Experimental video from 1984. The color bar reference signal is distorted by attacking the horizontal and vertical blanking sync timing signals using a time base corrector. This short video art piece was inspired by the ‘color tuning guide channel’ that American Cablevision included in its channel lineup in the 1980s. The odd thing about the ‘color tuning guide’, which was the typical NTSC color bar display, was that the average cable subscriber was not likely to know how the reference colors were supposed to look. Were any of them television broadcast engineers? So how would they know if the display they saw at home was correct? How useless! So here is my Color Bars 1, also known as ‘your color tuning guide’. Diabolical!