Ladybug A/V Club Uses Old TVs to Create Striking Installations in Cleveland

When he became a new father, Kyle Leuszler came across an article about the top 10 tech events that kids would never experience today. It listed things like tuning a radio, dialing a rotary phone and feeling the static buzz of a cathode ray tube TV.

These were all elements of Leuszler’s childhood — and much of it was in his basement, where he’d regularly tinker with broken tech and get it working again. 

That hobby led to Ladybug A/V Club, Leuszler and his wife Rebecca’s CRT TV project. It’s named after their daughter June (nicknamed “Bug”), who, as a toddler, has already grown up around tech that’s more familiar to those who are two or three generations older than her.

“We’ve gone from being able to pull the antenna out of a radio and tune a radio, and dial a rotary phone, and all that stuff — and now she can stand on the other side of a television and tell me if something’s playing or not,” Leuszler says. “She knows how to work a VCR and put a tape in and change it.”

With Ladybug A/V Club, the Leuszlers give outdated TVs new life, using them to create grid-like canvases for video art in venues and restaurants. Their TV made a big appearance in The Vindys’ music video for “Elton Glasses Baby,” and is the focal point of Sound On Tape’s 41-minute video for the album Price. At No Class and Amazonia, they’ve hosted a couple of intimate horror movie nights with walls of CRT TVs airing public domain double features. 

“I like dragging out this technology for a few different reasons. It's cool and striking, in person, when you see whatever we put together; it's always some sort of collaborative effort,” Kyle says. “But the other cool part is watching people watch the stuff … It’s always cool to talk to people about the nostalgia factor.”

All of Ladybug A/V Club’s CRT TVs are secondhand or thrifted. Currently coveted by retro gamers and a new wave of analog tech aficionados, demand has soared in recent years for the increasingly scarce product. Locally, listings for CRT TVs with photos of dusty, curved screens range from roughly $50 to several hundred dollars, depending on the model, on Facebook Marketplace. A far cry from finding a unit discarded on the curb.

“It’s not a race to try and grab all the things,” Leuszler says, cautioning those with interest to consider cost before plunging into expensive equipment. “It’s more like an archive, preserving, kind of thing.”

Fixing the TVs, finding solutions for outdated technology to thrive again, is part of what keeps Leuszler tinkering — feeling tuned in to reality, he says. 

“You talk about an analog resurgence, or this idea of things coming back,” he says. “For me, it never really left.”

READ MORE: Cleveland Logs Off in a Growing Analog Movement

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