Document:Q11751

In a recent gallery exhibition, I explored the past, present, and future of communication and broadcasting systems. Today, corporate media networks are desperately clinching to their long-held control of information and bandwidth, lately acting as if nothing has changed during the past decades of communication and information revolutions. They will fight vigorously to hold on to this lopsided power structure, even as individuals and small groups begin to form channels of their own...
Each of the 20 TV sets in the gallery were tuned to a standard UHF television channel. I 'hijacked' a few corporate-owned airwave frequencies (such as FOX and UPN) and overwrote their content with my own. This technology presented the viewer with great and unpredictable variations of imagery. For one, the communication noise resulting from the transmission gives my digital content a new and different facture. Viewers physically present in the gallery also interact with the broadcast and their bodily presence affects the reception and visualization of the art. At other times, both corporate-controlled and artist-controlled signals would actually compete for the channel, causing the TV to synthesize them together into new images. In addition, the various retro and contemporary platforms of television/antennae hardware realized the broadcasted images uniquely, as if they too were the spectators.
For my new TV channels I chose to broadcast custom-software generated videos which resemble television test patterns and modernist paintings, in motion. These pattern-paintings are shown for varied lengths of time, achieving a balance somewhere between beautiful-signal and mindless-noise.