The War on Television

The War on Television is a video based ‘performance’ work that explores interference fractured television broadcasts based mainly on the war in Iraq. The work has a range of source video and sound that form the basis of an improvisation, ‘randomly’ processed and manipulated through ‘scratch’ layers exaggerating the fragmentation. Though improvised in each performance, the work follows a consistent pattern and has been repeated in various venues. The work is the result of an extensive research period involving the collection and cataloguing of source material within the theme of television representation of war and of technical innovation in the way this material may be flexibly selected and presented in a ‘real-time’ performance. The digital techniques for selection and presentation were the result of applying database techniques to audio and video files. These techniques are combined with digital methods of image manipulation I developed in the production of two earlier video works. Though technological invention is fundamental to the creative strategies of these works and War on Television, the resulting changes in image and sound ‘language’ is seen as integral to the symbolic meaning of the representational sequences. Thus the research is concerned with integrating content, aesthetic quality and technology