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Statement
This series of pictures records wayward television transmissions that
made a brief but noteworthy appearance in my living room. For most of
the pictures, my set was tuned to channels distorted through a process
called scrambling, which is intended to protect content from unauthorized
viewing.
Part frustration with banal programming and part fascination
with the television image itself, this series has grown with my conviction
that TV still has the power to amaze us, eluding our best efforts
to lock down and commodify its meanings.
The events described by these photographs have been
shaped through layers of representation generated by the media and processes
involvedfilm, video, cable signal, scrambled signal, and unknowable
2nd- and 3rd-generation conversions. But for me they exist best as photographs,
their protean fluctuations held still and subjected to a more contemplative
gaze than we normally bring to the television image. As such they are
documentsrecords of visual events that flickered across my screen
and that I acknowledged with a click of the shutter because they spoke
to me of strange processes, lost landscapes, and the renewed potential
for discovery in the living room.
May 2002
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