We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isn’t even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow. As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging, because those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same... See more

In the two-thousand-tens, there was a brief vogue for “slow TV,” reality television of unedited reality, such as a more than seven-hour real-time video of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo, shot in 2009, and a Norwegian production, in 2016, showing twelve hours of the extreme tidal current in the strait of Saltstraumen. The durational videos inspire... See more

Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen. Ambient television aims to erase thought entirely, smoothing any disruptive texture or dissonance.  It provides glossy, comforting oblivion, or, as Matisse once wrote, of his own paintings, “something like a good armchair.”