(Super)STATION

AUTO ITALIA LIVE: DOUBLE DIP CONCESSION
Paul Becker, Nathan Budzinski, Benedict Drew, Robert Carter, Andrew Kerton, Leslie Kulesh, Huw Lemmey, o F F Love, Francesco Pedraglio, Lorenzo Tebano, Jess Weisner

Auto Italia South East presents Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession, an artist-run Live TV show performed before a studio audience and broadcast over the internet. Working in collaboration with Auto Italia, artists are developing new work for this one-off episode which engages directly with the format of live television. This new episode is commissioned by the ICA as part of Remote Control and will be broadcast live from the ICA Theatre.
This episode will use the techniques, characters and editing of live television to explore our interaction with the flow of images that invade our lives. Exploring the individual relationship that the audience has with broadcast, we consider the possibility for a personal and autobiographical tone to be delivered within a context which alienates those present on the screen from accurate self-representation. The manufactured space created by the set will be the backdrop for actions, statements and performances which are commonplace in live TV production but are rarely broadcast to the viewers.
This project is engaging directly in contemporary broadcast culture as a space for new work and how physical communities use the Internet to distribute ideas. It aims to be a proposal for how artists can produce live broadcast work in collaboration and act as a unique place for artists to create their collective context and distribute their work.
Produced in collaboration with: Nikki Bevan, Giorgio Bosisio, Anna Brecon, Roderick Burrows, Nat Cary, Cristen Clague-Reading, Luke Collins, Theo Cook, Cameron Foote, Mette Juhl, Fran Hitchcock, Julia Innocenti, McDeath, Tim McFarland, Kate Molins, Celia Moodie, George Moustakas Elly Nakajima, Radiance Audio, Sonia Rodriguez Serrano, Rebecca Root, Bernard Thompson
With special thanks to: Lauren Barnes, Marleen Boschen, Paul Crompton, Aoife Flynn, Henry Petrides, Laurence Price, Matt Welch
Commissioned and produced by Auto Italia South East.

For WORK, E.S.P. TV made Pioneer Works’ office staff and environment the subject of a six-week performative, televisual installation by relocating the organization’s second-floor, open-plan office to the first-floor’s main exhibition space. Surrounded by a de-centralized control room, the office doubled as both a dynamic sculptural set—painted partly in chroma blue and featuring movable walls, among other features—and the actual site for the staff’s five-day workweek. The staff’s “daily grind” was mixed live, on-site, with custom video effects and hourly commercial interruptions in the space. Far from peddling in the sensational tropes of reality TV, WORK instead turned banal, day-to-day office routines and patterns—the movement of a chair, a co-worker getting coffee—into the improbable, playful content of a serial program to be broadcast weekly on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. E.S.P. TV worked closely with curator David Everitt Howe to envision this social experiment and exhibition, which responded to the building’s unique environment and tight-knit, collective office culture.

Recreated as a pastiche of a “contemporary” office, the installation featured a series of sculptural set pieces that could be activated in real-time or through the video editing process. A camera crew, live TV mixing consoles, monitors, and program feeds surrounded and permeated the working office. At the start of each workday, Pioneer Works staff functioned as both employees and cast members who “logged-in” to an evolving algorithm that combined their names with a glossary of camera shots and an office etiquette handbook. The resulting text generate an abstract script or textual narrative that informed both the episodes’ editing and their subtitles.

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Working within galleries, museums, and artist-run and public spaces, E.S.P. TV’s television programs are taped before a live audience and place the labor of production in an equal spotlight with the artists and performers with whom they collaborate. These tapings reveal a new space born through a breakdown in the hierarchy of the producer and performer and an investigation of the aesthetic qualities of the “live TV studio set”—arising from subtle relationships of staging, timing, layers of observation and the line between shadow and shade of an evenly lit set. In many ways, the humorous, inquisitive, and convention-defying nature of E.S.P. TV carries on the tradition of institutional critique artists like Michael Asher. In the 1970s, Asher engaged in an art practice that broke down the separation between traditional roles of art production, exhibition, and public dissemination. An influential touchstone for E.S.P TV’s WORK is Asher's Via Los Angeles (1976) in which Asher recorded, and later broadcast, the behind-the-scenes interior of a local TV control room (Portland NBC affiliate KGW) while they were airing the Super Bowl.

For additional context, WORK featured video and printed ephemera from E.S.P. TV’s first 100 Episodes and 6 seasons on air in New York City. This multi-media collection draws on hundreds of collaborative efforts with local and international artists working in performance, video, sound, social practice, and more. Evoking this history, as well as the history of television and sound, a series of public programs featured screenings, performances, and an artist-led “staff retreat” to expound upon the major themes of the exhibition and activate the set outside of normal working hours.

"Double Dip Concession", Auto Italia LIVE

E.S.P. TV: Work