‘Disrupted Visions’ does not focus on what is shown on television, but on what becomes visible when the broadcast is disrupted. By manipulating a digital indoor aerial – whose reception is disrupted through deliberate alterations to the spatial situation – photographs emerge that straddle the line between malfunction and aesthetics.
Surfaces, stripes and patterns, as well as traces of the depicted content, become visible, hovering between digital noise and painterly abstraction. In the process, the images develop an almost painterly autonomy: concentrations of colour, gestural structures and open fields of colour evoke associations with abstract painting – without this visual effect having been deliberately created or constructed retrospectively.
The photographs not only document a technical process, but also highlight the limits of control over the image. The aesthetic transformation is neither planned nor constructed retrospectively. It arises from the interplay of transmission technology, spatial configuration and photographic decision-making.
In this way, *Disrupted Visions* touches upon a fundamental question of contemporary photography: what does it mean to trust an image when its creation and appearance are increasingly shaped by technical systems? Here, the photographic image appears not as a reliable representation, but as an unstable state between information and interference, reality and abstraction.
The fact that the footage comes from the cultural channels 3sat and ARD alpha adds a further layer of meaning. Whilst these channels convey knowledge, art and culture, their disrupted reception gives rise to an unplanned second culture: the aesthetics of error. With the announced closure of ARD alpha on 31 December 2026, the theme of disappearance also takes on a concrete dimension in terms of cultural and educational policy. It is not only images that are disintegrating; the institutional forms through which they are conveyed are also changing, and culture is coming under increasing pressure and falling into dangerous dependencies.
Disrupted Visions does not view the image error as a mere defect. The work explores what becomes visible when the familiar order of the image breaks down – and what new, idiosyncratic beauty can emerge precisely from this loss.