Ancestors is a piece of furniture: a wooden console, warm to the touch, dispensing people into a room. It answers the question of what the set delivered. This installation answers the one that follows — what became of the one who sat in front of it. The answer is a figure. Its body is a line. Its hands are full. Its head is a television, tuned to whatever is on.
Nothing here is a metaphor, or not only. The figure is an anatomy. Where the face should be there is a picture tube, and the tube faces out — toward you, toward the room, toward the next set — because that is the direction a screen faces. The books are in the hands because the hands are where books end up when the head is occupied. They are held, not read. The right one is even open.
Turn the dial. Each channel is a room of this site brought up on the tube, and under the set a line says what the screen is doing while it shows it. Watch the hands while you do. On one setting, and only one, the figure looks at what it is holding.
every channel names the room of the site it was tuned to.
Static
The rule of the figure. The head can face the audience or it can face the book. It cannot do both, and it is built so that it cannot: the tube is the face, and a face that is broadcasting is not a face that is reading. That is the whole finding, and it is not a complaint about television. It is a description of where the eyes are.
What it is not. Not a warning. Warnings about screens are themselves a genre of screen, and this department keeps a transmitter of its own and files the readings of its own signal beside it. The figure is not scolding anyone. It is standing there, receiving, with its hands full of the other thing. If it looks familiar, that is what the installation was built to find out.
Schematic. The button on the set strips the figure to its wire. The site's standing habit is to show the machinery rather than the finish, and a figure made of tubes and cylinders has less to hide than most. The tube keeps transmitting either way — the picture does not need the body to be solid.