10 to 10 to 10:10 Television Reflected: A Media-Installation Event

Published in 2003 by Point of Contact Productions in collaboration with Syracuse University Press, this book documents a media-installation event held on April 17, 2002, at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. Conceived by Richard Breyer, Pedro Cuperman, Peter Moller, Christine Fawcett, and Owen Shapiro, the project invited ten people from wildly different backgrounds — academics, artists, musicians, a journalist, and an activist — to record exactly 20 minutes of television on April 1st and then publicly reflect on the experience, treating their brief sample as a "DNA slice" of the vast television medium. The book opens with a presentation by Breyer explaining the project's origins and an introduction by Newhouse Dean David Rubin, who uses a real dispute between the YES Network and a cable provider to illustrate how ownership and economics shape TV content. Interior and cover art by video-art pioneer Nam June Paik is woven throughout, visually reinforcing the book's meditation on television as cultural artifact.

The ten panelists' reflections make up the heart of the book, and each takes a strikingly different form and angle: Silvio Torres-Saillant writes on the technology gap and economic exclusion from cable; Linda Martin-Alcoff critiques the treatment of women on shows like The Bachelor and on women's cable channels; playwright Lynn Pannell contributes a short absurdist play instead of an essay; Horace Campbell draws parallels between American advertising and Nazi propaganda techniques; physicist Peter Saulson traces the lost innocence of professional wrestling; peace activist Curtis Fishinghawk offers an Indigenous cosmological perspective on gender and civilization; composer Joanne Shenandoah reflects on music, film, and her Oneida heritage; conductor Daniel Hege discusses the subjectivity of media reception; Mohawk journalist Doug George-Kanentiio contrasts Canadian and American media (including Indigenous-controlled broadcasting) ; and Leo Crandall uses television as a tool to excavate personal memory. A closing contributors' section gives brief bios of all ten. Together, the reflections form a wide-ranging, often provocative collective essay on power, race, gender, corporate ownership, and nostalgia in American (and, by contrast, Canadian) television.

The digital version of this Point of Contact edition is accessible here, or in print, available for purchase through Punto Shop.