Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll share artist interviews and insights about this year’s ON SIGHT visual arts line-up. You can experience all of TBA:09’s visual arts installations from Sept 4 – 13, every day 12 – 6:30 pm. And join us for a free opening night party September 3, from 8 – 10:30 pm at Washington High School (map).
In this series of works, Antoine Catala uses complex technology and simple physical transformation to alter television images in real time. By altering mundane day-to-day television and displaying it in a quasi-cinematic way, Catala instigates a new, near-psychedelic experience of the familiar medium. TV is treated here as a continuous, unfiltered flow, regardless of its content. Catala brings a physical dimension to video, in what he calls “video scuptures,” to develop a new psychological relationship between the viewer and the medium.
Figure II: Antoine Catala’s video sculptures in TV.
KK: Why blobs?
AC: The Blob is the title of a horror movie, about an amorphous creature that terrorizes a small community. Blobs are grotesque, terrifying shapes. TV Blobs come straight out of a b-movie: the TV stream is a familiar companion that has been re-incarnated into a new body.
KK: Why news channels?
AC: A TV Blob is a television signal transformed in real-time into 3D multi-spherical spinning shapes that are projected human size onto a wall. I often use news channels as a source for the TV Blobs, because news channels are up-to-date around the clock and provide great entertainment. They act as a window to the outside world that functions especially well in a secluded environment like the exhibition space.
I am not uniquely attached to news, I also like to use weather channels – which stand more on the wallpaper side of TV entertainment. Weather channels’ weather maps are absolutely mesmerizing when turned into TV Blobs. I also favor cartoons, because their primary colors and contrasted content tend to work especially well with TV Blobs.
KK: Are these pieces video or sculpture? Or something else entirely?
AC: TV Blobs are video trompe l’oeil, flat projections of moving images that look like solid shapes. They are not really videos (because they do not produce new video content), nor are they sculptures (because they are immaterial projections), but they are a bit of both, they are video sculptures. TV Blobs are sculptures made out of a TV stream that introduces a new physical relationship between the viewer and the moving images. Video sculpture comes from a tradition of video art, pioneered by artists such as Wolf Vostell. Vostell was a fluxus artist that was one of the first to introduce a TV set into an art piece. One difference that distinguishes TV Blobs from the work of my predecessors is that I am exclusively treating the TV stream, while they were most often working with TV sets.
About
Antoine Catala’s practice, aside from making video, includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Catala holds a BA in mathematics and was schooled in sonic and fine arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited internationally at le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich); GAM (Mexico); The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh); and numerous venues in Bordeaux, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, Munich, Paris, Toulouse, and Saint-Etienne.
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