In 1979, four years before teletext first went live in Norway, Arild Boman of the Institute for Social Research led a group of researchers and artists in a series of experiments with the medium.
Facilitated by public broadcaster NRK during its testing phase with teletext, these included “literary forms”, sheet music and graphical artworks.
Boman acknowledged that the service’s acceptance of these ground-breaking experiments was “admirable for a media institution,” especially as they were “very busy with [the] new medium”.
“I was interested in whether there was a way to exploit [teletext’s] potential – not just with letters and numbers, but also various forms of graphics. … Teletext art is one of the earliest examples of digital art being sent into people’s homes. … When we made these images, we had no concept of what teletext really was. To get into the situation, we had to tinker with the technology.”
–Arild Boman
Participating artist Morten Juvet described the format as being “like later street art using small bathroom tiles to form an image, or like the first video games where you moved from side to side within a square.” In his piece Sunrise in the Green, Juvet represented in teletext “the first morning light, which gradually becomes brighter and brighter.”
Finland’s Yle Text would re-broadcast a selection of the experiments on their service in 2026 via the Museum of Teletext Art. These “Excursions” explored ‘Teletext as an Open Medium’, the ‘Point of Teletext’ (simply a 2*2 pixel red square), letter forms created with block mosaics and a teletext version of a “computer score of Ecumene, … played in NRK-TV during the first landing on The Moon in 1969”.
Described as the “earliest documented research into teletext art”, these experiments demonstrated the “potential of teletext’s features beyond mainstream information services” and explored its possibilities as a “tool and medium for research and artistic communication”.
Sources
- Den glemte tv-kunsten, Endre Ugelstad Aas, Klassekampen, 20 August 2025
- First Excursions in Teletext: Press Release, Museum of Teletext Art, fix.fi, accessed 28 February 2026
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