The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television

A fascinating look at artistic experiments with televisual forms. 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 forms.For Levin, “the channeled image” names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images.This formal experimentation influenced new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen