LiminalSpaces

Sean Snyder
Schema (Television)
Script written in collaboration with Olga Bryukovetska

?People talk so much about the weather in day-to-day life because it?s a
subject that cannot cause trouble. Unless you?re on vacation and talking
with a farmer who needs rain…?
Pierre Bourdieu, On Television
Television today is a relatively archaic ? although still the most powerful
? form of mass communication. In contrast to video on demand, digital
television and the Internet, where the subject/viewer has the ability to
preselect topics, television continues to authoritatively prescribe a
predetermined flow. Innumerable channels, and the ease of switching
between them, form an apparently endless and (dis)continuous range of
images. What is to be found beneath this imaginary plentitude, however,
is a rigid scheme of programmed broadcasting.
This scheme does not only underlie established television genres and
conventions; it also applies to the broader context of a specific, televised
way of consuming reality. This model of consumption shapes a distinct
subjective position ? that of a semi immediate yet cynically indifferent
observer. This observer witnesses inevitable (and often absurd)
juxtapositions of what would be considered “serious news events” (for
example, the recent conflict between Israel and Lebanon) with
predominately entertaining programs (about the weather, sports, cooking,
telemarketing, etc). In this context, one may well pose a seemingly
redundant and naive ethical question: given the spectacular and suspense-
filled nature of televised news, to what degree has the reporting of actual
events been reduced to the level of entertainment?
Schema (Television) is a process-oriented video that started from such
questions, as well as the attempt to categorically index and identify
programming themes and cycles from cable and satellite television
sources in varying geographic regions and languages.
There is a formal potential of the common technique of television viewing
shaped by remote control as a device of unpredictable montage. The
remote control not only subverts the linear flow of television and its pre-
determined programming logic, but it transgresses the very foundation
of meaningfulness.
Schema (Television) attempts to crystallize and refine the indeterminate
process of reordering created by the remote control’s aleatoric montage.
This video work uses Dziga Vertov?s silent Kino-Pravda newsreels from
the 1920s (with subtitles by Rodchenko) as a formal paradigm and editing
model and as a paradoxical reference. This reference underscores the
futility of both direct propaganda and of any aempts to aribute
truthfulness to a moving image. The Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse
on suspicion and denaturalization provides a textual commentary on the
visual material.

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Sean Snyder
Lives and works in Berlin. Using different media, his projects deal with
obscure deviations in the processes of globalization, their decline in
hegemonic power and the occasionally search for mechanisms of an
uncertain utopia. His projects and installations explore aspects of urban
space and architecture as signs of economic and political structures, while
directly addressing the media as a sign of cultural domination through
representational and visual methods. The artist uses different sources to
produce his projects ? photo archives, documents, film footage,as well as
producing his own material. Through the reprocessing of visual material,
he de-constructs it, creating new narratives showing the manipulative
power of modern digital techniques alluding to the manipulative power
of mass media.
seansnyder@gmx.de