Seminar: Public service television as scene for experimentality
Centering on work-in-progress and anecdotal presentations by artists, researchers, and practitioners in the field of television, this seminar investigates the premises of public service television as an experimental platform for filmmaking and artistic production.
What material conditions made possible now canonized aesthetic and formal film and TV experiments of the past? What kind of imaginaries did the emergent field of television afford? How were these imaginaries different from those of more established institutions of filmmaking?
The aim of the seminar is not to diagnose a historical moment or celebrate specific tv-productions, as much as to seek insights that can equip and inspire towards modes of audio-visual expression and articulation that differ from those pre-designed by media infrastructures in the present. A necessary outset of the conversation is the assumption that the artist’s production of discourse increasingly depends on highly determined modalities of articulations. Hence, in considering the material conditions that brought about new experimental productions in the second half of the 20th century, we wish to recontextualize those conditions in a post-digital, contemporary situation. We wish to cast an image of a present full of nostalgia and old hope, but also to ask if and how old hope can equip us in contemporary social struggles to ‘know differently’.
The seminar is organized as a collaboration between the Art as Forum research centre and the Center for Practice-based Art Studies (both University of Copenhagen) in the context of Eva la Cour and Mia Edelgart's speculative collaboration with the Belgian tv-producer and filmmaker Jef Cornelis (1940–2018) and the forthcoming exhibition project at HEIRLOOM – Center for Art and Archives in 2024.
With: Andjeas Ejiksson (artist, filmmaker, translator, and postdoc at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, GU), Eva la Cour (visual artist and postdoc at Art as Forum, the Department for Arts and Cultural Studies, UCPH) and Mia Edelgart (independent visual artist affiliated with Center for Practice-based Art Studies, UCPH), Nete Nørgaard Kristensen (Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Communication, UCPH).
Time: 14 September, from 13:00-16:00, followed by a film screening of Television Without Frontiers (Andjeas Ejiksson, 2019. 74 min).