The fast-forward, fugue state of multi-tasking gains new meaning in Jason Salavon's video artwork, which allows the viewer to simultaneously watch the opening monologues of 64 nights of three TV shows in just three minutes, 35 seconds. Salavon, an American video artist, created "The Late Night Triad" by obsessively recording hundreds of hours of programming from "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and "Late Show with David Letterman." He then wrote code in the C programming language that generated the frame-by-frame mean average of pixel values from the shows. The resulting looped triptych projection is accompanied by the averaged sound from all of the programs, resulting in an experience in which the viewer sees and hears all 192 shows simultaneously. The work can be seen 24/7 at the Media Test Wall in Building 56 through January. Watch it if you can.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 12, 2005 (download PDF).
