Channel Surfing: A Response to Video Pool Media Arts Centre’s Video Commission Residency (VCR)

By Madeline Bogoch

“Television is the force of no history” claimed writer George W.S. Trow in his famed essay “Within the Context of No Context,” first published in the New Yorker in 1980. This bold claim personifies the structure of the poetic piece which is broken into semi-autonomous fragments and delivers a despairing assessment of Television’s effect on the culture at large. The zigzagged momentum of Trow’s renowned essay, which rapidly toggles between ideas, is designed to correspond to the cadence of channel surfing, while the author mourns the decline of the public commons concerning the rise of television. As the internet has replaced TV as the dominant media form, channel surfing has been remediated through the scroll of social media and the algorithmic feed of streaming platforms. Within this practice, there is an invocation of chance, a free association of disparate images which together, produce a reading of the cultural climate with astute, if incidental, insights. Taking the concept of “channel surfing” as a loose prompt, Video Pool Media Arts Centre commissioned 4 artists to make videos which play on this structure.
 

Warren Chan introduces his work "Pixels of the Orient"

In its primary form, channel surfing is endemic to the heyday of network television in the 80s and 90s, before TiVo and Netflix granted viewers increased access to on-demand screening. Warren Chan’s Pixels of the Orient assembles a fevered montage of found footage ripped from the vast pop-culture archive of crude western interpretations of East Asian-ness. Chan’s reframing not only underscores the persistence of this orientalist lens but also the artist’s ambivalent approach to these source materials culminating in this critical and clever re-contextualization.

Sharing an affinity with Trow’s thesis, pluetoe’s I am a program, takes a wistful approach to the outsized impact media has on our identities. pluetoe’s voice-over narration delivers a soft and self-possessed existential monologue on the notion of selfhood, posing the eternal question of nature and nurture in relation to the media environment. Set against a backdrop of lo-fi images featuring home movies and found footage, pluetoe’s essay feels both sincere and candid. At one point the artist points to the irony of using video as a tool to critique media and television, a postmodern sensibility that has deep roots in the canon of video art and is evoked here gracefully.
 

pluetoe introduces his work "I am a program"

Channel surfing evokes a quality of dissatisfaction and perennial seeking, in its analogue form this cycle was contained to a finite number of options but in the digital era, this has proliferated to an infinite and unobservable vastness. Sarah Boo’s Virtual Spectres leads the viewer on a tour through this postinternet void. Moving through obfuscated screens arranged like dominoes and travelling through the mouth of a semi-rendered face while a posthuman narrator expresses a specific brand of born-digital loneliness. The psychological malaise and disembodiment that Boo manifests in this infinite limbo is eerily familiar, and what transpires is a haunting reflection of a very contemporary condition.
 

Sarah Boo introduces her work "Virtual Spectres"

The constituent elements of DUST by Jaye Kovach are minimal— a distinctly prairie landscape is occupied by the artist, who digs in a seemingly barren field. Both bodies and land carry the baggage of politics and history, contexts which are never far from the lens in DUST, which the artist describes as “an exploration of legacy and what it means to me as a queer, disabled, butch trans woman living as a white settler on Treaty 4 territory.” Kovach’s as-of-yet unknown imperative is revealed midway through the video, when the artist lays down in the hole, a morbid gesture that is accompanied by a perfectly timed soundtrack (courtesy of Kovach’s punk band Forced Femme) which makes the act of (proverbially and literally) digging one’s own grave a charged and climactic gesture.


- Essay written by Madeline Bogoch