by Claude Closky
curated by Nathalie Anglès
September 12 – December 30, 2003

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Artforum Review
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The Village Voice + Timeout New York
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frenchculture.org
The L Magazine
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Location One is pleased to present the first US solo exhibition by French artist Claude Closky. Television focuses on the production of signs and systems that articulate the world in a society driven by consumerism.

For the installation, Closky created 10 thousand entertainment channels for the Internet (TPIs: Television Programs for Internet). Each channel is composed of a short program shown in a loop. The TPI programs are exclusively animated gifs and html, namely very low tech, some exclusively created for Television, others borrowed by Closky from the web.

Television is displayed on 19 color monitors installed in Location One’s gallery. Viewers will be able to access the 10,000 channels with numeric keyboards that control all of the monitors. This inordinate number of channels will expose the impotence of viewers who, despite the interactive nature of the installation, are left with very little control.

One of the most innovative emerging artists of his generation, Closky’s imagery draws on mass media culture with sources of material ranging from everyday life to images taken from fashion magazines, billboards and television. In Television, the artist pushes the logic of these images to the absurd through the use of humor, repetition, accumulation, diversion and loop systems. Television is a caricatured reflection of the web and television networks that questions their rapid and continuous growth, regardless of the information they broadcast.

Television is available to the public online at: http://location1.org/closky, as well as in the gallery.

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Étant donnés, The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art; Cultural Services of the French Embassy (US); and DICREAM-CNC, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, France.

About the artist
Claude Closky was born in 1963 in Paris. He works with different media; video, photography, the Internet, drawing. He has participated in the Sydney Biennial, the Taipei Biennial, and in exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, at the Fondation Olivetti, Rome, at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, and at l’Oca, Sao Paulo, among others. His work is currently being presented at the Tate, Liverpool, and at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. More information is available on his website: http://sittes.net