…Building on the group’s 1979 video piece Test Tube (a parodic yet prescient meditation on the collapse and intermingling of popular and high culture through the mass media), Test Pattern employs the form of the television screen to comment on the highly stylized and mediatized nature of the culture industry…The initial impetus to create Test Pattern came from the exhibition venue itself. Established in 1985 by the Wacoal Corporation, Spiral is an arts center that includes exhibition spaces, a restaurant, a gallery shop and a cutting-edge video production facility. General Idea was intrigued by the concept of a place where you can “look, shop and eat”…