Creating Static Art

Stand a few feet back from your television set and start in slow at first. Let the static lull you in, the white noise flowing into your ear canal like seashell tones. Static has a lot of pop culture references, if you think about it. Candle Cove being one good example. The story wouldn't have nearly the staying power it does if we weren't subliminally terrified by the infinite possibilities of weird subliminal messages being hidden in that ongoing vortex of frothing electric hiss. 

Once you feel your shot is set up correctly, snap the shutter a few times and watch it go to work. The best part is that, depending on whether you're using an analog or digital camera, what'll be picked up can vary wildly from what you're actually seeing. On digital cameras, static usually possesses moving green bars which hover erratically up and down. I'm not sure why this is, although if I had to guess it would have something to do with the difference between the frame rate of the digital camera and the cathode TV. Digital technology has never been very good at capturing analog technology without a direct hookup. Audio recordings off vinyl will sound terrible if you record them over your iPhone's speakers, and VHS tapes will look terrible if you record them by setting a camera in front of the TV instead of hooking your VCR directly up to your computer and copying the video in with an adapter. For the purposes of static art, though, this imperfection, this uncanny disconnect, is exactly what you're looking for. 

Once you have enough shots, go ahead and take a look at them, blow them up and scan every little detail. Try and find shapes in the static, using the same process of pareidolia everyone uses to find shapes in the clouds. Chop up different pictures and arrange them into a little collage. The possibilities really are endless with this sort of thing. 

One might view this process as somewhat nihilistic, in that static may be the most nihilistic medium of all time. I myself would argue that static is worth exploring, and the more you think you know about its intricacies, the less you actually do. Going in and really taking a close look at static can be refreshing, to consider exactly why it looks like that, and what makes it tick. It is a daunting task, to begin to understand and recognize phenomena in static, yet after a while it becomes a fulfilling hobby, like spotting different wildflowers or collecting different stamps. Static may appear simple to the layman, but there's a world of captivating insight on the other side of the glass. once you start to breach it, there's no turning back.