Test pattern tests, 2006
Exhibited: Yours, Mine, Ours: 50 years of ABCTV, Penrith Regional Gallery
artist statement, 2006
Test patterns (or test cards) evoke nostalgia for my early memories of television. As an artist, I find them fascinating; a juncture of minimalism, colour-theory and optical art. They have beautiful colours (the post black and white era ones) and an internal formal logic. Their form follows their function – blank, yet evocative. They were used to test frequency signals and measure broadcast quality, since before the first public broadcast. When invited to create a work in response to the ABCTV archive, I decided to track how test patterns had changed over time, and how they may act as markers of an abstracted, technological trajectory through TV history. Working with the archivists, we discovered that very few examples of test patterns existed in the ABC archive – only a few examples on video-tape and certainly none of the early printed cards that would have been used before computers. Perhaps because of their innocuousness, their blankness, the only traces we could find existed at the end or beginning of other archived material. It's certain that more examples exist, but the attention, in the logs of each program, has been given to content rather than the 'blank' test pattern. Test patterns were, after all, before 24-hour broadcast, the symbol that there was 'nothing' on television. In the absence of many 'actual' examples, I decided to create my own archive. I made kinetic spinning discs, referencing the circles found on most early test patterns and also a nod to Marcel Duchamp's series of ’rotorelief’ optical experiments. Transcribed onto the surfaces are colours and forms derived from the test patterns found in the archive. The motorised discs crackle and pulse on the eye, foregrounding visuality as a primarily optical (bodily) experience – much like watching television.
Exhibited: Yours, Mine, Ours: 50 years of ABCTV, Penrith Regional Gallery
artist statement, 2006
Test patterns (or test cards) evoke nostalgia for my early memories of television. As an artist, I find them fascinating; a juncture of minimalism, colour-theory and optical art. They have beautiful colours (the post black and white era ones) and an internal formal logic. Their form follows their function – blank, yet evocative. They were used to test frequency signals and measure broadcast quality, since before the first public broadcast. When invited to create a work in response to the ABCTV archive, I decided to track how test patterns had changed over time, and how they may act as markers of an abstracted, technological trajectory through TV history. Working with the archivists, we discovered that very few examples of test patterns existed in the ABC archive – only a few examples on video-tape and certainly none of the early printed cards that would have been used before computers. Perhaps because of their innocuousness, their blankness, the only traces we could find existed at the end or beginning of other archived material. It's certain that more examples exist, but the attention, in the logs of each program, has been given to content rather than the 'blank' test pattern. Test patterns were, after all, before 24-hour broadcast, the symbol that there was 'nothing' on television. In the absence of many 'actual' examples, I decided to create my own archive. I made kinetic spinning discs, referencing the circles found on most early test patterns and also a nod to Marcel Duchamp's series of ’rotorelief’ optical experiments. Transcribed onto the surfaces are colours and forms derived from the test patterns found in the archive. The motorised discs crackle and pulse on the eye, foregrounding visuality as a primarily optical (bodily) experience – much like watching television.