On Jon Carapiet’s Rainfade, or, Why is the rain remixing my tv? [Review]

[Review - Excerpt] Jon Carapiet documents telematic signal interference on his lounge tv (probably caused by heavy rain leaking into his aerial system). The photographs he takes are abstracted signals, stilled in time and remixed by weather; fractal glimpses of a papal inauguration, protestors disrupting the Tour de France, the weather blitzing of Trump’s corrupted news, or merely ads which the artist describes as ‘the phantasmagoria of late modern entertainment.’[i] These are shattered TV signals – weather and tv – weather as news, weather fronts, systems in their undoing. Too much rain, too little rain, even in our couched homes we are water-dependent beings. As the reigning orthodoxies swing right, rain is a leveller. Flooding is water going where it wants to go, uninterested in human needs or wants. Mainstream media trades in spectacular images of flooding, politicians fast-track mining consents; networks and ecosystems are awash with contradictory signals.