Auto Italia presents Auto Italia LIVE, an artist-run TV series performed before a studio audience and broadcast live over the Internet. Working in collaboration with Auto Italia, a wide variety of artists will produce new work through weekly episodes, engaging directly with the format of live television and the history of artists using broadcast media platforms to distribute work.
Alongside a full camera crew, lighting technicians, directors, performers, production designers and set builders, artists will engage with all aspects of television production, opening the space for criticality and intervention within the medium. The series aims to experiment with new possibilities for engaging in contemporary broadcast and internet culture while responding to the familiar tropes and formulas within television programming.
The apparatus of TV and its technical infrastructure will allow for dialogue and exchange with images, actions, performances and experiences. Covering ideas from ‘edutainment’ to cultures and ecologies that surround the idea of live television, the project will engage with how live TV has changed our understanding of culture and public space. Each episode will investigate a range of approaches, exploring an expanded notion of the televised live performance, the live soap opera and the factual documentary through the choreography inherent in both performance and camera movements, and the narrative implicit in the existence of objects on set.
The studio space will be open to the public for the weekly broadcasts and at specific times during rehearsals. The whole process of the live broadcast and production will be made public, engaging with audiences in the space and tuning in online. In an ever-increasing landscape of broadcast media and ‘accessible’ web platforms, this project aims to emerge within pre-existing web communities, allowing artists to make and distribute new work and to create new contexts and audiences around their ideas.
Produced collaboratively by the artists, Auto Italia LIVE aims to reclaim space within a television format that has increasingly lost its experimental aspect. The project will draw from figures including Nam June Paik, who dealt with the risk taking inherent in live TV; Warhol TV, which brought a community of artists together; and Jef Cornelis, who pioneered productions for Belgium Television with shows such as Container. Questioning the demise of risk-taking in mainstream cultural programming in the UK, the project aims to provoke discussion and challenge how artists might work together to create new work, examining how dialogues are negotiated and tested within this unique context.
Through a collaborative approach to working and new technological developments, issues of copyright and collective authorship will be examined. New documents will be compiled discussing best practices for commissioning on digital media platforms in ways that benefit the artists over the distributor. These will reflect the possibility of artists producing work independently from the demands of the gallery or a standard art context.
Narrated by Saul Reichlin.
With a discussion performed by Robert Carter, Tim Ivison, Andrew Kerton, Leslie Kulesh, Huw Lemmey, Michael Oswell, Eddie Peake, Francesco Pedraglio, Heather Phillipson, Julia Tcharfas, Lorenzo Tebano, Jess Wiesner and Charlie Woolley.
In collaboration with Luke Collins, Theo Cook, Debjita Dhar, Marianne Forrest, Gerado Guerra, Mette Juhl, Amy Maguire, McDeath, Ben Mitchell, George Moustakas, Laurence Price, Radiance Audio, Sonia Rodriguez Serrano, Nicola Sersale, Poppy Walker and Matt Welch.
With special thanks to Daniel Challis, Max Fedyk, Alex Glen, Graeme Halliday, Micah Harbon, Chris Ilankovan, Ryan McNamara, Oli Owen, Gwennan Thomas and Alex Williamson.
