The death of analogue Television

The speed and complexity of modern life is such that sometimes things slip past us unnoticed.

We do not have time to worry about their passing it’s as though we only see them by glancing in the rear view mirror, once we have moved on.

To put in another way, looking straight ahead, we miss important events happening at the edges of our vision.

This selective cultural indifference to events taking place in our peripheral vision has been a recurring theme in my work for the past 30 years.

Italy along with many other European countries recently switched off their analogue television signal and moved everything over to a digital signal. One of the visible signs of this changeover were the scores of suddenly no longer viable analogue televisions dumped by rubbish bins ready to be carted away.

I dismantled 20 televisions and used them as the starting point for this work. The paintings are based on some of the objects to be found inside those now useless sets – the circuit boards, transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors and speakers. All hidden from view, but which have been constant companions for most of our lives.

The transistor, for instance was first invented in 1947 in the Bell Laboratories, USA. It was probably the most important electronic event of the 20th century as it later made possible the integrated circuit and microprocessor that are the basis of modern electronics.

I took these tiny objects and blew them up in size, to turn them almost into large scale icons so that we could look at them in a slightly different way. Maybe if I expanded them into something the size of, lets say, a Mayan temple that could be seen from a satellite in space, it would give the images an added importance?

These thoughts were in the back of my mind whilst working on some of these paintings and it was something that my collaborator in this installation – the musician, Gian–Marco Marseglia was also well aware of.

He composed the music for the installation and visited the studio on many occasions while they were being painted to keep track of the gradually evolving images.

He too thought of some of the tiny groups of transistors as large herds of moving animals in the desert seen from above and so composed music based on electronic sounds but with grandiose sweeping movements from one of those television nature programs which we have all watched at some point.

Keane
1983-1984 Toured Europe with own street theatre “Lord Lucan’s Travelling Box”
Since 1985 Living and working in Italy as a painter
1991 Elected member of Fine Art Society, Florence Italy
1992 With Fabrizio Da Prato and Tiziana Fontana formed “Artists at Work”
1996 started barganews.com

1982 Dudley Art Gallery, Dudley England
1983 Bournville Painters, Bournville England
1984 Gallery, Aix en Provence France
1988 Sala ex Archivio, Castelnuovo Garfagnana Italy
1989 Pantelleria, Trapani Italy
1990 Fine Art University, Nanjing China
1991 Italian Trade Centre, London England
1992 Casa di Dante, Florence Italy
1993 Palazzo della Cultura, Latina Italy
1994 Cardoso Art, Cardoso Italy
1995 Hijack Artvertising, Dublin/London/Milano/New York USA
1996 Hijack Artvertising, Colman Fine Art, London England
1996 Terre d’Acqua Biennale, Vercelli Italy
1996 Terra d’Acqua, Treviso Italy
1996 G7 Group, Sternen, Fluelen Switzerland
1997 Altsadthalle, Zug Switzerland
1997 Salle des Voutes, Cassis France
1998 Varkaus Art Museum, Varkaus, Finland
1999 Joensuu, River Art Finland
1999 “Candy Factory” Yokohoma, Japan
2000 Sottopassaggio73, Livorno Italy
2003 Signs at Casa Cordati, Barga Italy
2006 The Mutande of Barga, Florence, Italy
2008 Margini – stone installations at 1600 metres, La Pania, Italy
2010 The Nuns of Barga, “Artefact”, Fornaci di Barga, Italy