Saeed Gebaan
TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED
2022 - Ongoing Video Installation, CRT Television, Electrical Arc, Custom Electronics
STATEMENT
A vintage television refuses to stay silent. Its power cable reaches toward the wall socket without ever fully connecting, and between plug and outlet, intermittent electrical arcs generate just enough energy to wake it. Each spark yields a few seconds of unstable transmission before collapsing back into darkness.
The work does not seek to preserve the past. It asks why certain messages return while others do not , whether history is truly repeating itself, or whether we have simply stopped listening.
THE WORK
The work centers on a vintage CRT television that refuses to stay silent. Its power cable reaches toward the wall socket without ever fully connecting. Between plug and outlet, intermittent electrical arcs briefly generate just enough energy to wake the television.
Each spark yields only a few seconds of unstable transmission. The image surfaces through CRT distortion, VHS interference, horizontal scan lines, electrical noise, and repeated interruptions before collapsing back into darkness. Rather than replaying an archive, the television struggles to keep a warning alive.
The interrupted transmission becomes both a physical condition and a metaphor for the fragile survival of collective memory. The work proposes that certain warnings never truly disappear; they survive through damaged signals, fragmented memories, interrupted broadcasts, and voices that keep searching for another listener.
SPATIAL EXPERIENCE
The visitor is never given a complete narrative; meaning forms through interruption, forcing each viewer to assemble the message from fragments, absences, and repeated attempts at transmission.
The visitor enters a nearly empty room, occupied only by an old television on a simple wooden table. The silence is suddenly broken by an electrical spark. The screen flickers. The grandfather begins to speak. Images emerge for a brief moment before interference consumes them again.
War. Aircraft. Collapsed cities. Fragments of memory. Human ambition. Silence. Another spark. The message returns. The cycle repeats without end.
The audience never experiences a complete broadcast; they assemble the warning from fragments, waiting for each spark to restore another piece of the unfinished transmission.
EXTENDED NARRATIVE
The work begins from the familiar opening narration voiced by Conan's grandfather in the Arabic version, Adnan & Lina — the warning an entire generation grew up with. At the point where the original narration ends, the speech continues seamlessly into an extension I wrote, carrying the warning into our present:
Years have passed…
We believed war would teach humanity its final lesson.
Instead, humanity grew more capable…
but not more compassionate.
We learned to command the earth…
the sea…
the sky…
and now even information itself.
Yet we still struggle to govern fear,
greed,
and the desire to stand above one another.
Every generation believes it has grown wiser than the last,
yet every generation finds new ways to repeat the same mistakes.
Technology keeps evolving.
Human conscience does not always follow.
Perhaps that is why this transmission keeps searching for its listener.
Not because the past wishes to return…
but because the future has not yet been decided.
If this message still reaches someone…
then perhaps there is still time.
CLOSING STATEMENT
Transmission Interrupted suggests that history rarely disappears. Sometimes it survives only as a weakened signal. A damaged image. A familiar voice. A sentence struggling to continue. Between every electrical arc and every moment of silence, the work asks one final question: What if the transmission never truly failed… and we simply stopped listening?
Materials
· CRT Television · Single-Channel Video · Audio · Custom High-Voltage Electrical Arc System · Custom Electronics · Analog Video Processing · Wooden Table · Power Cable · Wall Socket Based on Future Boy Conan (Nippon Animation, 1978, dir. Hayao Miyazaki), adapted from the novel The Incredible Tide by Alexander Key (1970), drawing on the Arabic version Adnan & Lina. Dimensions: Work 2 × 1 m, height 1 m — requires a darkened room
