Created out of a love for Posters, Modernism and Television, there wasn’t a client out there to commission such a job so Austrian designer Albert Exergian wrote his own brief and created this self initiated series of posters throwing all of the above inspirations into the creative melting pot.

See more of Exergian’s Iconic TV series here.

Episode is the final work in a trilogy of projects having to do with perception, coincidence, and the challenges of objectively communicating subjective experiences. The video takes the form of a standard news-and-culture-style television talk show in which a conversation among three guests about a topic of current import is moderated by a journalist host. The project was shot on location at the DFA studio am Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.

In Episode, Melinda Crane, the host of DWTV’s weekly talk show Quadriga, moderates a discussion among three witnesses to an undocumented event that occurred in 1991. Kerry Tribe, Jade Stefano and Jolon Bankey were teenage friends on a summer-long road trip across the Unites States when strange lights appeared in the night sky over northern Idaho. The three compare their recollections for the first time since the events took place fifteen years earlier, their speculations ranging from the mundanely scientific to the psychedelically absurd.

All images © Kerry Tribe

How can I make an outline of myself?
Where’s the guidelines?
For the profiles?
For my country?

How do others see me?
I’m worried,
Worried but I feel guilty.
The media robs and betrays us –
No more lies!

We are responsible.

Oh, no you might well moan, not another group of pals sitting around whining and nursing their anxieties, getting up once in a while to test the passing Zeitgeist. Oh, yes. But click into NBC’s “Friends” anyway. [...] Plot lines are devices on which to build riffs, things like the conversation in which the chums wonder if kissing is as important as any other part of sex or if it is just the opening act, akin to getting past the comedian to Pink Floyd.

— John J. O’Connor, The New York Times, from a preview of Friends

Download the article

James Burrows knows television. Whether independently as a director or with his production company Charles Burrows Charles, Jimmy (to his friends) Burrows has lent a hand to every popular comedy since 1975. I’m not exaggerating. The man worked on Mary Tyler Moore, The Bob Newhart Show, Taxi, Friends and Will & Grace, among others. Jimmy Burrows created Cheers for fucksake.

During the NBC panel Burrows made three important points while discussing his work on Will & Grace. He described how the “gay sensibility” of Frasier made viewers comfortable with homosexuality. He also mentioned that 25% of Americans wouldn’t watch the show at all because of its themes. When I asked about this he confirmed that it was only true for gay characters. Lastly, he rewrote the pilot to end with a heterosexual kiss between “Will” and “Grace” so that the audience would subconsciously wish for a heteronormative relationship between the main characters.

I cornered Burrows after the panel to tell him about my recent essay on Cheers. He seemed unfazed, saying “In the late nineties I did a lecture up at Stanford and this women brought me a stack of paper this-high. She’d written her dissertation—a book—about Cheers.” He finished his story with this piece of documentary gold, “We didn’t realize we were doing anything important. We were just trying to make America laugh.”

I recently attended a panel discussion titled “Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV”  at the Paley Media Center in West Hollywood. The event was organized in conjunction with the release of former NBC President Warren Littlefield’s new book of the same name. The panel featured Littlefield; Noah Wyle, “Dr. John Carter”, ER;  James Burrows, Emmy Award–winning Executive Producer/Director; Cheers, Will & Grace; Marta Kauffman, multiple Emmy Award–winning Co-creator/Executive Producer, Friends; David Nevins, President of Entertainment, Showtime Networks, Inc; former SVP, Primetime Series at NBC; and was moderated by Michael Schneider, LA Bureau Chief, TV Guide Magazine.

I had many revelations during this industry love fest, but my most significant breakthrough was the realization that Must See TV was television for yuppies made by yuppies. In The Columbia History of American Television scholar Gary Edgerton writes, “Yuppie audiences became the make-or-break commodity of the television industry during the late 1980s and early 1990s. If the [Nielsen] system captured them, then that was what mattered most.” The television industry tolerated the young, urban, professional bias of Nielsen because they didn’t care about other audiences.

Littlefield recounted NBC’s record-breaking market share with a mix of glee and nostalgia. “30 percent of America was watching our network.”

“A few years ago, a TV show might have been unthinkable to me, but now, as a single person, I don’t want to just sit in our house regretting what’s passed. This feels like I’m embarking on a new chapter.” — Anjelica Huston

Big Star, Small Screen, Brian Lowry, W Magazine, August 2011

641 Castlewood Lane, Deerfield, IL

I miss Chicago. When I return in June, I’m making the trek to Deerfield, Illinois to visit the Bundy House.

“Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch” (pdf) is an essay about what it means to be American and watch TV. The essay examines fifteen core American values, as established by sociologist Robin M. Williams, Jr. in 1970, through the lens of the long-running primetime situation comedy Cheers (1982). “Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch” uses personal history to interrogate the myths of success, family, love and identity that are learned though watching thousands of hours of television. A close reading of Cheers is contrasted with the parallel story of US commercialism to explore how television creates value.

I presented “Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch” at Bodega in Philadelphia on February 25, 2012 and it was published as part of Document, a new online distribution project featuring PDFs by artists.

In a media-saturated environment in which news, opinions, and entertainment surround us all day on our television sets, computers, and cell phones, the television commercial remains the one area where presidential candidates have complete control over their images. Television commercials use all the tools of fiction filmmaking, including script, visuals, editing, and performance, to distill a candidate’s major campaign themes into a few powerful images. Ads elicit emotional reactions, inspiring support for a candidate or raising doubts about his opponent. While commercials reflect the styles and techniques of the times in which they were made, the fundamental strategies and messages have tended to remain the same over the years.

The Living Room Candidate contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, when Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower that short ads played during such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more voters than any other form of advertising. This innovation had a permanent effect on the way presidential campaigns are run.

The Living Room Candidate is organize by the Museum of Moving Image. The Nixon commercial below is absolutely terrifying! But how much better are recent campaign ads?