On thing is certain about Debla and Kurt Geissel's television sculpture installation in the storefront windows of 911 Media Arts Center: the television is perceived as a malignant machine that controls people like a kind of electronic Pied Piper. As to the how and why of the -well, the signals are scrambled. Danielle's Nightmare is installed in five adjacent window spaces-storefront vitrines- that face toward a busy intersection in a light-commercial area near downtown Seattle. Each contains one or more monitors, shorn of casing and enmeshed ins some other mechanism or form, all involved various methods of of thwarting the viewer's gaze. Several components are activated by viewer proximity, including the playback of a videotape and soundtrack of insistent, thudding music; others are constant and unremitting in their phosphorescent glow and metallic hiss.
The centerpiece is a robotic bipod with an audio speaker set into the "cross hairs" of a circular armature, behind which a cathode-ray tube dangles from springs and cables. It bobs and jerks when triggered by the viewer's presence, while a rastered video image plays to a dirge-like music. It has a quality of sci-fi fantasy to both its form and its metaphor-the lifelike menacing machine with unpredictable power of coercion and control. But we're looking at the wrong end of the picture-it's the camera that modifies behavior in an active, aggressive sense. The monitor makes us passive. (Admittedly, that too has negative implications.)
Other parts of the installation treat the television set as a devalued or mutant icon. One hisses from behind the veil of a black scrim; two re buried in grotesque gilded casings (one suspended, the other on a table-top pedestal); and a triple group set into metal racks is seen through horizontal black-out bands and raked by a strobe light. There's something archaic about seeing TV sets in storefront windows, as if they are intended to grab the attention of the passersby who (as in the 1950s) may not yet won or even familiarized with television; commercial promotion today is more likely to occur in chic, high-tech surroundings. Still, it's a lure' and the allure of television is intended to attract passersby to this installation.
But once we're there, it fails to deliver. The "interactive" component of the piece is merely a series of sensoring devices that turn thing on and off. The strobe is a bigger brighter version of the transmission scans onscreen, and the turning on a set to broadcast static instead of a picture is a well-worn conceit. The techno-decay look of the installations-especially from the vantage of a display vitrine (the robotic structure is framed by red damask curtains pulled back)-is its only redeeming feature, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the technology per se. Ironically, the premise implicit in Danielle's Nightmare, that television technology has made us into unquestioning automations locked into a one-way gaze with the machine, is barely able to command our sustained attention.