An Evening In Front Of The Box

An Evening In Front Of The Box was first shown at DOCument (ECA, Edinburgh 2011) and later included in the I Am Not A Poet text festival at the Totalkunst Gallery (Edinburgh, 2011). It is a lo-fi animation, little more than a gussied up slide presentation. It consists of white text placed against a black background and it has two parts: the main body of the text which offers instructions on how to watch television, and  a punctuation poem - a full stop located at the centre of the screen – which opens and closes the piece. The animation is shown on a flat screen television.

I am interested in how people’s behaviour shape, and are shaped by, the technologies that they use. In 2008 I made a series of instruction pieces which took contemporary technologies and imposed upon them the social conventions associated with older forms (e.g. using a music download as if it were a 45rpm vinyl record). An Evening In Front Of The Box is an animated reworking of one of these texts, and it instructs the viewer on how to watch their television as if it were a late 1960s black and white set.

The original instruction pieces were published in I am a text-based artist: Selected Words, 1998-2008