| Signal is a meditation on the birth of the video age—a visual remix of motion, media, and myth. At its core is a tribute to MTV and the seismic shift it triggered in music, culture, and identity. When MTV launched on August 1, 1981, with the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” it didn’t just play music—it redefined how music was seen, consumed, and mythologized.
The date 1981 appears in the upper left corner, anchoring the canvas in that moment of cultural rupture. Floating nearby are safety pins—fashion staples of the MTV generation, symbols of punk, rebellion, and DIY identity. Behind them, a yellow line diagram reveals a radio tower beaming signals to multiple television sets: a literal transmission, a metaphor for influence.
Across the bottom third of the canvas, a white line drawing maps the craters of the moon—a nod to MTV’s original mascot, the astronaut planting a flag on lunar soil. It’s a symbol of conquest, spectacle, and the illusion of arrival. In the center, a jockey on a racehorse charges directly at the viewer: a burst of motion, ambition, and competitive energy. It’s not just about speed—it’s about dominance, about who gets to define the cultural finish line.
Running through the composition is a ring of horses—lifted from Edweard Muybridge’s
Studies of Animal Locomotion. Originally captured in the 1870s to settle a debate about equine motion, Muybridge’s sequential photographs became foundational to the development of cinema. Here, they spin like a zoetrope: a loop of motion that predates film, yet anticipates it. It’s a nod to the mechanics of vision, the illusion of movement, and the origins of spectacle.
Text fragments—“public domain footage,” “no logo on,” “playing over”—evoke the raw, experimental energy of MTV’s infancy, when music videos were still a new language: part commercial, part art, part rebellion. Silhouettes, ornamental gears, and neon gradients pulse across the canvas like a broadcast signal—glitching between analog and digital, history and hype.
Signal doesn’t just document the video revolution. It embodies it. A canvas caught mid-transmission—charging forward, never looking back.
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