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“This is a only a test” – is the first declaration in Tamara Kuselman’s hypnotic video Plan. At first, the tone sets the audience in a state of reassurance, while at the same time washing the screen with alarming colours; deep red, cold yellow and bright orange. The effect recalls those moments of rehearsal and protocol that many children of the cold war era experienced when interludes of public alarm testing interrupted our warm attachment to the household television and its programming. It is this youthful place of confusion, assurance and discomfort that is manipulated in a very affective way by Kuselman in this bold video.

The washes of solid colours disintegrate into strange zig zags, grids and obtuse delineations of space – now appearing in tinted versions of the introductory washes—purples, peaches, pale greens and brown—form digitally flat but psychedelic renderings of the screen space. Thin grey bars appear and stretch horizontally across the screen filling it vertically. Is this signal loss in the image a further threat from the uncontrollable outside forces? The colour fields and abstractions in the film pulsate with energy and movement, evoking the history of structural moving image artists such as Paul Sharits and his flicker films.

The narration performed by the artist herself, shifts in positioning from official language to a point of view perspective of an ambiguous disaster. ‘Probably there would also be smoke’, “A woman would try to open a door by banging it”, “some glass pains would be broke” and “children have their hands over their heads”. These distressing statements are delivered in a deadpan tone and overlaid with other vocalized sounds representative of