Love fest.

SATELLITE OF LOVE

INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND

JANUARY 26-MARCH 26, 2006

It was once the case that artists chose to use video in order to be able to broadcast their work, and their goal was to leave behind the traditional gallery space for a more egalitarian form of dissemination. But video artists and distributors now rarely deal with television; it appears that more often film festivals seem to be the place for new video art. However, this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), curator Edwin Carels chose to take up the issue of contemporary art's relationship to television with the program "Exploding Television." Located at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and TENT, the "Satellite of Love" exhibition--in conjunction with the "Exploding Television" program at the IFFR--attempts to respond to recent developments in television with a combination of historical material, contemporary installations, and a working television station.

Television seems to be experiencing a technological transformation, with recent developments in Internet streaming, mobile telephony, and podcasting, but whether any of these new technologies will actually take off, or have any room for contemporary artists, is questionable. The desire for these technologies, along with their utopian potentials, is at the heart of the exhibition. Also, one of the main goals of "Satellite of Love" is to make the process of producing television transparent. The staff of five television stations in residency collaborated to produce ten days of broadcast television distributed via the Internet and local television in Rotterdam. AmbientTV.NET from London, CAC TV from Vilnius, Orfeo TV-Telestreet from Bologna, De Taalpolitie from Rotterdam/Brussels, and tv-tv from Copenhagen all came together to produce what Carels described as "television for people who don't watch television anymore." Amazingly, the five television stations have had some real local success in promoting more creative approaches to television. For example, The Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius is the only Museum in the world that has a television show on a mainstream commercial channel.

The exhibition has a definite political edge even though its main objective is to present how artists respond to recent changes in technology. A work such as Monika Sosnowska's mural Rubin (2004) is seemingly apolitical, but by reversing an advertisement the artist found in a Warsaw apartment block into an open gesture, the artist illusively comments on our relationship to television and advertising. Maurice van Tellingen's Monitor (1999) takes the notion that television is a representation of reality one step further by replacing the screen of a television with a mirror. The sculpture has an eerie way of evoking surveillance imagery in a subtle understated fashion. Rirkrit Tiravanija's installation "Untitled" (2005) sets up its own television transmission of the movie Amphibious (Login-Logout) (2005) by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. The fact that the transmitter and the receiving television are only about ten feet away from each other emphasizes the magical quality of transmitting waves through the air.

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Many of the works use abstraction to explore television's structural qualities. Angela Bulloch's Blow Up TV (2000) breaks down every pixel used during a news program, transforming the information into a display of subtly shifting boxes. To emphasize the unrelenting flow of information presented by television, Daniel Sauter and Osman Khan created an interactive installation titled "We interrupt your regularly scheduled program" (2003), which stretches the television image into a long projected band of color. These installations sit in stark contrast to Mark Bain's "Feed Carnivore" (2004). Bain's jarring video installation creates a definite physical effect by flashing so many channels in quick succession that no one image can be fully processed.

The historical material included in the exhibition includes John Logie Baird's 1934 "Daily Express Televisor Kit," which was used to prove that the invention of television has a do-it-yourself philosophy at its root. Only when the BBC began to realize the power of Baird's invention did television become a state-run apparatus. The exhibition also offers a television corner where historical material can be perused while lounging on beanbag chairs. After watching Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica's Videogramme einer Revolution (1992), it is hard not to see the immense power television has over contemporary society. Made from 125 hours of video transmission, during the five days of the overthrow of Romania's Ceausescu government, demonstrators clearly understood the importance of television when they decided to first take over the state-run television channel. The narrator asserts that it was the desire to record events that first made mechanical reproduction possible, but it was the fate of such imagery to make history itself.

In an attempt to bring back a second utopian moment in video art during a seemingly similar state of technological transformation, the "Satellite of Love" is bringing many like-minded artists and activists together for the first time. The desire to work with these new technologies balances utter fascination with the potentials of the medium with bitter critiques of potentially lost ground.

IAN MORRISON is a curator and writer living in Chicago, Illinois.

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For more information about Exploding Television and the Rotterdam Film Festival see www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com.