Simon Denny. Those who don’t change will be switched off. 2012. 

We here at Kill Screen are obviously obsessed with screens and London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts is as well. Their upcoming exhibition Remote Control caught our eye and artist’s interaction with the medium of TV certainly has ramifications for our many hours spent glued to one.

Remote Control surveys the enormous impact that television has had upon contemporary culture through a range of artistic engagement with the medium and offers a look at how the next generation are responding to digital convergence. The exhibition includes many important works that reveal the power and influence of television broadcasting on politics and society. Remote Control coincides with the digital switchover in the UK and marks the end of analogue broadcasting, representing a milestone in the evolution of the medium. […]

Remote Control also looks at television as a physical object as can be seen in Matias Faldbakken’s minimal tombstone-like concrete casts of televisions (2011) and Tauba Auerbach’s hypnotic images of TV static and digital binary code (2012). Julie Wachtel’s I’m O.K, You’re O.K (1992) combines hard-edge abstraction and daytime television, juxtaposing silkscreened images of faces on the afternoon talk shows with monochrome panels. Concern with fame, pop culture and consumerism dominate in the work of Jessica Diamond, Mark Leckey and Martha Rosler. Diamond’s wall painting T.V. Telepathy (1989) proclaims in bold black letters “Eat Sugar Spend Money” and takes the outline of a television screen whilst Leckey weaves pop imagery such as Felix the Cat into his film collages, particularly symbolic as it was used in the 1920s as a test pattern for the first television broadcasts in the USA.

The show runs April 3 to June 10.