For my first actlab project, I wanted to play with the familiarity of the moving television image.  I bought some plexiglass, metal parts, straws, thread, magnifying sheet material (from Mapsco), and I asked an optometrist to collect unwanted lenses for me.  Out of this stuff I made a screen for my television screen. 

Television itself is uncanny--little two-dimensional people walking around in a box in your home.  I hoped that by playing with scale, I might draw our attention to the unsettling craziness we fail to see in our entertainment.  I was inspired by the sculptures of Ron Mueck, who plays with figural scale.  Mueck creates these lifelike silicone statues of giant and tiny people that will creep the hell out of you, even in a busy museum in broad daylight.  Just by changing relative size, he makes the human form alien.

The screen screen is an apparatus meant to be interacted with; the viewer can move around as television plays through the screen and get various visual effects from different vantage points.  However, I also found, unexpectedly, that I could capture interesting visual moments by taking still shots of the television through the screen screen.  I think these destroy TV's familiarity even further, since images meant to pass quickly through the eyes and brain are this way made to linger there.  These are displayed below.  Scroll all the way down for images of the construction process.