Television as Medium: How a Century of Broadcasting Reshaped Art

“This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book,” a voice states at the opening of Nam June Paik’s Global Groove (1973), a work now understood as pivotal in the history of video art. 

If anything, this prediction – prescient, though likely thought hyperbolic at the time – underestimated the penetrating influence of television on today’s world.

The moving image is now a tentpole of culture. In an intensifying mutation of Paik’s prediction, it has transcended television, appearing in forms ranging from animated billboards to TikTok videos. 

In 1986, the curator Marc H. Miller organised an exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York, titled Television's Impact on Contemporary Art. When I tell him that I’m writing a piece on the same subject, he laughs. “You’ve got your hands full there,” he says, “it was a lot easier to do this in 1986.” Today, he explains, television’s impact “expands into all aspects of life.”

Anton Perich, Lisa, c. 1979, oil on canvas, 183 x 206 cm. Courtesy the artist

The Ideology of TV

A century after its invention, artists continue to return not just to television’s images but also to the technology and ideology that underpin it. Unlike most of the audiovisual content that we consume today, we do not decide what’s on television. In a 2005 interview with Dr. Jackie Hatfield, the British video artist Tamara Krikorian described it as “a controlled means of communication”. As the screen becomes an increasingly ubiquitous and democratised space, this idea of control is guiding the next generation of television-inspired art.

Television characters are now undeniable parts of the cultural canon. “If you go back to the nineteenth century, everyone was familiar with the classics – everything from Shakespeare to Greek myths – those were the shared vocabulary of an earlier generation,” says Miller. “The shared vocabulary of the television generation was anything from The Jetsons to Howdy Doody and Archie Bunker. These were the references.” He cites Kenny Scharf’s Jetsons-inspired paintings, some of which appeared in his own 1986 exhibition, but other examples – from Takashi Murakami’s Doraemon to Mark Leckey’s Felix the Cat – proliferate.

Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984 (installation view), four-channel video, colour and sound on thirteen monitors, 15 min 21 sec. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. © Estate of Gretchen Bender. Courtesy Sprüth Magers

Glitch, Distortion and the Aesthetics of Broadcast

Beyond this, many artists are inspired by the distortions inherent in television’s delivery of such images. Joan Jonas’s haunting videowork Vertical Roll (1972), for example, is marked by a scrolling, skipping picture that brings to mind a faulty television

In the late 1970s, the artist Anton Perich designed an electric painting machine that anticipated the inkjet printer, influenced by television monitors. It produced horizontally distorted images that captured the spectral, often uncanny quality of broadcast television.

Gretchen Bender’s 1984 video installation Dumping Core comprises 13 monitors that saturate the viewer with disparate information. At the time, LA Weekly described her as a ‘T.V. terrorist’. When the work was acquired and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the media conservator Peter Oleksik writes, his team quickly realised that ‘its raw qualities – its tape glitches, frenetic editing, and varying audio mixes – are in fact critical elements of the piece’.

Four decades later, art’s fascination with television’s ghostly mode of image-making endures. Last year, Matthias Groebel’s exhibition Skull Fuck at Modern Art included a number of works from 1989 to 2025 made by a machine that translated television signals into paint on canvas. Their subjects were selected from obscure satellite television channels which Groebel watched on mute.

Matthias Groebel, Untitled, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 95 x 95 cm. © Matthias Groebel. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London

The Television Set as Sculptural Object

Indeed, the television is rarely just a delivery system for a finished artwork; it’s a medium in itself. Paik is often described as the father of video art, but much of his work might be better described as ‘television art’. In almost all of his most recognisable works – such as TV Garden (1974–1977), an installation featured in his 2019–20 Tate Modern retrospective, in which televisions are dispersed among live plants – the television itself, not just the image on its screen, is an essential ingredient.

Matt Fitts, director of The Block, hires monitors from his holding of around 450 to museums and galleries. Most video artworks, he explains, come with display protocols that specify the exact model of the monitor that it should be displayed on. Most popular, he says, is the Sony PVM - known by most as the cube. It’s a black box that, though technically only a monitor, embodies the archetypal television. Enthusiasts speak about the quality of its hardware with awe: “It’s as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside,” says Fitts.

The cube isn’t just lauded for its technical specs; there’s something sculptural about it that lends weight to the images that it displays. Fitts describes it as “not anthropomorphic, but body-like”. “You can display a handful of them in whatever size white cube – and they can command the space,” he says. “It’s quite an extraordinary thing for an object to do.” When Leckey’s rendition of Felix the Cat was shown at Tate Britain in 2008, winning that year’s Turner Prize, it was on a cube supplied by Fitts.

But not all artists working with televisions opt for the same model. In her 2024 exhibition Artificial Intelligence at Galerie Isabelle Bortolozzi, Morag Keil installed a flatscreen television that befitted the anonymous, middle-class home that the exhibition sought to emulate. Its display alternated between inane clips from British daytime television and a realtime video of the viewer, shot by a nearby webcam. “The screen itself is part of the work,” she says. “The video isn't a thing that could be shown in another way.”

Antony Cairns, MaViCa: Tokyo Blue x Aquos 01, 2025 (detail). Sony MaViCa FD200, memory stick, Sharp LC-15C1 AQUOS colour TV, dimensions variable. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards. Courtesy the artist and a. SQUIRE, London

Similarly, the photographer Antony Cairns, who often incorporates televisions in his work, considers the physicality of the object as an essential aspect. “In [photography’s] march forward with technology, a lot of things are left at the side of the road,“ he says. He’s interested in reexamining the significance of such things, and collects early Sharp Aquos models designed by Toshiyuki Kita. One of them, a silver plastic monitor with two bulbous speakers at the bottom, was recently displayed in a group exhibition at a. SQUIRE gallery as part of his work MaViCa: Tokyo Blue x Aquos 01 (2025).

From Broadcast Schedules to Autonomous Systems

Cairns has recently turned his attention to a new project, one that centres not the form factor of television but its controlled nature. He’s working on a subscription service for VHS tapes containing his work, which he describes as a “television-magazine”. “Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want people to look at The Godfather on their iPhones,” he says. In the same spirit, this project will sacrifice the convenience and agency that viewers are used to, delivering instead an intentional viewing experience that references “a time when everyone would huddle around one screen and watch TV in the living room.”

For Zero 10, a curated section of Art Basel Miami Beach platforming “creators defining the future of culture”, curator Eli Scheinman says he wanted “to move away from televisions on walls”, a format that he feels digital art is capable of going far beyond. He describes Raster und Spectrum (2025), an algorithmic digital work by Kim Asendorf, as “perpetually-generating”.

Kim Asendorf, Raster und Spektrum, 2025 (installation view, Art Basel Miami Beach 2025). Courtesy the artist and Nguyen Wahed, London & New York

“You never at any two moments in its existence will see the exact same output,” he says. To me, this sounds less like video art and more like television art; a moving-image medium that can’t be paused or rewinded, acting autonomously. It unfolds on its own terms, independent of the person displaying or viewing it. It is, as Scheinman explains, “always running; there’s always something ‘on’, to borrow that nomenclature, always something showing. You might tune back in and see something familiar or something completely disparate.”

Artists like Cairns and Asendorf, working amid a visual paradigm birthed by television, emulate not its imagery or image-making faculties, but its structure as a controlled distribution system. Today, the moving image is art’s most obvious inheritance from television. In the future, as other content is further democratised, television’s more significant contribution to art might be the terms on which it is viewed.