PLEASE ADJUST YOUR ANTENNA

A test pattern is the reference against which the medium is calibrated, its values fixed so that any drift can be measured. It belongs to the gaps of broadcasting and to the moment before a program, the image that teaches the viewer to wait. In Calibration the program never arrives; what comes is only text, a phrase, sometimes a few lines.

The window is narrow: 1987 to 1993, the last fully analog years, the threshold at which Abosch entered machine vision. The works are made with software he wrote, and each line is his own. He lets the bars decay as he renders them; the medium that holds them is mortal.

Calibration once moved one way , a human set the standard, the machine was tuned to meet it. Now it moves the other way: we tune ourselves to the infrastructure, shaped to stay legible to systems that record by ingestion and keep everything. What they keep is the image dissolved into weights. These works hold the older standard opaque, degraded, present, and left unread.