“redTV” by Brad Todd, Elie Zananiri

Title:

redTV

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Artist Statement:

redTV (Brad Todd, conception/design, Elie Zananiri, code/implementation) is an installation incorporating a live TV signal, a small Television, custom software and a projected circular video image. The TV signal is fed into a laptop using a analog to digital video converter and is then accessed via the redTV application, using the OpenFrameWorks library for C++. The image is analyzed and any areas of red are then isolated and tracked in real-time, leaving behind a trail of image outlines, which gradually, over the course of several minutes, fade away. In this manner a complex and dense environment of filigreed lines emerges and dies out, tracing and mapping an evolving history of the underlying visual mechanics at play.

I have used red as it seems to be the most resonant tele-visual color (and in a neurological sense is associated with caution and even danger), often employed liberally for garish news headlines (think Fox network fascist-hysteric graphics, or The Colbert Report’s parody of same), ‘terror’ alerts, cartoons, weather graphics and music videos, et al. Another analogy is that of blood, where the stream of images coursing through cables and satellites is seen as a correlative, in some sense, to a bodies circulatory system. The video projection takes the form of a circle to elicit associations of a Petri dish, microscope, or planet, heightening the sensation of seeing some sort of biological processes at work as in the early films of Jean Painlevé, or contemporary nano level imaging.