24 September 2011
Benedictions, Nathan Budzinski, Benedict Drew, Jeremy Glogan, Morag Keil, Steve Kado, Patricia Lennox-Boyd and Jamie Stevens

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 a history of artists using broadcast media platforms to distribute work.

Featuring a full camera crew, lighting technicians, directors, performers, production designers and set builders, artists will engage with all aspects of production opening the space for criticality and intervention within the medium. The series aims to experiment with new possibilities to engage in contemporary broadcast and internet culture whilst also responding to the familiar tropes and formulas within television programming.

The apparatus of TV and the technical infrastructure will allow for dialogue and exchange with images, actions, performances and experiences. Covering ideas of ‘edutainment’, to permacultures and ecology 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 the expanded notion of the televised live performance, the live soap opera and factual, documentary presentation, through the choreography inherent in both performance and camera movements, and the narrative implicit in the existence of objects within a set.

The studio space will be open to the public both for the weekly broadcasts and also at specific times during rehearsals in the preceding weeks. 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 create new contexts and audiences around their ideas.

Produced collaboratively by artists, Auto Italia LIVE aims to reclaim a space within the television format that has increasingly lost its experimental aspect. The project will draw from figures including Nam June Paik that dealt with the risk taking inherent in live TV, Warhol TV bringing a community of artists together and Jef Cornelis in terms of his pioneering productions for Belgium Television in particular shows such as Container. Questioning the demise of risk taking in mainstream cultural programming within the history of British Television, 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.

Bound up within the collaborative approach to working and new technological developments, issues of copyright and collective authorship will be examined. New documents will be compiled that will represent the best practice for commissioning on Digital Media platforms, in ways that benefit the artists over the distributer. These will reflect the possibility of artists working together, 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:
Theo Cook, Mette Juhl, Radiance Audio, McDeath, Matt Welch, Nicola Sersale, Sonia Rodriguez Serrano, Amy Maguire, Ben Mitchell, Gerado Guerra, Debjita Dhar, Luke Collins, George Moustakas, Poppy Walker, Laurence Price, Marianne Forrest.

With special thanks to:
Oli Owen, Graeme Halliday, Ryan McNamara, Micah Harbon, Alex Williamson, Alex Glen, Chris Ilankovan, Gwennan Thomas, Max Fedyk, Daniel Challis.