Date:

28 February 2008

Venue:

Hatton Gallery

Time:

17.00 - 20.00
Exhibition:
Friday 29 February 10:00 - 17:00

Cost:

Free

Broadcast Yourself ? Artists' interventions into television and strategies for self-broadcasting from the 1960s to today.

Active Ingredient (Rachel Jacobs / Matt Watkins); Shaina Anand; Ian Breakwell; Chris Burden; Stan Douglas; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; Alistair Gentry; Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Adriene Jenik and Adriene Jenik; Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter; Joanie 4 Jackie (Miranda July et al.); Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup; TV swansong (curated by Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie); Bill Viola; Van Gogh TV; 56KTV Bastard Channel (curated by Reinhard Storz / xcult.org)

Bill Viola
Reverse Television ? Portraits of Viewers, 1983
Broadcast television project
Videotape playback, color, stereo sound. Forty-four portraits, 30 seconds each, are broadcast in between television programs as unannounced inserts
Produced by WGBH-TV New Television Workshop, Boston
Photo: Kira Perov

This international group exhibition, co-curated by Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman, includes a selection of TV, video installation and web-based works which demonstrate how artists have successfully challenged the dominant culture of television since the 1960s. The exhibition includes artists who have taken TV technology and turned it into a performance space, a cultural forum, and an interactive media platform, as well as projects which document how artists are now using the Internet to broadcast themselves.

Broadcast Yourself is part of AV Festival 08: Broadcast. The AV Festival is an international festival of electronic arts, and features visual art, music and moving image. It takes place across Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough from 28 February - 8 March 2008. www.avfestival.co.uk

Broadcast Yourself is a cornerstone exhibition of AV Festival 08, and has been developed in partnership with the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, where it will be on view from 29 February - 5 April, and Cornerhouse, Manchester, where it will be on view from 13 June - 10 August. Further information about the exhibition can be found on an accompanying website

Co-curators Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman explain: "Broadcast Yourself considers how individuals have established themselves within a commercial broadcast environment, how they have turned TV technology into a meaningful artistic platform, how they have given control to the viewer and even 'squatted' TV, undertaking a variety of personal acts to put themselves on-air / on screen."

Artists have been fascinated and affected by television since its inception, and continue to be inspired by the potential of new formats such as on-demand TV and video file-sharing sites on the Web, which reflects a new world where the broadcaster doesn't govern our viewing habits.

The curators continue: "We hope to show how artists' programming, once supported by broadcast TV, has moved to the Web, and what it means to personally appear via broadcast media. Television culture is often consumed passively and this exhibition seeks to show how artists have taken control of the way audio-visual culture is consumed and given it back to the people."

Included are the restaging of important historic installation works, as well as works that have never before been seen in the UK:

The single channel video broadcast on television by Stan Douglas, Chris Burden, and Ian Breakwell (his landmark diaries made for the launch of Channel4 twenty-fix years ago) will be experienced through the recreation of a period living room for watching TV.

The actual news desk from KVIIâ??TV (Channel 7) in Amarillo Texas will be rebuilt in the gallery as an environment in which to show the videos documenting the residency there in 1979 by artists group Ant Farm (Doug Hall, Jody Procter and Chip Lord).

Also included are:

Bill Viola's 'Reverse Television: Portraits of Viewers' (1983/4), where he filmed American television viewers in Boston watching WGBH-TV and then later broadcast the footage back at them, as unannounced inserts in between other television programs on that same channel.

'Piazza Virtuale' by Van Gogh TV (1992), consisting of documentation of the activities on a TV channel received across Europe which was controlled by the audience via post, telephone, videophone and fax for the 100 days during Documenta IX.

'Hole in Space' (1980) by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, founders of the influential Electronic C.A.F.E (Communication Access For Everyone) and pioneers of public access network technology art. Hole In Space was the first coast to coast (NY ? LA) encounter for the 'public' to not only see each other, but communicate live, over three evenings, using TV technology.

Shaina Anand ? an internationally recognised social documentary filmmaker based in Mumbai ? will show 'KhirkeeYaan' (2006) from New Delhi, an exploration of what happens when you connect people in their homes via an open circuit TV system, resulting in 7 episodes.

UK based artist collective, and recent winners of the Northern Art Prize, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie (somewhere.org.uk) will show documentation and archival material from their immensely popular and large scale co-curated project 'TV Swansong' (2003) which commissioned 8 new works from 11 UK artists, performed live at locations across Great Britain and streamed in real time on the Internet on a single day. The project is an important early questioning of so-called 'convergence media' ? interactive television and the notion of pre-programmed television programmes made available on the web.

Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to make and stream their own celebrity-style television interviews in the gallery with the restaging of the online web project MakeTV (2006) by artist group Active Ingredient (Rachel Jacobs and Matt Watkins)

Broadcast Yourself is Co-Curated by Kathy Rae Huffman, Visual Arts Director, Cornerhouse, and Dr. Sarah Cook, Independent Curator and Research Fellow, CRUMB, University of Sunderland. Kathy Rae Huffman is recognised as being one of the foremost authorities on early video art and broadcast art projects, whilst Sarah Cook has established herself as a leading critical voice within the rapidly evolving arena of new media art.

Events:

Broadcast Yourself: In Person and On Screen, Star and Shadow Cinema, Stepney Bank, Byker
Sunday 2 March (from 11:30am).
Q&A with co-curators Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman, followed by presentations and discussion with international artists included in Broadcast Yourself: Van Gogh TV (Karel Dudesek), Shaina Anand, and Active Ingredient (Rachel Jacobs and Matt Watkins) from MakeTV, with guest TV producer Maria Pallier from TVE (Spain).
In the evening there will be screenings of a 1983 documentary about the first reality TV show, "An American Family", produced and directed by Alan Raymond and Susan Raymond and the feature film 'The Truman Show'. See starandshadow.org.uk for more information.

Guided Tour
Wednesday 12 March, 6 pm, Hatton Gallery
Exhibition walkthrough and discussion with co-curator Sarah Cook
This event is free. For further information and to book your place please contact the Hatton Gallery on 0191 222 6059 or email hatton-gallery@ncl.ac.uk

Broadcast Yourself is a Touring Exhibition produced by AV Festival 08 and Cornerhouse in collaboration with the Hatton Gallery with support from Arts Council England, CRUMB at the University of Sunderland and The Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship)