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"
...channel surfing has been remediated through the scroll of social media and the algorithmic feed of streaming platforms.