Televents was made for the VPRO (a Dutch radio and television public broadcaster) as a series of short, unannounced and unexplained events that were transmitted between the usual programs. Each of these events was an ‘expanded television’ performance that used an empty TV set (the CRT tube was removed) as the environment in which the performances were staged. In each case the camera looked straight at the front of this TV set, creating a ‘screen within a screen’ that presented a number of paradoxical cinematic situations for the home viewer.

The following are a few examples: The TV enclosure was arranged as a crib with a baby inside it. Snow was falling outside and a windscreen wiper on the window of the TV cleared a view of the child within. This episode was broadcast at Christmastime. In another episode, the TV enclosure was filled with a black balloon whose front surface had been painted white. A movie was projected onto the balloon’s surface to give the impression of a normal TV image. The balloon slowly inflated so that it began to bulge out of the screen. Because of this inflation the white paint started to crack and flake off the black balloon, resulting in the projected image also appearing to break into fragments and fall away from an increasingly black screen.