Lately it seems like we, collectively, are stuck in the past, the 1980s to be accurate. I don't know what happened to the present (nevermind about the future, that was always already an imaginary)? I increasingly get the feeling that we aren't going to be getting anything of or from the present for a while at least. Instead, we have this strange obsession with revisiting the past artifacts of our culture and redoing/remaking/recreating them at a higher resolution and with more detail, but without anything that we haven't already seen.
This Stainless Steel Camera is a sign of the future: the divide between professional and consumer, instead of gradually going away, is going to become ever wider and more obvious. The professional equipment will record high-quality, ready-to-edit footage, and consumer devices will be more concerned with their fashion-sense than with the ability to control the quality or do much with the finished footage. I'm not surprised by this development: it makes sense if you want to gradually eliminate the consumer-as-producer, just gradually do away with consumer tools that are as good as the professional ones.
VHS tapes were the first genuinely popular, available to the masses media format. So much happened with VHS (and BETA, too) that it is easy to misunderstand what its death means for us: the replacement of VHS with digital alternativesalternatives that change the balance from what the people using the tapes want to do with their technology to that they are allowed to do with it.
The idea of TV as sculpture isn't a new one, and if you go looking at department stores, chances are you will see a few novelty sets. Hannspree is a company devoted to LCD TVs are sculptural fashion accessories. It was inevitable, I guess.
