The misuse value of the TV set

Abstract

This article uses photography to document what I call ‘television settings’: the video installations that people make in everyday life by putting objects and images on and around the TV screen. Its focus is not on domestic TV, but rather on treatments of the TV set outside the home, in urban spaces of work and leisure that serve, and are operated by, members of immigrant communities in the USA. These treatments of the screen combine raw materials of diverse origin to register the complexities of transnational experience. Studies of transnationalism often describe media images as links to the elsewhere of the lost homeland. But TV settings complicate such singular views of TV’s relationship to place, calling attention instead to uses of the screen as an object in the ‘here and now’. Intertwining transnational perspectives on locality with the protocols and contingencies of small-scale commerce in the USA, the TV settings examined in this article testify to the flexibility of TV as an object through which people mark their positions in transnational and local cultural networks simultaneously.