Nightlights Like Fireflies
16 x 20 prints on chromira paper
Some nights I stood on the inside looking out at the flickering green lights of fireflies; some nights I stood on the outside looking in at the flickering blue lights of television sets. For 50 years and more the CRT shone like a flickering blue beacon to passersby. Now after the last transmission, the CRT is rendered useless, thrown out of doors like a dog who has pissed on the rug; lifeless and dark on the edge of the curb; a nightlight now more night than light. Electronic syndicated dreams are replaced with fancies even more far than fetched. If only these abandoned tubes could flirt in open fields and lift themselves up to perch in the trees flickering blue night lights like fireflies.
Last Days of Snow: Nightlights Like Fireflies
Photographic lightboxses documenting a site specific performance Exhibition History :
Art in the Open Festival, Charlottetown, PEI, 2011 (similar to nocturne or nuit blanche)
Original Performance Format:
• 12 televisions were hung in a large tree on August 27, 2011 (just 3 days before the end of most Canadian analogue television broadcasts).
• Each television was tuned to CBC, CTV, Global TV, and Radio Canada (some had already stopped receiving and were already displaying snow, others would be losing their signals in 3 days, and one channel had a one year extension).
• Art in the Open Festival ran from 4pm until midnight and hundreds of people passed through the spaces exploring temporal public art installations.
• During the festival I stood with the installation in costume, dressed as a television repairwoman (custom tailored blue coveralls with my name embroidered on the pocket and a toolbelt) and answered questions about which channels were shutting off on which dates and at what times.
• I had a table and chair set up with a laptop and internet connection, and a notebook listing all of the television stations in Canada that would be shutting off, and what their digital replacement channel would be.
• There was a lot of public engagement that resulted in lengthy discussions with people about the relationship between television, politics, economics, society, culture, geography, and technology.
Physical Description for Gallery Installation:
These photographs were taken after midnight as the festival came to a close. The digital files were later manipulated and interpolated to create soft diffuse texture – playing with the dark shadows and exagerated pixels where signal and noise dance hand in hand in forbidden relationships, a digital parallel to the bleed of televisual image into ambiguous snow.