Still Life

Chisenhale Gallery presents _Still Life_, the first institutional exhibition in the UK by London-based artist Jasper Marsalis. For this new commission, Marsalis presents a large-scale audiovisual installation that accesses and reworks public broadcast signals, raising questions of transmission and attention in the systems that govern how images and sounds reach us. A cinematic screen displays a randomised sequence of live feeds from unsecured Internet Protocol cameras in places of natural beauty around the world. Showing real-time shifts in light and weather, these moving images prompt the type of reflection that historic landscape painting was designed to provide. The industrialised futility of these cameras, set up to broadcast ceaselessly yet trained on vast emptiness, is recontextualised here as a meditation on the new technological conditions that mediate the passing of time. The exhibition is built to echo environments of mass spectacle entertainment, such as stadiums and cinemas. Four electrostatic speakers each process an FM radio signal in real time. A programme written by the artist takes images of the transmission frequencies and converts them back into sound, slowly interpolating between them. What is heard are the shifting static tones rendering the spatial aspects of transmission audible. _Still Life_ examines broadcast technologies not as neutral infrastructure but as a saturating presence, the scale and relentless immediacy of which continually reshapes the texture of attention itself. Centred on live imagery, each moment of the exhibition is unique, mirroring the perpetual present tense of the broadcast cultures it interrogates.