Rhizome | Blog Posts tagged "television"

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Television

Prosthetic Knowledge | Mon May 21st, 2012 10:26 a.m.

X1795 by Max Capacity

A collection of items from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive, around the theme of 'Television'

de/Rastra by Kyle Evans

An old television set is converted into a live performance instrument, an oscillographic synthesizer which "... allows a performer to generate visualizations intrinsic to cathode ray tube technology while simultaneously creating the acoustic analog of the displayed imagery ... " Project Home Page (PK)

LG Plasma Arc Display Panel - Burn Baby Burn

A burned-out Plasma television, applied with excessive voltage, displays a slow yet spectacular visual disintegration which would make Gustav Metzger proud. (PK)

fuba_recorder

Japanese automated glitch image project, running since January 2009, creates random images from mixing various Japanese television feeds and uploads the results to it's Flickr account.

"I am a robot for generating abstract-images of Japanese TV programs requested by my followers"

クッキンアイドル　アイ！マイ！まいん！「特集

ズモモとヌペペ＃6 ヨーセーてなに！？の巻

さんかれあ＃2 成功…してた

Flickr / Twitter @fuba_recorder

1001 TV Sets (End Piece)

Installation by David Hall at the Ambika P3 Gallery, London. Using television sets of various ages, all were running up to the 18th April which was the switch-off point for analogue television signals in the UK.

Here is a video from the University of Westminster of the piece - wait till the 2 minute 19 mark (PK)

Television Test Cards From Around The World

A Russian Livejournal entry from 2009 features a collection of television tuning displays (unnecessary for modern televisions) from around the world, which we can now appreciate for their geometric aesthetics.

More (in Russian) here. (PK)

Other Notables:

Enough Already: An Arduino-powered solution to block celebrities, based on recognizing names fed through the closed-captions
GIF TV
Understanding 9/11 - A Television News Archive: Coverage from around the world, via the Internet Archive:
Max Capacity - Closed Caption: Photographic captures of ...

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You'll (N)ever Watch Alone

Yin Ho | Thu May 17th, 2012 2:44 p.m.

Still from Art21 Telethon, May 2012

There's performance: immediate, rehearsed and present; then there's television: distant, canned, and broadcast. One offspring of their coupling is the telethon. 'Telethon' became a recognized portmanteau of 'television' and 'marathon' with Jerry Lewis' aid in the 1950s. His telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association ran and ran: there'd be a song, a celebrity, a mail carrier, a joke, banter and filler. The marathon viewing sessions kept attention on the cause at hand by providing various entertainment in service of one goal: to raise awareness and funds for the organization. The camera was always on: in order to look away, the viewer had to hit the clicker to change the view (or turn off the box). Inside, the telethon continued.

Recently, Art21 held their own artist-led telethon. Hosted by Ronnie Bass, who had explored the format in 2007 in order to raise funds for his Performa TV piece, the event came to be after the NEA cut funding to the PBS art documentary program. Artists replaced entertainers to create some nine hours of durational broadcast performance streaming from Algus Greenspon Gallery to the Art21 site. It was telethon to its core, making up what it lacked in big-production finesse with performative sincerity, intimacy, and palpable camaraderie.

The telethon as a fundraiser makes less viable sense today: crowd-funding options are less time-consuming and presentation-intensive. What remains is its value as a style: the telethon as an experience that fills time with performance, and an endurance event in service of an objective.

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Remote Control

Charmian Griffin | Tue Apr 17th, 2012 9:55 a.m.

Simon Denny, Those who don't change will be switched off, (2012)

A TV set burns fiercely. These are the last days of the British analog television broadcast.

I kid you not, the United Kingdom limps sorely behind on digital conversion. Luxembourg was first to the finish line, followed by most of Europe, the States, North Africa, Japan. The UK, a chain-smoking marathon runner, who might or might not have gout, has decided — to hell with the lot of you — to race dressed as Chewbacca.

As we drag ourselves sodden and bronchial through those final steps, a slow clap from the ICA gallery greets us. The exhibition 'Remote Control' (April 3, 2012 - 10 June 10, 2012) marks the end of the analog signal by uniting works that take TV and break it apart.

Artist David Hall set television ablaze in 1971. His TV Interruptions were broadcast during normal BBC scheduling in Scotland. No announcement, nor explanation. A tap in the top right-hand corner filled the screen up with water as if it were a cross-section of a sink, a man filmed out at the audience from inside the set, a television burned to cinders in an open field. Each short film held its own during broadcast with a cool irony. Yet the creation and destruction of illusions simultaneously undermined the tyranny of any box masquerading as a window into reality. Hall pioneered art in television and continues to work with the medium and concept. With it, and in opposition to it, for the artists in 'Remote Control' hold their enemy close.

Still from David Hall, TV Interruptions (Tap piece) (1971)

Commercial broadcasting is the adversary in Television Delivers People (1973) by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman. A six and a half minute credit roll tells us merrily that we are the end product of TV, delivered through broadcast to be consumed by advertisers. The medium itself emerges banal, or shrill; the mechanisms of corporate control form the malevolent baseline. Screened in the ICA alongside these works by Hall and Serra as well as Gerry Schum, are further exposés on television advertising from TVTV, misogyny from Joan Braderman, and violence from Marcel Odenbach. Sixteen CRT televisions line up neatly to show us how artists rankled with the system over the decades past.

It doesn't sound very radical does it? The wit of the interruptions has already been dampened by their removal from the broadcast context. They confront an engaged, expectant audience, not their passive target. Can we understand quite how difficult it must have been to infiltrate the mainstay of the British broadcasting industry, the BBC, when there is such a multitude of platforms available today? Should an institution that holds the contemporary at its core not be addressing the hidden power lines of the mass media that immerse us now?

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Technology is Not Enough: The Story of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program

Jason Huff | Thu Dec 15th, 2011 5:08 p.m.

4th Floor of ITP at 721 Broadway, photo by Jason Huff

NYU’s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2009, but much of the program dates back to forty years ago. The graduate program is “dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds.” This year is also a landmark year as founder Red Burns is starting to archive the program's history. The archive is beginning just as New York City, with its thriving startup scene, is starting to feel geeky enough to be a natural home for the innovative program.¹ Beyond its original intentions, the program is pioneering in "physical computing," as coined by a faculty member. It has even managed intellectual property policies that let students keep full ownership of their ideas.

As I sat down for an interview with Burns in her office at 721 Broadway, she searched for a copy of the first grant proposal she wrote to set up the Alternate Media Center (AMC) in 1970-71, which later—in 1979— would become ITP. “If I could find that—I would die to find it. It must be the worst proposal, but it was original and it was fresh,” she declared. That lost proposal is what started everything; it helped secure grant money from the Markle Foundation, workshop space in the two floors above Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village and essential equipment.

Bleecker Street Cinema circa 1970, photo by Robert Otter via Soho Memory Project

The year the AMC started was the same year Sony introduced the first portable video recorder—the Portapak. The units cost around $1500 to buy, but according to a New York Times article from that year, they could be rented for $75 a day. Burns and her collaborator, George Stoney, with

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The Twilight Zone for the Facebook Age: Charlie Brooker's "The Black Mirror"

joanne mcneil | Mon Dec 5th, 2011 9:20 a.m.

The Black Mirror is a British television program that premiered last night. Charlie Brooker, creater of the series, a media critic and host of the shows Screenwipe and How Television Ruined Your Life, was inspired by The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling's "quasi-fictional world" allowed for more political and provocative television scripts to go uncensored by networks and corporate sponsers, Brooker argues in the Guardian.

The first episode of The Black Mirror is provocative but with unambitious targets —the 24 hour newscycle, omnipresent social media— the disgusting premise is unmerited. One gets the sense it was written mostly to test television's limits; which may be a worthwhile demand itself. Nevertheless, upcoming episodes sound much more promising.

Trailer for The Black Mirror

Episode descriptions via The Guardian:

1. The National Anthem

Set slap-bang in the present, The National Anthem, starring Rory Kinnear and Lindsay Duncan, recounts what happens when fictional royal Princess Susannah is kidnapped and prime minister Michael Callow is presented with an unusual – and obscene – ransom request. The traditional media finds itself unable to even discuss what the demand is, while the Twittersphere foams with speculation and cruel jokes. As the ransom deadline nears, events start to gain a surreal momentum of their own. This was inspired partly by the kerfuffle over superinjunctions, and partly by the strange out-of-control sensation that takes grip on certain news days – such as the day Gordon Brown was virtually commanded to apologise to Gillian Duffy in front of the rolling news networks. Who was in charge that day? No one and everyone.

2. Fifteen Million Merits

In 1984, Apple ran a famous advert that implied the Mac might save mankind from a nightmarish Orwellian future. But what would a nightmarish Orwellian future that ran on Apple software actually look like? Probably a ...

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(Recent) History Class: Paul Ryan Interviews for Grey Room

Orit Gat | Wed Sep 28th, 2011 4:33 p.m.

“Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare Revisited: From Klein Worms to Relational Circuits” In an interview by Felicity D. Scott and Mark Wasiuta for the Summer 2011 issue of GreyRoom, artist and writer Paul Ryan talks about the time he spent working with Marshall McLuhan, the early days of video art, and his work.

“At that moment [1967] I thought of myself as a writer. I was holed up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my typewriter, trying to write, and I heard McLuhan on the raso saying, ‘of course, in this electronic age of computers, satellites, radio, and television, the writer is no longer somebody holed up in his garret pounding a typewriter!’ It stopped me cold. I had to find out what this guy was about.”

Ryan gives a fascinating account of video art in the 1960s, from the Howard Wise Gallery, to securing money from the New York State Council for the Arts for video art at a time when no such funding was readily available, and tells the story of meeting the heir to the IBM fortune who admired McLuhan and wanted to give him two Sony Portapaks that both ended in Ryan’s hands to “experiment” with.

Artist book based on the Triadic Tapes, 1976 (via the Smithsonian Archives of American Art)

Ryan wrote extensively about video art, cybernetics, and technology; his work was then featured in some seminal exhibitions, such as “TV as a Creative Medium” at the Howard Wise Gallery (1969) and “Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art” at MoMA (1984). (Here's a 1969 letter by Ryan to Howard Wise.)

“I would avoid the term visual to describe video. You can see a bottle of perfume, but sight is not the sense it really affects. You can see video images but their effect is primarily kinesthetic or proprioceptive when you see yourself. Video is about perceiving events with the nervous system, not visualizing in a pictorial way.”

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Luminant Point Arrays (2010) - Stephan Tillmans

Natalie Saltiel | Tue Mar 22nd, 2011 10 a.m.

The Luminant Point Arrays show tube televisions in the moment they are switched off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture describes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Originally via today and tomorrow and iGNANT

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Compression Study #2 (Untitled) (2007) - Paul B. Davis

Ceci Moss | Tue Mar 15th, 2011 10 a.m.

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QR Codes Used in Glasser Performance Open Up "Zones" on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Ceci Moss | Wed Mar 2nd, 2011 10 a.m.

Glasser performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Monday. If you watch the video above, you'll notice the QR codes circling the stage. The QR code was designed by Kyuha Shim. He built a system using programming language that receives color data sets from Glasser's album graphics and adapted them to the modules that he designed. The QR code also leads viewers with mobile devices to "zones" designed by artist Mitch Trale's web production company, which you can access here. (Christopher P. Allick, Trevor Giller and Pablo Rochat contributed to the technical and creative direction for the website.) I've posted Mitch Trale's past websites-as-interactive-music-videos to Rhizome before, such as New Stripes (2009) as well as the epic Open Seas (2010). The use of QR codes during Glasser's set is a really interesting translation of this idea to a live performance context, and I thought it was very cool.

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TV Party: A Panorama of Public Access Television in New York City

Ceci Moss | Fri Feb 11th, 2011 11:29 a.m.

The weird and fantastic world of New York's public access television will receive the attention it deserves in a film program curated by Leah Churner and Nicolas Rapold for the Museum of the Moving Image. The program, titled TV Party: A Panorama of Public Access Television in New York City kicks off tonight, and will run until February 20th. Spanning the past four decades, screenings will include shows such as The Scott and Gary Show, Wild Record Collection, The Live! Show, Glenn O' Brien's TV Party, The Vole Show, and more! Check the trailer below.

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