Zhanyi Chen’s Tele-Sky Unplugged reframes sky art with mirror lens and analog reflection
Tele-Sky Unplugged (2023) by Zhanyi Chen revisits and reimagines a landmark moment in media art history through a tactile, analog gesture. Drawing inspiration from Aldo Tambellini’s Tele-Sky (1981), a pioneering work from the Sky Art movement, Chen transforms a relic of the electronic age, a CRT television, into a contemplative instrument that reframes the way viewers engage with the sky.
In the original piece, live images of the sky from three different countries were transmitted via slow-scan television technology and displayed on screens, emphasizing technological mediation of natural phenomena. In Tele-Sky Unplugged, that mediation is stripped away.
Rather than broadcasting distant skies through electromagnetic waves and networked devices, Zhanyi Chen’s reinterpretation invites the viewer into a direct encounter with their own atmospheric reality. The CRT TV, once a symbol of global connectivity and mass media, is hollowed out and retrofitted with a mirror, camera lens, and diffuser, components that convert the screen into a passive but dynamic reflector of the immediate sky above.
The television casing retains its symbolic weight, but its function is transformed. This new configuration transforms the once-powerful display into a humble window, repurposing the object as a contemplative device for observing the present, not the distant or digitally mediated.
The work also engages in a critical dialogue with the technological optimism and geopolitical tensions of the Sky Art era. The 1980s Sky Art movement, particularly active at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, framed the sky as both subject and medium, examining how outer space and atmospheric imagery could be appropriated into human aesthetic and conceptual systems.
Zhanyi Chen’s Tele-Sky Unplugged updates this inquiry for the 21st century, at a time when satellite infrastructure, climate change, and drone surveillance shape our relationship with the sky in fundamentally new ways. The unplugged television becomes a metaphor for disengaging from hyperconnectivity and returning to embodied observation.
This approach turns the artwork into a subtle yet potent form of critique. It challenges viewers to consider how deeply technology is embedded in their perception of nature, and how infrastructures—satellites, data relays, transmission towers—remain invisible yet omnipresent in daily life.
By using a defunct medium to reflect a timeless element, Chen highlights the enduring tension between nature and technology, visibility and invisibility, presence and mediation. The mirror within the television does not just reflect light—it reflects the political and cultural forces that have shaped how we see and what we are allowed to see.
Tele-Sky Unplugged is not merely a tribute but a transformation. It brings the conceptual rigor of Tambellini’s original into contemporary discourse, emphasizing the importance of materiality, locality, and introspection in an age increasingly dominated by screens and signals. The work encourages viewers to look up—not through a lens of distant transmission, but through the reconfigured body of a machine that once promised global vision, now offering an intimate view of the sky just above.
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