Infermental was the first international magazine published solely on videocassettes. The concept was conceived the Hungarian filmmaker Gábor Bódy in 1980. The name is a combination of the words international, ferment, and experimental.
The eleveen volumes of Infermental were published from 1980–1991, with an rotating series of editors from different countries. Each annual issue assembled from four to seven hours of the audio-visual work that represented the latest national trends of each country.
Infermental's ten issues (and one special) totaled approximately seventy hours of material from more than a thousand artists and thirty six countries. Among the numerous participating artists were Gary Hill, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, Jon Jost, Peter Weibel, Heiko Daxl, Marina Grzinic, Aina Smid, Joan Jonas, Yello, Ulrike Rosenbach, Hiroshi Ito, Mona Hatoum, Paul Garrin, and Steina and Woody Vasulka.
In 1990, Veruschka Bódy, who co-ordinated the project after Gábor Bódy's death in 1985, stated, "The annual anthologies, published by local editors (artist groups from 12 cities), are in fact a rich find for semoticians, topologists and visual philosophers. With this now 65 hours long video archive, a vocabulary of the 1980’s has been made available to the public."[1]
The Infermental collection is accessible to the public at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media .
Berlin/West, Germany, 1982
37 contributions, 8 countries, 4 hours
Editors: Gábor Bódy, Astrid Heibach
Supervisor: Gusztáv Hámos
Hamburg, Germany, 1982/83
77 contributions, 15 countries, 6 hours
Editors: Oliver Hirschbiegel, Rotraut Pape
Supervisor: Vera Bódy
Budapest, Hungary, 1983/84
99 contributions, 18 countries, 6 hours
Editors: Peter Forgacs, László Beke
Co-editors: Malgorzata Potocka, Peter Hutton, Egon Bunne
Supervisor: Rotraut Pape
Production secretary: Zoltán Bonta
Lyon, France, 1985
102 contributions, 14 countries, 7 hours
Editors: FRIGO (Gérard Couty, Mike Hentz, Christian Vanderborght)
Supervisor: Astrid Heibach
Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1986
39 contributions, 13 countries, 5 hours
Editors: Leonie Bodeving]], Rob Perrée, Lydia Schouten
Supervisor: Egon Bunne
Vancouver, Canada, 1987
59 contributions, 25 countries, 6 hours
Editors: Vera Bódy, Hank Bull
Supervisor: Gérard Couty
Buffalo, USA, 1988
58 contributions, 17 countries, 5 hours
Editors: Tony Conrad, Chris Hill, Peter Weibel
Supervisor: Rotraut Pape
Tokyo, Japan, 1988
73 contributions, 15 countries, 5 hours
Editors: Keiko Sei, Alfred Birnbaum
Supervisor: Mike Hentz, Hank Bull
Wien, Austria, 1989
45 contributions, 15 countries, 5 hours
Editors: Ilse Gassinger, Graf + ZYX
Supervisor: Chris Hill
Osnabrück / Skopje, Germany / Yugoslavia, 1991
51 contributions, 16 countries, 6 hours
Editors: Heiko Daxl, Evgenija Dimitrieva
Supervisor: Keiko Sei
Wuppertal, Germany, 1984/85
This edition presents a selection of works mainly from 1984 from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. This volume included works from Joan Jonas, Marcel Odenbach, Birgit Antoni, and Vera Bódy.