Before there were theories about the water, there was the television: a wooden cabinet in the corner of the living room, warm to the touch, dispensing people. Some of those people were more present than the ones at the dinner table. They repeated. They kept their promises weekly. They modeled how to be — how to reason, how to be kind, how to be strange in public — and the modeling took, because a child does not distinguish between a person and a transmission of a person.
This installation is a census of those transmissions. Call them ancestors, because that is what they functionally are: the figures upstream of a sensibility, the ones whose habits of attention became ours before we could consent to them. Each channel below holds one of them, with an account of what they installed and why it held.
The set works. Turn the knob.