The Oscilloscope converts sound waves into visual signals. In this piece I wanted to use the very notion of the televisual image – an image often produced by an accretive process of left to right scanning, although imperceptible, has obvious parallels with the way the eye reads a page of text in Western culture. By undoing the notion of the image and reducing it to a waveform I wanted to bring attention to the aural. The sonic component of the signal being displayed is a 24-hour sound recording of a television channel. Manipulating the internal circuits of the set, I was able to produce wave forms that emphasize TV as a medium in which the image is simple a function of some specific set of controls – one that just happened to be more rigidly enforced than others. The speed of signals, not the legible image is the fundamental fact of television. And in the oscilloscope the rapid emergence and disappearance of forms, televisual outtakes, and general electronic noise seem explicitly to attest to the forces of frequencies – wild powers at work, as liable to tear through the darkness with thumping, piercing sound as with blinding flashes of light.

 

The shift from a modern to a postmodern world is accompanied by a radical change in the mode of representation, bringing with it a change in the relationship of signifier and referent-or rather representation and reality-which is now more problematic because the image has taken the place of the word as signifier: images now resemble referents more than words. That is to say, the signifier has become a referent and the signified is devalued; this is what Lash calls "the de-differentiation of signifier and referent". Thus, the postmodern cultural forms of social communication generate meanings through "non- discursive visual imagery" which shapes consciousness and behavior. What one has at one's disposal is a culture where image plays a more important role than linguistic or sonic discourse. As Jhaly, Kline, and Leiss put it, "iconic representations" have a stronger impact on "affective opinion," and behavior than "verbal discourse"; they can be absorbed without full conscious awareness and without being translatable "into explicit verbal formulations"