The Channeled Image

"Following the integration of television into the fabric of American life in the 1950s, experimental artists of the 1960s began to appropriate this novel medium toward new aesthetic and political ends. As Erica Levin details in The Channeled Image, groundbreaking artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini developed a new formal language that foregrounded television's mediation of a social order defined by the interests of the state, capital, and cultural elites. The resulting works introduced immersive projection environments, live screening events, videographic distortion, and televised happenings, among other increasingly diverse forms. For Levin, "the channeled image" names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disseminate the appearance of televised images. This formal experimentation carried over into new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen projections, and in other cases artists entered into television studios and took hold of the means of televisual production directly. Above all, this book asks how artistic experimentation with televisual forms was shaped by events that challenged television broadcasters' claims to authority, events that set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated in the future"--