2001, TV static, inkjet prints, screen print, chipboard
The work begins with an image of television static: a visual field produced when transmission breaks down and the television is left without an image to display. The image was photographed and transferred into physical form through a three-colour screen-printing process. Each print was made by hand, translating the transient electronic image into layers of ink on paper.
Television static occupies an ambiguous space between absence and transmission. It appears to show nothing, yet its constantly changing field of noise suggests that something is still being received. Television static has even been associated with the residual radiation of the Big Bang, while in popular culture it has repeatedly become an image through which other worlds might appear. In Stephen Spielberg’s 1982 film Poltergeist, the empty television screen becomes a threshold: a technological void through which another dimension makes contact with the 5 year old Carol Anne – the breakdown in the broadcast signal becomes a doorway to another dimension.
The screen prints were pasted repeatedly across one side of a large chipboard structure resembling an empty stage. Here two kinds of emptiness meet: the vacant physical space of the stage waiting for a performer and the apparently empty virtual space of the television screen.
As the same fragment of static is repeated across the structure, noise begins to acquire order. Accidental concentrations of light and dark form patterns that can appear intentional: diagrams, figures, landscapes or fragments of some unknown system. Like an inkblot test, the indeterminate image invites the viewer to find structure within noise. What appears to emerge from the static may therefore belong as much to the observer as to the image itself.
The distinction between noise and information begins to become uncertain. A pattern may be meaningless because there is nothing there, or because we do not know how to read it. Equally, the order we discover may not be present in the image at all. The same capacity that allows us to recognise structure in the world also allows us to construct it.
The other side of the structure reverses this movement. Here the work begins not with an absence of images, but with images already saturated with meaning. Pixelated fragments taken from censored pornographic images are enlarged and recombined, while monetary logos are translated into physical objects. Bodies, money and the systems through which they are represented are broken apart and made strange.
The two sides therefore operate in opposite directions. On one side, an apparently meaningless field begins to generate possible images and structures. On the other, existing images and symbols are dismantled until their familiar meanings become unstable. Noise moves towards form; recognisable forms move towards abstraction.
This movement between fragmentation and reconstruction extends into the materials of the structure itself. Chipboard and cardboard are made from matter that has already been broken down and reconstituted: particles and fibres compressed into new forms. They provide a physical counterpart to the pixels and fragments appearing across the work. Image and structure begin to follow the same logic, in which things are reduced to smaller units and assembled again.
The architecture holds these different conditions together without resolving them. The viewer cannot see both sides at once, but must move around the structure, passing between different ways in which images can appear. What seems empty from one position becomes crowded with signs, bodies and objects from another.
This gives another meaning to the idea of transmission. The static might carry traces of the origins of the universe, become a fictional channel to another dimension, or provide a surface onto which the mind projects its own forms. Elsewhere, bodies and systems of value are converted into pixels, patterns and objects. In each case, something passes through a system of representation and emerges changed.
Made in the early 2000s, the work belongs to a moment when the familiar static of analogue television was beginning to disappear and digital images were becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life. Yet the distinction between digital image and physical matter is repeatedly unsettled. Static becomes screen-printed ink; bodies become pixels; monetary symbols become objects; wood and paper become particles and fibres before being reconstructed as the stage itself.
Neither side provides a stable image of the world. Instead, the structure places the viewer between two possibilities: that order is already there waiting to be discovered, or that the systems through which we see and construct the world are continually producing it.
Untitled
2001, TV static, inkjet prints, screen print, chipboard
The work begins with an image of television static: a visual field produced when transmission breaks down and the television is left without an image to display. The image was photographed and transferred into physical form through a three-colour screen-printing process. Each print was made by hand, translating the transient electronic image into layers of ink on paper.
Television static occupies an ambiguous space between absence and transmission. It appears to show nothing, yet its constantly changing field of noise suggests that something is still being received. Television static has even been associated with the residual radiation of the Big Bang, while in popular culture it has repeatedly become an image through which other worlds might appear. In Stephen Spielberg’s 1982 film Poltergeist, the empty television screen becomes a threshold: a technological void through which another dimension makes contact with the 5 year old Carol Anne – the breakdown in the broadcast signal becomes a doorway to another dimension.
The screen prints were pasted repeatedly across one side of a large chipboard structure resembling an empty stage. Here two kinds of emptiness meet: the vacant physical space of the stage waiting for a performer and the apparently empty virtual space of the television screen.
As the same fragment of static is repeated across the structure, noise begins to acquire order. Accidental concentrations of light and dark form patterns that can appear intentional: diagrams, figures, landscapes or fragments of some unknown system. Like an inkblot test, the indeterminate image invites the viewer to find structure within noise. What appears to emerge from the static may therefore belong as much to the observer as to the image itself.
The distinction between noise and information begins to become uncertain. A pattern may be meaningless because there is nothing there, or because we do not know how to read it. Equally, the order we discover may not be present in the image at all. The same capacity that allows us to recognise structure in the world also allows us to construct it.
The other side of the structure reverses this movement. Here the work begins not with an absence of images, but with images already saturated with meaning. Pixelated fragments taken from censored pornographic images are enlarged and recombined, while monetary logos are translated into physical objects. Bodies, money and the systems through which they are represented are broken apart and made strange.
The two sides therefore operate in opposite directions. On one side, an apparently meaningless field begins to generate possible images and structures. On the other, existing images and symbols are dismantled until their familiar meanings become unstable. Noise moves towards form; recognisable forms move towards abstraction.
This movement between fragmentation and reconstruction extends into the materials of the structure itself. Chipboard and cardboard are made from matter that has already been broken down and reconstituted: particles and fibres compressed into new forms. They provide a physical counterpart to the pixels and fragments appearing across the work. Image and structure begin to follow the same logic, in which things are reduced to smaller units and assembled again.
The architecture holds these different conditions together without resolving them. The viewer cannot see both sides at once, but must move around the structure, passing between different ways in which images can appear. What seems empty from one position becomes crowded with signs, bodies and objects from another.
This gives another meaning to the idea of transmission. The static might carry traces of the origins of the universe, become a fictional channel to another dimension, or provide a surface onto which the mind projects its own forms. Elsewhere, bodies and systems of value are converted into pixels, patterns and objects. In each case, something passes through a system of representation and emerges changed.
Made in the early 2000s, the work belongs to a moment when the familiar static of analogue television was beginning to disappear and digital images were becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life. Yet the distinction between digital image and physical matter is repeatedly unsettled. Static becomes screen-printed ink; bodies become pixels; monetary symbols become objects; wood and paper become particles and fibres before being reconstructed as the stage itself.
Neither side provides a stable image of the world. Instead, the structure places the viewer between two possibilities: that order is already there waiting to be discovered, or that the systems through which we see and construct the world are continually producing it.