Channeling, 2016-2018
Channeling – Televisual Memory and Media Séance is a multimedia installation that combines still images, video, and interactive elements to address the nature of television as both media and medium, capable of "summoning" the dead in perpetuity.
Television is a possessive specter. It permeates our memories, our engagement with the world—affecting our understanding of self and purpose. To revisit older media on television is to enter the territory of memory itself, where we face fading moments that remain cannibalized in a cycle of broadcast (and recollection)—consumed and regurgitated. Watching not only conjures characters and their fictional curses, it summons our own inability to escape media possession.
Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, Adams mines digital “monotypes” from vintage horror films rebroadcast on TV, subjecting them to analog and digital glitch. Focused on the screen presence of Lon Chaney Jr., a figure she associates with her own dislocated childhood, Adams uses an obsessive system of “summoning” and extracting, creating glitches that articulate the imperfection of memory and the vampirism of a media-cursed self. The resulting moments are haunting and unstable, featuring a receding “hero” who is undermined, uncertain and media-bitten.
In essence, television supersedes mortality. “Dead” moments are channeled with a click, yet without interaction, media is entombed. We connect its points. We invite its permeation, its infection. We are both necromancer and created, and these wild borderlands of self-and-culture are the stuff of séance, a trance suspended between manifestation and ending, between the archive and the living.
Television is a possessive specter. It permeates our memories, our engagement with the world—affecting our understanding of self and purpose. To revisit older media on television is to enter the territory of memory itself, where we face fading moments that remain cannibalized in a cycle of broadcast (and recollection)—consumed and regurgitated. Watching not only conjures characters and their fictional curses, it summons our own inability to escape media possession.
Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, Adams mines digital “monotypes” from vintage horror films rebroadcast on TV, subjecting them to analog and digital glitch. Focused on the screen presence of Lon Chaney Jr., a figure she associates with her own dislocated childhood, Adams uses an obsessive system of “summoning” and extracting, creating glitches that articulate the imperfection of memory and the vampirism of a media-cursed self. The resulting moments are haunting and unstable, featuring a receding “hero” who is undermined, uncertain and media-bitten.
In essence, television supersedes mortality. “Dead” moments are channeled with a click, yet without interaction, media is entombed. We connect its points. We invite its permeation, its infection. We are both necromancer and created, and these wild borderlands of self-and-culture are the stuff of séance, a trance suspended between manifestation and ending, between the archive and the living.
Re-visitation, 2017
Do Not Adjust your Set, 2017
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Artifacts of You, 2017
Simulcast, diptych, 2017
In these Haunted Moments, Video Stills, 2017-18
The Language of Summoning, triptych, 2016
Touch Me, I am Already Gone, 2018
Dawning, triptych, 2017
Awakened, Video Stills, 2017
Network Decay, 2017
Interference, Individual Variations, 2017
