Interrupting society's daily programming, we present our projext "COMMERCIAL BREAK" with a quote from a recent conversation:

"if you think about the media as a colonial, white supremacist, genocidal system of information sharing to propagate how humans should behave in order to succeed monetarily and socially in eurocentric white society, right? That's its function is to show you how you should comport yourself then you know it's a system that can be like a body. You can get sick or get a virus, right? And the George Floyd video is a virus that made it sort of eat itself, made it critique itself even. And what happens if you get a virus that doesn't kill you, you know what I mean, you become inoculated"
- Terence Nance in conversation with EricTheYoungGawd (2024)

¶ An Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is the aesthetic of this website, which is similar to the tv guide preview channels and the pop-ups that display the what channels are currently showing deploying. Most EPGs only show the hours and minutes for current programming as an infomercial plays above the vertically scrolling grid. Our un-EPG is different. For all the times tv hosts speak to the camera and say "we will be back after a commercial break," we created the un-EPG to detail, to theorize in the break, to practice, to sharpen praxis – in relation with the in-between moments of tv societal programming.

¶ Our "commercial break" breaks commercials, through uncoding to illuminate alternative pathways to engage in the genealogy of liberation. 21 year-old Black poet, Gil Scott-Heron, pronounces on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox that "The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised." Our "commercial break" neither aims to sell you school degrees with perpetual payment plans written in small font nor word vomit legal jargon before prompting you to CALL NOW to order a weight loss prescription pill for 24 EASY PAYMENTS that comes with TWO FREE bottles for the price of 10 additional payments. We are not interested in rescuing those from the programming; rather as Christina Sharpe writes, "I am interested in the ways of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhibit, are inhibited by it and refuse it. I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror" (Sharpe, 2016, p. 116). Our "commercial breaks" seeks to witness the refusal and continue to imagine responses despite the dominant codes.

¶ On this un-EPG are the titles and one-sentence descriptions of each intentionally, crafted "commercial break." When clicked, similar to the pressing of a channel in an EPG, you will be transported to the "uncoding" website with the full transcripts dialogues, screenplays of the "commercial break." We used "scripts" to further investigate the dominant "programming nature" in society. These "commercial breaks" scripts topics that will simulate and twist the familiar to make the familiar strange, and strange, familiar as well as continue to offer insight with uncoding.

¶ You can return to this page by clicking the button on your remote keyboard. In addition, this un-EPG has a horizontal scroll, so you can witness some of the "commercial break" in a "24 hour" period.

As for the question of "why the revolution will not be televised?", well, Scott-Heron concludes his poem with the reason, "The revolution will be live"

"Commercial Break" is live