The Atomic TV Is Art, Not Entertainment

The best art is that which holds up a mirror to society and forces us to take serious look at what we really value. If you’re an American, the two easiest targets in our modern culture are entertainment and consumerism. We spend hours every day on the couch watching our TVs as they transmit formula-perfected entertainment directly to our eager brains, taking breaks only to let massive corporations tell us which of their new products we should be the most excited about purchasing. I’m not sure if the creator of the Atomic TV was thinking about that or not, but that’s what the functional art piece says to me.

The Atomic TV was built by Ryan of The Garage Journal and it is simply a DIY TV — albeit a cool looking one that has some vintage vibes. Its purpose isn’t really for actually watching TV, but rather to sit on a shelf as an art piece and endlessly play videos from whatever USB flash drive is plugged into it. I like to imagine it playing exclusively commercials or some sort of nationalistic propaganda. It’s quite small, so it can easily fit between copies of Atlas Shrugged and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on a bookshelf.

Ryan made the enclosure mostly from hand-cut pieces of wood, with a few metal accent pieces thrown in. There isn’t much detail about the electronic hardware inside, except that there is a single-board computer (SBC) present — specifically a Raspberry Pi 4. The screen is a 7” LCD from a broken tablet, which takes the Raspberry Pi’s HDMI signal through an LCD driver board. Ryan doesn’t intend to leave the volume on all the time, because that would be really distracting. But there is a small pair of speakers inside for audio when he wants it. Ryan says that this was just a “quarantine boredom” kind of project, but I think it still makes a great statement.