Sun in Your Head

"Sun in your Head (1963, Fluxus Film Anthology, Fluxfilm no. 23) images' have been directly captured from a television screen with a film camera. The film upsets the canon of the experimental film which then prevailed. The film is neither personal nor abstract, but refers to something entirely impersonal like a television programme. The artist also subverts the intention of the original film, transforming it into a cinematographic object. His distortions of and interfer- ences with the television screen not only include references to its physical structure— its support and its electronic components— but also examples of a wide range of television programmes that dominated the screen at the time. Pixilated newscasts appear against a background of a space capsule at sea: fragments of 'Magazin der Woche', a pro- gramme with various news items broadcast on German television. The video ends with a long, sophisticated montage of scenes from a documentary about American airborne troops during World War II: a succession of shots of pilots, dashboards, propellers, transformed by Vostell’s videographic interventions. (Berta Sichel)" (Source, site web, ARGOS)

"Vostell's large-scale happening '9 Nein Décollagen' ('9 No – Dé-coll/ages) took place on 14 September 1963 in nine different locations in Wuppertal, and was organized by the Galerie Parnass. The audience was ferried by bus from location to location, including a cinema that screened 'Sun in your head' while people lay on the floor. The film transfers to the moving image Vostell’s principle of ‘Décollage’. While up to then Vostell had altered TV pictures as they were being broadcast, he was now able to compose the temporal sequence. Since no video equipment was available in 1963, Vostell instructed camera-man Edo Jansen to film distorted TV images off the TV screen. The film was re-edited and copied to video in 1967.
Made for Vostell’s '9 Nein Dé-coll/agen' (9 'No Dé-coll/ages') happening, the film was subsequently shown in a separate context, for instance in Amsterdam in 1964." (Source, site web, Medienkunstnetz)