Wes Heiss » 2009

transvision

everlast . 24" x 24" x 30" . 2004

We are overrun by dumb objects. The things that we touch, watch, eat, buy, use and throw away have no ability to think for themselves nor are they designed to make you think. The vast majority of this stuff is actually designed precisely to keep you from thinking about what they are and why they are there.

The means by which you see things determines what you get out of them, and few objects in our world take this into consideration less than the television. In terms of how it functions, the design of the television has barely changed since its introduction over half a century ago. Strangely, as it has become a nearly ubiquitous component of contemporary life, the television’s physical presence has dwindled into almost complete insignificance. It is a muted black box… anonymous, passive, inert.

Transvision is an ongoing project that reconsiders the design of the consumer television we take for granted. Shedding the pretense of operating on the future infrastructures of broadcast information, transvision instead explores the potentials of altering the mediating object itself. This mediating object is a potent and thoroughly ignored threshold between the space of your body and mind, and the stream of information from the world.

Transvision’s intent is to change you’re relationship with what you are seeing rather than simply mindlessly relaying information. Each of the fully functional transvisions proffers new prototypes for watching and reconceptualizing our ideas about television. These new schemes of interface problematize the act of watching TV by imbedding interaction into a medium traditionally resolved to the goal of complacency. The individual transformations in Transvision expose the power of the mediating object, reanimating both the content and the viewer while cutting through the static and stasis of media. Whatever you do, don’t sit back and relax.