3 channel digital video installation, 1 minute, looped, 2001/2.
'Titles' strips three TV title sequences, of their original content. The missing images are replaced by a series of green, black and white grids, templates for the perfect placement of evocative imagery and text. These grids, reminicent of both patterns from early 20th century abstract paintings and popular mathematical copy books, animate around the screens in the same sequence as the original images. The emotional backdrop of these animations, origially provided by music and sound effects, has also been withdrawn, replaced by a concatenation of digital metronomes.
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"Works like “One Hundred Percent”, “15:1” and “Titles” are based on specific TV programmes. Each follows a different process of abstraction, by way of distillation: the “content” is stripped out and the “structure” laid bare. In this way Deignan uses standard modernist strategies of simplifying in order to focus attention on commonalities (the grids in “Titles” replace the animated text, videos and images in a show’s title sequence; thus you see graphically instead of reading text and images). But, importantly, her abstractions are made from things that are already very abstract. She is working with “cultural” objects rather than “natural” ones, and as such they are already highly constructed."
from the essay 'This Space is Unstable' by Alison Green, 2002.
© Michelle Deignan 2002