About midway down the Muni platform at 19th and Holloway avenues, a black video monitor hangs unobtrusively from the copper roof.
More than a month after the grand opening of the new SF State station, the large black screen still remains blank. But by May, art Professor Leonard Hunter hopes it will become a window of images to ease the wait for people standing on the platform.
Hunter and Sheila Ghidini, a lecturer in the art department, helped create the artistic design of the Muni platform. The idea for a video display came from the desire to make the outdoor station more interesting to those who wait for trains, according to Hunter. A total of four monitors will eventually be installed on the platform which will show a variety of videos from short movies to visual art, he said.
Hunter considers the monitors to be similar to an art gallery. While programming won't be limited to students, he encourages students to submit video cassettes of their work to him that could cover a range of subjects, including movies, poetry or dancing, he said.
"I think people that wait for trains will have an opportunity to see interesting things and to see other things that are going on on campus," he said. "And for students who make the art, who make films, it will give them a forum to get their work out there in public."
For students like Theresa Lerma, an SF State English major who rides Muni daily, the videos just might make the wait on the platform seem a little bit shorter.
"It'd be something to do without getting bored here," Lerma said.
The monitors will be linked to videocassette recorders in the College of Creative Arts by an underground fiber-optic cable, according to Hunter, and the videos will be programmed in advance. It will be up to a review committee of students, university administration, and community residents to decide which videos to show, he said.
Funding for the video monitors and other artistic aspects of the platform, such as planters and binoculars, came from federal and city grants totaling $400,000, according to Jim Nelson, of Muni's Project Planning Department. It is the first Muni station to have a video art display, he said.
Although March 1 marked the official opening of the new SF State station, completion of some parts of the platform, including the installation of the monitors, is taking longer, Nelson said.
"It's not unusual that with a project this big there are things that take more time to finish, loose ends that need to be tied up," he said.
The monitors and the underground cable are expected to be in place by the end of April, according to Nelson. From there it will be up to the university to start the programming, he said.
The video display will require no extra money from the university because it will utilize VCRs already on campus, according to Hunter.
Derek Hunt, associate dean of the College of Creative Arts, said the VCRs will be placed in the college which has its own technicians to monitor their operation.
Most likely the videos will only be shown during the evening hours because it is harder to view the screens in daylight, he said.
Hunter is confident the university will decide these details by May and programming can begin as early as the summer.
But Hunt believes programming might not start until the fall.
"Whatever we put up there has to be produced," Hunt said. "Physically we'll be ready by mid-summer, but the bigger problem is the programming. It'll take time to get the students motivated and to find something we can program."
Eventually Hunter wants to include broadcasts of SF State's cable Channel 49 on the video monitors. However, Keith Morrison, dean of the College of Creative Arts who was recently placed in charge of the cable channel, called those plans "premature."
"There is no direct connection as of yet, although in theory we hope to plan some kind of hook-up," he said. "Nobody has had yet either the time or the resources to decide how it will work. It will depend on the budget."