as some critics argue. - The average TV audience is not as stupid as the networks assume and is willing to tune in on the new, the unique and the different. - There is a great deal of audience interest outside major art centers in an art form that can be viewed at ease in the home. Davidovich carried his live experiment one step further on QUBE, a step that he contends will bring the video artist and his audience close together once interactive cable systems start to proliferate. Using both the response buttons and call-inns, Davidovich asked the audience to help him create a work of video art. One button on the QUBE console was used to select one camera in the studio while another was used to select another. With a viewer calling in to direct camera movement Davidovich and his QUBE audience created what he called "the world's first audience-created piece of video art." The future of video art, Davidovich argues, is now in the cable systems, not in the galleries. The QUBE poll backed up this assertion: 43 percent of the audience said that Soho TV belongs on cable TV, 15 percent of the audience voted for it to have a place on public TV, 15 percent on commercial TV and only 7 percent of the audience said it did not have a place on TV at all. These results auger well for video art, Davidovich says, but only if video artists Continued on next page SOHO QUBED Continued from previous page meet the challenge. "Video art today has many problems, not only with the audience but with the art community," he says. "There is a paradox about video art-if it is to succeed, then it is going to succeed in the home and not in galleries. "It is easy for me to go into a gallery and know I am going to have 10 monitors to work with. Then I can plot out what I am going to do. But that's gallery art, and I believe that the real future of video art is in the home, not in the galleries.'" Backing this conviction with action, Davidovich is trying to take Soho TV to the rest of the country via cable. Starting next month Soho TV will be shown on the Iowa City Iowa cable system, a long way from Wooster Street, but according to Davidovich definitely the right direction for video art to be moving if it is to survive. Soho TV can be seen on Manhattan Cable TV and Teleprompter Manhattan Mondays at 10:00 on Channel 10 and also Sundays on MCTV only on Channel 10 at 11:30. VIDEO [[horizontally]]
