Jason E Geistweidt

about ephemera

Television is bad for your baby.

Television is bad for your baby. is a procedural work based upon the permutative processes of Brion Gysin, who along with Burroughs developed numerous generative techniques for determining what a text was really saying. In TIBFYB all possible permutations of the 6 words are presented accompanied by a banal text-to-speech reading. As the code begins to shift the text around, the initial statement becomes obscured and the viewer is presented with various nonsensical interations. However, from this process emerges key phrases which pull the viewer back into the work -- is your baby bad for television -- providing the viewer a moment of clarity from which to become lost again. It is this shifting between clarity and confusion that shapes the temporal form of the work.