As this exhibition shows, a lot of what we consider internet-age worries about gorging on electronic stimuli were developed first, not as a response to the internet, but in the age of television. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive video installation Lorna (1979-82) lets the viewer use a remote control to inquire into the life of its subject, a woman who constantly watches TV and fears “everything”, and whose distinguishing characteristic is that she has not left her apartment in more than four years. (The technique of allowing the user to navigate between prerecorded video clips clearly prefigures modern commercial works such as this year’s critically acclaimed detective video game Her Story.) Such worries about entertainment addiction are brought up to date in Jeremy Bailey’s imaginary patents, jeux d’esprit that include one for an Apparatus for the Display and Control of Television Preferences as Facial Fashion on the Internet, in which the user’s face is decorated by the electronic projection of her favourite shows…
Artspace