In the early days of television, engineers needed a way to test and calibrate broadcast signals. This necessity led to the creation of test patterns—graphic displays featuring geometric shapes and color bars designed to assess color accuracy, resolution, and contrast.
I grew up with these test patterns, and they terrified me. I would turn on the TV, see the eerie stillness of the patterns, and run out of the room until the cartoons came on. They now feel like old friends—no longer scary, but nostalgic symbols of a time when television offered limited channels and shared programming.
While they may seem like relics of the past, test patterns mark the beginnings of a technological journey that has taken us from black-and-white broadcasts to color, from television to streaming, from the internet to artificial intelligence. More than just technical tools, they now serve as metaphors for our shifting relationship with media and one another. We've lost the communal experience of gathering around a single broadcast, the unity that early television once offered.
To highlight this loss of shared content, I created a group sculpture featuring a family of vintage TVs arranged as if gathered together to watch something—searching for that now-elusive collective moment. Their retro aesthetic evokes a bygone era, underscoring what has faded.
Materials for the test pattern artworks: sand, glitter, ink, gravel, photographs, acrylic paint, and found objects on wood, canvas, and Yupo (a synthetic paper).
Materials for the TV series: acrylic paint, spray paint, glitter, buttons, stones, and antennas on wood.