Jeff Hurlow
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Echoes
2026

Panasonic TR-425R CRT television, 
Raspberry Pi, 
Digitized Hi-8 footage

Build state:
Complete and functional When we were cleaning out my dad's apartment after he died, we found a box of his Hi-8 tapes. Some were labeled. Some were just blank. Watching them, I found that he was generally the one behind the camera... mostly absent from the footage... the same experience I have in my videos of my kids and Jen. But his presence is everywhere in what he chose to shoot.

I found this TV on eBay. It's not the same model he had, but it's the same era... What drew me to this one was the way it folds. Closed, it's a black box, anonymous. Open, it reveals itself. There's something slightly science fiction about it. Something hidden and then shown.

The footage plays on a loop. No interaction required. You watch whatever he was watching when he decided to press record. A birthday party... family reunions... trips to Tijuana... ordinary moments that didn't seem worth remembering at the time. Much of it is tedious, like most home videos. The television sits on a pedestal. High enough that you have to stand to watch it. It gets uncomfortable after a while... I think it's supposed to.

Sometimes I'll see myself in the footage and not remember being there at all. The camera was running. I was there. And somehow the memory didn't take. What remains is this... light and shadow from a different time, bouncing back.








Build process notes

GitHub Repo
Installation instructions The build was relatively straightforward... a Raspberry Pi feeding video through a signal chain that ends at a pair of screw terminals on the back of a fifty-year-old television. Converting the footage to the right format, coaxing composite video through an RF modulator, and fine tuning the channel.

But I'm still genuinely shocked when I see the images on this screen. There's something about watching digitized Hi-8 footage on a CRT that no modern 
display could replicate. The scan lines. The warmth. The way the image sits in the glass rather than on top of it. It looks like the past.

© 2026 Jeff Hurlow. All rights reserved.

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