Janek Schaefer - National Portrait (Artist Multiple)

Edition of 40 Artist Multiples - Appropriated TV remote control containing 24 hour (1000xMP3) album, on USB circuit board

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Our world is continually in transition. Technologies drift into obsolescence as others push to fill some potential consumer gap, and these in turn influence the way we process and occupy our media saturated environment. At midnight on December 1st 2009, Liverpool’s analog television signal was switched off to the five terrestrial TV stations, paving the way for a purely digital paradigm. It marked the end of an analogue era that began in 1936. There to capture and frame this cultural shift was sound artist Janek Schaefer.

The edition follows on from the original installation, which was commissioned as part of his retrospective at The Bluecoat, in Liverpool city centre. A condensed collection of 24 hours of found sound, forming a seething ocean of data from that final days broadcasting. Voiceovers, incidental music, current affairs reports, commercials, dead air, sports commentary, film dialogue and other broadcast detritus are reshaped into a comprehensive concrète collage. A sound portrait of a single day, that speaks for a lifetime.


Janek Schaefer writes

“The installation records the sound of the very last 24hrs of the 5 terrestrial TV channels as they were broadcast live across the city. This forms a sound portrait of a day in the life of Britain, and reveals how we define ourselves through our channel hopping mass media. It celebrates the first generation of television history at the switching point between analogue and digital culture.

In the gallery five TV cabinets and the surrounding walls the are boldly painted with vertical test card stripes in red green blue black & white. The cabinets frame a  collection of classic old TV sets with a black & white pulsing screen that is sound reactive. Each TV plays the audio of a whole days broadcast from one of the terrestrial channels. This is cut up into 1000 random length clips that are played back in shuffle mode, producing a varied series of sound bites. Across the five sets this produces a cascade of jump cut sound sentences ricocheting around the gallery. News bulletins blend with reality shows, as children’s TV collides with late night programming. An infinite remix of a portrait of the nation.

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