Das Publikum als Exponat (Ausstellung des Publikums)

»Publikum als Exponat (Ausstellung des Publikums)« [The Public as Exhibit (Exhibition of the Public)] is a participative video performance and closed circuit installation by Peter Weibel, which took place on April 10 and 11, 1969, at Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna. The audience of the exhibition »Multi Media 1« was interviewed in the gallery and recorded live. Thus in the first room, the audience saw themselves depicted in real time. They were standing simultaneously in real and media space. In a second room of the gallery, the interviews were shown on monitors with a time delay. The visitors saw themselves entering the gallery and being interviewed by Weibel. At the visitors’ request, the recordings could be rewound and played back several times. Due to the immediate availability of the video images, the audience in the closed circuit installation was psychologically confronted with its own image in the public space, and thus became an exhibition object itself. The exhibition was a radical gesture of audience participation; in the gallery only the audience was exhibited.