November 22 1963

The news coverage surrounding John F. Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963 was the first global, live TV news event. Transforming the global media landscape literally overnight, it marks the beginning of a new era of real-time mediatisation and with it the rise of a new temporality all too familiar to our present age. From the moment the news broke to the state funeral on 24 November in Washington, D.C., millions around the world didn’t turn off their TV sets and broadcasters stayed on air for four days and three nights. Newspapers couldn’t keep up. Like few events in recent history, the incident in Dallas produced a collective real-time memory and divided time into before and after.

This TV installation by the forgotten American video artist Oswald Store (1945–1973) captures the first five hours of TV coverage of this historic event in all its affective immediacy and retrospective, media-related complexity. An installation that asks to be perceived like a performance; a fascinating conceptual art piece, and a subtle meditation on time and the conflicting (but coexisting) models of clock time and experiential time.