The present work focuses on two examples of TV photobooks: From Siberia to Cyberia, a monumental publication by Polish neo-avantgarde artist Zofia Kulik, and TV, the much more modest, but nonetheless intellectually intriguing book by the Lithuanian photographer and poet Algirdas Šeškus. These works treat television as a sort of total experience; moving pictures which, when stopped and recorded in photography, allow better perception and understanding of not only the medium itself, but reality more broadly. Both Kulik and Šeškus deconstruct TV communication. If Kulik focuses on the picture broadcast in Poland at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries, Šeškus concentrates on the institution of Lithuanian television during Soviet times. In both cases, the artists criticise television, perceiving it as a sort of Louis Althusserian ideological state apparatus. On the other hand, the artists remain open to the poetics and beauty in television.
