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 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 is 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 is 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.

Featuring:
Blanch & Shock, Laura Elsworthy, Cédric Fargues, Fleetwood Mac, Aoife Flynn, Marina Gasolina, The Haircut Before the Party, House of Drama, Nia Hughes, Heather May, Peggy Noland, Open Barbers, Rikslyd, Linda Roser, Julia Tcharfas.

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, Giorgio Bosisio, Cristen Clague-Reading, George Moustakas, Luke Collins, Robin Stuart, Amy Friend, Ciara Halpin, Poppy Walker, Laurence Price, Marianne Forrest.

With special thanks to:
Ceredig Ap Dafydd, Gemma Butterworth, Caitlin Bryant, Oscar Cass-Darwiesh, Daniel Challis, Max Dade, Elle Donlon, Caroline Flynn, Alex Glen, Chris Ilankovan, George Makis, Matt Newbigen, Steve Nice, Eva Sbaraini, David Stevenson, Gwennan Thomas, Louise Thomas, Joe Yates, Dai Williams, Louis Cryer, Graeme Halliday, Oli Owen, Zaid Shoubber, James Whelpton.