SONY AV-3420 Portapak

The Sony DV-2400 Video Rover, known as the Portapak, was a battery operated portable video recording system. It was launched in 1967.

The introduction of the Pprtapak had a great impact on the development of video art and political activism. Suddenly, this technology was not in the hands of the big television stations alone. The artist Nam June Paik described the new situation in 1969 as follows: "People were attacked by television all their lives. Now they can move on to counterattack."

Video collectives used the technology to document events that were not shown by the major television stations. New artistic formats were also emerging: performances, for instance, were no longer performed in front of an audience, but alone in front of the camera. The artists* also experimented with the new formal possibilities of the electronic medium: unlike celluloid film, the video image could be shown on a screen in real time, cross-faded and delayed. The audience reacted with astonishment to the first video installations in which they could see themselves live on the screen.

“The PORTAPAK would seem to have been invented specifically for use by artists. just when many artists were doing performance works but had nowhere to perform, or felt the need to keep a record of their performances; just when it became clear that TV communicates more information to more people than large walls do;— just then the PORTAPAK became available" [1]



[1] Hermine Freed, 1976