The emergence and proliferation of video art played a role in the disappearance of television in galleries and museums. Author Kenneth White contends that artist Tony Oursler's work employs the modes of television rather than "painterly or cinematic" conventions often seen in video. The effect is a repressed 'seeing at a distance,' to incite the original meaning of television: 'seen from afar'. The technical and philosophical implications of such an undertaking are discussed in this article through Oursler's video works from the 1970s to 2000s.