This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Ceefax was brief, but art is long.
Although the BBC will switch off its Teletext service -- the last in the UK -- this October, FixC, an artists' co-operative in Helsinki, is preserving the medium by organising the world's first international Teletext art festival. <span class="s2">"We received some very different approaches to Teletext art: abstract, representative, pop, political and expressive," says Juha van Ingen from FixC (shown here are a selection of the works). "Teletext looks simple to use, but it really isn't."
The artworks will be shown on German Teletext in August; they've already featured in the Teletext pages of YLE, the Finnish national broadcaster. "YLE has some 900,000 daily viewers of its Teletext pages and the service remains popular in some other European countries," says van Ingen. "It is surprising that it is disappearing from the UK." Certainly beats watching the Test Card.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
