Reception
2004
Single-channel video, monitor, sound
4 minutes 31 seconds loop
“Patrick Ward’s Reception explores cinematographic representations of television and video’s imagined paranormal potential. The scenes in the original films present broadcasts that begin and end with a flicker of a broken image or a burst of on-screen static. Ward has edited the fragments that framed each scene to create a looped sequence that plays on our narrative expectations: what was actually seen on the television screens in the original films is missing. The flicker and static that framed the transmission become the content. Establishing shots situate the encounters within an estranged domestic setting leading to a series of mesmerising, nebulous on-screen images of white noise. The work implies an element of external interference which, allied with an ambient soundtrack, becomes an unsettling portent of events unfolding in an unseen narrative.”
—Jeanine Griffin
Haunted Media, exhibition catalogue
Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK, 2004