SLOW

SLOW invites viewers to contemplate the pace and complexity of the lived experience through film and video.

Contemporary media is designed for optimized consumption: jump cuts, quick edits and sound bites inundate viewers with simplified information. The Slow TV genre provides contrast to the ways in which information is digested today. It explores, through unedited video, the nuance of routine and reality, allowing details to emerge and subtleties to be emphasized.

Slow TV was born from artist video works and particularly inspired by Pop artist Andy Warhol, who in 1963 created a film titled “Sleep,” which showed poet John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes.

Based on repetition and duration rather than storytelling, Slow TV has enjoyed a surge in popularity in Northern communities from Alaska to Iceland and has become so popular in Norway that the BBC and Netflix have adopted it. This live marathon television coverage of an ordinary event in its complete length is known in Norway as “Sakte-TV.” The Discovery Channel also features Slow TV programming, including a 7-hour video of an Alaska Railroad journey.

On view in the museum’s fourth floor Chugach Gallery, SLOW features original Norwegian Sakte-TV along with American adaptations of the form featuring video works by Scandinavian artist Guido van der Werve.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website