The Signals Channel

In these videos from the 1960s to the 1980s, the conventions of corporate broadcast television were turned into critical tools. Exploiting video technology’s ability to record and reshape, artists inserted their works into communication networks, disrupting television’s relentless flow of information in order to probe the medium’s seeming neutrality.

Training the camera on the human figure, these video works explore the increasingly entangled links between private actions, personal identity, and the public sphere.

The artists in this program confront the power dynamics between audience and performer. Co-opting the face-to-face format of television interviews and news reports, they speak directly to the camera, assume alternate personalities, or invite audience feedback, revealing the screen to be a threshold between often conflicting realities.

These artists experiment with video formats and networks to reflect on personal history and experience—grappling with the intimate consequences of displacement, occupation, war, and labor.

Using methods of documentation, appropriation, fiction, and performance, the artists featured here confront the experience of war—and challenge its depiction in mass media.

These works used—or even invented—video and telecommunications networks to create new modes of connection, collective experience, and assembly.

In these works, artists actively rethink cultural identity in the age of electronic communication. Their strategies include challenging the tropes of traditional ethnographic documentary, questioning the presumption of a seamlessly networked world, and using video technology to reconsider historical signs and emblems.

Artists have used and misused video technology since it first emerged, countering the visual norms of commercial television and mass media with humor, anger, and subversion.

These works bear witness to histories of conflict, invasion, and insurrection. In preserving the memories of those “who dared to record,” as Harun Farocki put it, they invite viewers to consider the ways in which historic change is witnessed, relayed through media, and shaped by media itself.