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Prime Time

Laurie McDonald

1981 00:05:24 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:33/4" U-matic video
Tags:
Advertisement(s), Consumer culture, Found Footage, Television

Description

Prime Time is a video collage of violent imagery appropriated from American commercial network television. The work features rapid-fire editing (i.e., for analog 3/4" video technology) often used by network producers to create a sense of action or tension, and violence from all genres of television programming – cartoons, news broadcasts, commercials, made-for-TV movies – is juxtaposed to create humorous effects and absurd situations.

Prime Time was inspired by the AC Nielsen Company, best known for their titular Nielsen ratings, which is a system devised to measure audiences for television, radio, and newspaper in their respective markets. The Nielsen Company sent Laurie a diary in which to record her television viewing selections and a packet with two quarters ($1.74 in 2024) as an incentive to complete the diary and mail it back to the company. After about age ten, Laurie had not been much of a television watcher, so she saw this as an opportunity to familiarize herself with the current television landscape. What she saw was so much violence that it inspired Prime Time. As in her later work Surveillance, Prime Time the installation makes use of the familiar ​to explicate the unexpected, a technique she calls "visual decoy." Although the installation resembles a TV display in an electronics showroom, the viewer encounters content that is out of context and completely unanticipated.

About Laurie McDonald

Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow). 

As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées. 

Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.