Alison Fornell, NCAD

1. 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

2. L i f e 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

3. L i f e “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

4. L i f e 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

5. D e a t h 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

6. P r e l u d e t o N o t h i n g (2012)

7. 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

8. D e a t h 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

9. D e a t h 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

10. 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

11. S u s p e n s i o n (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

12. S u s p e n s i o n (2011)

16. C o m a t o s e “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