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César also uses a television set sculpturally in his piece «Télévision» in 1962. He strips a television of its casing and places it on a scrap sculpture. The whole thing is covered with a Perspex hood, with holes for the aerial, loudspeaker and operating knobs. The idea of the ready-made is transferred to the wonders of modern civilization, entirely in the spirit of Pierre Restany's Nouveau Réalisme manifesto.
A TV object by Isidore Isou, the founder of Lettrism, dates from the same year, 1962; it is called «La télévision déchiquetée ou l'anti-crétinisation.» Lettrism is a movement that has been somewhat unjustly forgotten. In the early 1950s, it anticipated many 1960s developments in conceptual and inter-media art. Isou proclaimed the destruction of the film in 1951, actually implementing this with a montage film and thus causing the scandal that brought the young Debord to Lettrism.[34] The movement was best known for Lettrist hypergraphics, a set of meaningless signs that anticipated the development of comics and advertising
in many ways. In his TV object, Isou puts a template of such hypergraphic elements over the screen. This simple gesture makes the TV into a reservoir of constantly new signs, created by overlapping the hypergraphic matrix and the moving image. A key fact is that both César and Isou exhibited their TV objects in Paris in March 1962.[35]
The Swiss artist, graphic designer and advertising expert Karl Gerstner changed an active TV image in a much more complex visual way. He developed various models of his «Auto-Vision» from 1962–1963: «The name identifies the difference from television. The aim is not to broadcast programs, but to create programs directly. For this we use daily television programs that are abstracted through a ‹pair of spectacles,› and alienated to the point of being non-representational,» is Gerstner's comment on the process.[36] These Perspex ‹spectacles› have something in common with Op Art. They can be swapped around, and each pair creates a different effect. Twelve different ‹spectacles› versions of «Auto-Vision» were shown on a
