Transmission

This thematic exhibition considers a range of artists’ responses to, and engagement with, television, sets and screens, visual broadcasting and the transmission of information. It includes Australian and international practitioners, with works dating from the late 1950s, when television was becoming a mass medium, to today.

Ranging from video works by Nam June Paik, Ant Farm and Dara Birnbaum, Transmission also features print and photographic abstractions by Anish Kapoor and Susan Fereday alongside contemporary works by Elvis Richardson and Simon Denny, and leads into the large-scale, immersive installation Available sync 2011 by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin.

Within the exhibition there is consideration of television as a means of global communication; a mediator of technology; a distributor of pop culture and consumerism; a filter of media and the news; a vehicle for a new ‘reality’; and a transmitter of information. Several artists look beyond television to newer technologies that have marked the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting and the Internet, and the simultaneous shift from passive to active engagement.

Transmission is an opportunity to reflect on the significance of the television age on art and contemporary culture, and to consider what is coming next.