Hello all,
Thanks for your interesting contribution, Allison (and hey, how are you
doing?!). Thanks for the mention of SAW Gallery. In 1982-84, SAW Gallery
produced the SAW Gallery Cable Show, aka Video Sync. As part of our 30th
anniversary, SAW Video (which is now a separate organization from SAW
Gallery) migrated those Umatic tapes from this artists' television
initiative. Several of the works created for this broadcast project will be
seen in Ottawa, Canada in an exhibition this May entitled Tape Heads: Video
Art and Technology in the 1980's.
Video Sync is one of two artists broadcast projects SAW Video has in its
archives. In the 90's SAW Video also produced Mirror/Mirror, a television
show about local artists. We were also one of the first centres in Canada
to engage with online streaming of artists work, with the creation of our
Mediatheque website in 2003 (pre-Youtube). This site crashed in 2009 and
we're only just now getting it back online at
http://sawvideo.com/mediatheque. Please see Mel Hogan's article in Video
Vortex "Archiving the Crash/Crashing the Archive":
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/vv-reader about the difficulty
in maintaining online project such as ours.
Hope this adds to the interesting discussion.
Penny McCann
Director
SAW Video Media Art Centre
Ottawa, Canada
-----Original Message-----
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Allison Collins
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 2:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] quick piece of research regarding artist's
television
Hi from Vancouver. I'm new to this board, but I have something concrete to
add, I think. Less related to TV swansong, and more to the larger discussion
of cable access).
In 2010 I curated a project called Hold Still Wild Youth: The GINA Show
Archive, for Or Gallery. (you can look at some clips/the essay here:
http://www.theginashow.orgallery.org/)
The project focused on a cable access television project initiated through
an artist-run centre in Vancouver called PUMPS (active from 1975-80) The
show was weekly from 1978-81, and ran (barely funded) on the steam of an
artist-producer named John Anderson. It was a kind of compendium of the
local scene - screenings of works, adverts, music videos, promotional info,
talk show, etc.
In the course of working through this exhibition I considered the question
of whether television is 'dead'. Ultimately, I concluded that the material
nature of this project was a degenerating archival document. All of the
works it contained were sort of by-product copies of the originals as well
as a record of the moment of execution (the broadcast). I would say (and
maybe you've already concluded) that the shift to online forums and modes of
dissemination has fundamentally altered the possibilities of this kind of
work. Online broadcast projects exist in an immediate archive - preserved,
in a sense, for as long as anyone cares to keep their Youtube/Vimeo (etc)
channel active.
In very practical terms, the tapes I was dealing with (originally 3/4 inch
U-matic) were damaged (had been in a fire), some beyond repair. They were
migrated to Betacam SP, Mini-Dv, and ultimately an electronic file for easy
programming, but they still contained all of the mess of their age (lots of
drop outs... ). So, I think of the tapes (and their copies) like I would a
faded piece of paper. I wrote about the show at length and you can read
about it on the site, so I won't go any further here, but...
The question of artists and community television is much larger history in
Canada that goes well beyond Vancouver. (Our first show on record, or at
least that I know of, was Images of Infinity, Vancouver, in 1974). The
history is largely tied to a generation that begat artist-run centres.
Further, i tended to come out of the non-profit artist-run centres who had a
focus on (or were actively engaging with) video and new media. Video Inn,
Vancouver, were actively lobbying the CRTC for an artist-controlled cable
access channel in Vancouver). Many major cities across Canada had active
communities of artists who were eager to take advantage of community access
as a platform (SAW Gallery, Ottawa, A Space, Toronto, some on the East Coast
-- the names escape me). Television by Artists (Toronto), for example, was a
short-run project of 6 pieces commission to deal specifically with video art
as television and emerged out of A Space Gallery as an extension of their
Radio by Artists project. Some great pieces, including one by Dan Graham and
Dara Birnbaum.
In the course of my research, I found that there were also many active
projects in the US that straddled art/documentary, and many artists using
the form of community television as part of a larger activist project. So. I
certainly think artists can contribute to this larger conversation about
community television, historically for sure. At present, I know of a few
artists who are looking to what's left of community cable. Weekend Leisure
in Vancouver.
Look forward to seeing what comes of your research. Don't hesitate to be in
touch if you want to know more. I wrote my thesis about this stuff, and I'd
be happy to share it.
Allison
--
Programs to have a look at:
the GINA Show (now housed in the archive at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art
Gallery, Vancouver).
TV Party (NYC - episodes and a documentary are commercially available)
Weekend Babysitter (Winnipeg cable access, commercially available)
Television by Artists (Vtape has this)
Also worth looking into:
TVTV
Ant Farm
Chris Burden
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