L i f e a n d d e a t h o n t e l e v i s i o n:
David Fagan’s Prelude to Nothing (2012) and Suspension (2011)
Alison Fornell, NCAD
Life
flow
“the grabbing of attention in the early
moments; the reiterated promise of exciting
things to come, if we stay” Raymond
Williams
“For the ‘interruptions’ are in one way only
the most visible characteristic of a process
which at some levels has come to define
the television experience.” Raymond
Williams
Life
“repetitive reformulation of desire” Beverle Houston
desire
“Rather than suturing the viewer further
into a visually re-evoked dream of
plentitude, [television] keeps the ego at a
near-panic level of activity, trying, virtually
from moment to moment, to control the
situation, trying to take some satisfaction,
to get some rest from the constant
changes, which repeatedly give the lie to
television’s fervent, body-linked promise.”
Beverle Houston
“In its endless flow of text, it suggests the
first flow of nourishment in and from the
mother’s body, evoking a moment when
the emerging sexual drive is still closely
linked to—propped on—the life-and-death
urgency of the feeding instinct.” Beverle
Houston
Life
liveness
“The medium in its own practices seems to
insist more and more upon an ideology of the
live, the immediate, the direct, the
spontaneous, the real.” Jane Feuer
Death
deadness
“As a temporal structure of TV, liveness is
associated with crisis; it interrupts. But
here I am concerned with a related, though
opposed, organization of televisual time,
namely, forms of deadness: routine,
boredom, and repetition, the unremarkable,
take-for-granted continuousness of the TV
schedule.” Anna McCarthy
P r e l u d e t o N o t h i n g (2012)
Case Study: P r e l u d e t o N o t h i n g (2012)
“Prelude to Nothing was an event which
marked a moment of finality; Europe's last
ever broadcasting of satellite television
signals in the original analogue format.
This happened at 2am on Monday April
30th 2012 […] It was an attempt to
anthropomorphise a system and mark its
passing. At 1.55am we stopped to watch
television, at 2am, the signal ceased.”
David Fagan
Death
obsolete technologies
“Generated at the peak of the cold war, in
the midst of the space race, and during
decolonization of the developing world,
satellite television first took shape in a
series of broadcasts emanating from the
United States, Western Europe, and
Japan.” Lisa Parks
Death
witness
“Witnessing became a domestic act,
happening in the home rather than in a
public space of entertainment. It came
through a technology that proposed itself
as a live transmission from a centre to
millions of homes watching the same
images at the same time. Television sealed
the twentieth century’s fate as the century
of witness.” John Ellis
Case Study: P r e l u d e t o N o t h i n g (2012)
“When the end of analogue satellite
broadcasting comes, the television set is to
be the site of its death. Usually the site of
content such as film and sport, which
evoke a first person experience of narrative
or events, the television is
anthropomorphized and experienced in the
third person. The set and the system
become the ill-fated protagonist whose
passing is witnessed by those present.”
David Fagan
Suspension
(2011)
“A clock on a television screen counts
down to New Year 2011. As this is the
moment the television channel shown,
9Live, was due to cease broadcasting on
this satellite signal, a poetic convergence
occurs, whereby the clock is also counting
down to it’s own demise. Looping these
final moments attempts to halt the
inevitable.” David Fagan
Suspension
(2011)
Comatose
“ground within which communication as
flow of values among and between two and
three dimensions and between virtuality
and actuality—indeed an uncanny
oscillation between life and death—can
‘take place’” Margaret Morse