TODD STABLEY
 
 
photographs
 
 

SCRAMBLED SIGNALS
 
 

photo 1, Untitled, 2001, C-Print, 8 x 10 in.

Untitled, 2001
C-Print
8 x 10 in.


OBSERVATIONS AND IDEAS
INTERNET STARS
SCRAMBLED SIGNALS
LANDSCAPES AT THE EDGE OF PERCEPTION
PHOTOGRAPHIC RESTORATION

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copyright © Todd Stabley

 
TODD STABLEY photographs


 Statement


This series of pictures records wayward television transmissions that made a brief but noteworthy appearance in my living room. For most of the pictures, my set was tuned to channels distorted through a process called scrambling, which is intended to protect content from unauthorized viewing.

Part frustration with banal programming and part fascination with the television image itself, this series has grown with my conviction that TV still has the power to amaze us, eluding our best efforts to lock down and commodify its meanings.

The events described by these photographs have been shaped through layers of representation generated by the media and processes involved—film, video, cable signal, scrambled signal, and unknowable 2nd- and 3rd-generation conversions. But for me they exist best as photographs, their protean fluctuations held still and subjected to a more contemplative gaze than we normally bring to the television image. As such they are documents—records of visual events that flickered across my screen and that I acknowledged with a click of the shutter because they spoke to me of strange processes, lost landscapes, and the renewed potential for discovery in the living room.

May 2002