You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal.
Howard Beale, Network, 1977
As the coming end of one era (broadcast television) gives way to another (the advent of artificial intelligence), On Television aims to investigate the continued power of the moving image to create alternate realities, captivating our attention while it reproduces and shapes our world. As the first mass-produced technology to send moving pictures directly into the home, TV quickly displaced the radio as the focal point of home entertainment across the American postwar landscape. Beaming corporate-sponsored narratives of success and optimism into our living rooms as part of a massive postwar consumer boom, the underlying message was clear, we helped win the war and all the bounty of the world was now at our disposal.
What began with live televised broadcasts collectively engaged in (at train stations, bars, and shop windows), eventually lent corporations access to a willing audience within millions of American homes. Hawking a cornucopia of new products and services within the discrete interiors of "suburban and urban boxes" proliferating across the country also produced in its wake what the artist Gordon Matta-Clark once referred to as the "passive, isolated consumer."
Connecting viewers through the fun and frolic of game shows and comedy, the adrenaline rush of action films, the unscripted drama of sports, the "hard nosed" reporting of the news, and the reassuring sincerity of family drama, an underlying social hierarchy is regularly imposed through frequent corporate prescriptions for lifestyles and products to be envied then faithfully adhered to.
With television's efforts to shape reality eventually challenged by its greater technical capacity to record it, nightly broadcasts of the war in Vietnam and civil rights struggles at home posed challenges to upbeat, family based narratives, paving the way for more explicit ideological positioning among the networks to foster and maintain audience share. With the backlash against the tumult of the 60's and 70's fostering a schism of conservative and liberal leaning networks
which continue to define our "polarized" world, "mass media" has now atomized across billions of individual platforms, collectively linked by a new, more causally dressed corporate elite, no less aware of the continued power of the image to captivate a subject's attention as a means of influencing consumer behavior.
In returning to the origins of the first great disseminator of the moving image, easily located and defined within its rectangular housing, the goal of On Television is to reveal the continuity of mass media's societal influence across ever shifting platforms, technologies, and devices, where "updates" in technology are not necessary accompanied by more progressive considerations of the public interest, and seductions of future technological promise can often mask the agendas of
powerful interests whose influence might be presumed to be a thing of the past. Incorporating photography, film, video, sculpture, the artwork in On Television employs humor, irony, critical distance, and direct engagement as a means of revealing the seductive power of the televised image and its profound effects in (re)shaping our world.