SHLOCK ART SHOCKS CITY

Shlock Art Shocks City

Participatory Potentialities and TV220

I first encountered TV220 at an illegal screening hosted by a naughty Providence Public Library archivist friend. The uninitiated sat in awe in front of a computer screen, dumbstruck by the program’s low-brow tenor and volatile segmentation. One minute the pixels on the screen coalesced into a kaleidoscopic animation called “Mr. Shiney” during which Dr. T flips and distorts the Superman Building, and the next, we were met with a home video called “Rat Circus” during which a rat navigated a tightrope course made of yarn and play structures. Beyond these sketches, at select moments, TV220 presented an unabashed and dirtbag radicalism. Episode 93 featured a segment called “Providence Dirt Newsreel” that explains various pieces of bleak, quirky local politics. A voice actor dubbed over documentary footage about the Foxwoods Casino promotional campaign at the Pequot Research Center, with the garish tone of a salesman: “the commercialization of discourse is the number one thing that binds us together as a society!” So, the episodes rolled along. Every episodes fades in:

“The goal of TV220 is to provide an open forum for the arts on television and to promote the mission of AS220.”

The same screen crawl opens each episode of TV220, a cable-access television show produced and curated by downtown arts collective AS220 from 1996 until 2004. AS220 remains a wellknown feature of Providence’s downcity land scape today and still offers residential studios, galleries, and stage spaces. TV220 began as a weekly, submissions-based television program sometime in 1995 or 1996. It started when AS220 got a $10,000 grant from the Rhode Island School of Design and decided to funnel that money into video artist and then-Gallery Director Richard Goulis. Goulis, whom I inter viewed for this piece, was already working with local TV station Cox Cable at the time, producing a program called Artists Rhode Island Goulis admits some guilt for gradually “glomming on” to the Artists Rhode Island 8 p.m. slot and eventually taking it over from “two elderly ladies” on the east side.

“I think maybe we, sort of, steamrolled them a little bit. Maybe left them out of some of the decision-making at some point. And they felt a little nudged out, so they sort of of were just saying ‘here you go Richard, just take it, it’s all yours.’”

Once he got Artists Rhode Island rebranded TV220, Goulis began editing, curating, and producing for approximately 50 episodes. Until 2004, when TV220 aired its final episode, the program solicited general submissions at a mailbox at the AS220 studio. While TV220 was always a submissions-based program, during his tenure Goulis often hustled to edit together footage from the backlog of videos in the AS220 archives. When co-producers Amy Z and Heather Sylvester took over, they more actively sought out and featured new work from the Providence community. I had the opportu nity to interview Z for this piece, through which I learned more about the show’s production, process, and community solicitation.

TV220 always stayed a psychedelic, open, and dirty platform. It also offered a constant melee of mediums, variously featuring dance, music, performance art, video art, documentary, and home video. In my interview with Amy Z, she added: “[At TV220] you can be curated but not juried, which is the beauty of it.”

AS220 still runs an unjuried space today, at their Empire Street studio, but the television show (and, with it, the opportunity for mass broadcasting) is long gone.

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Another part of “Providence Dirt Newsreel” presents the story of Juanita, a fictional Fox Point resident who produces advertisements for Texaco gas pump video screens. One day, when Juanita goes to fill her tank at a nearby Texaco she discovers that the screen has been overtaken by a Rhode Island red rooster who haunts her with Bible quotes, “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). During such moments, TV220 commands us to write a dissertation. In this essay I will (not) argue that the representation of Juanita’s alienated labor begs an attitude of guilt that finds its object in the lack of a grand narrative inherent to how Frederic Jameson conceives the postmodern condition. I’ll hold my tongue, but this thematic and openly antag onistic attitude seems only possible vis-à-vis TV220’s commitment to mixed media and indi vidual production.

With these theses in mind, I expected to sit down to interview Goulis and Z and discover philosophical treatises on the generative nature of accessible, community-oriented media. To my dismay, Goulis, then-gallery director, main tained that the primary purpose of TV220 was to promote visits to the studio. From Amy Z on the other hand, there was that previously quoted comment about the virtue of unjuried curation as a means of diluting pure accessibility. Despite these comments, TV220’s content leaves room only for authenticity, blandness, or inefficacy. It appears like the last of its time, a source for video production before the internet. More than a television program though, TV220 begs us to consider how potentialities for community-cen tered art remains subject to medium, platform, and economy.

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Allow me to argue from a TV220 story, one from “Andre the Giant has a Posse.” “Andre the Giant has a Posse” documents the proliferation of Andre the Giant imagery through stickers and T-shirts by then-RISD student Shepard Fairey. The Andre campaign began in 1989 with Shepard distributing stickers around the Providence skater community. Those stickers would soon spread across the United States and eventually become the impetus for the OBEY logo. “I just think he looks really funny,” mumbles the ’90s skater boy, now OBEY founder and Obama ’08 campaign graphic designer. Throughout Shepard’s lackadaisical diatribe, one moment about his politics sticks out. For context, Fairey stuck an Andre sticker over the head of a poster of Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, to which onlookers assigned a degrading motive. In the TV220 documentary, Fairey denies denies denies.

“Everybody was reading all this stuff into it… ’cause Cianci had beaten up his ex-wife’s lover, and they thought because Andre’s a brute and Cianci was a brute I was making this parallel, but I was really just trying to make the small stickers seem more meaningful.”

Fairey’s aversion to ‘politics’ reflects the purportedly apolitical intentions of TV220’s producers. However, as Fairey notes not ten minutes later, “since the sticker doesn’t have any meaning, everyone was making up their own meaning for it.” Contrary to “apolitical inten tions,” in a manifesto he wrote in 1990–1991, and has since posted on his website, he links his graphic design work with phenomenology. The ambiguity of the Andre sticker elicited a series of varied but intense political reactions in the early 1990s. Both the claim that the Cianci vandalism constituted a cheeky accusation of domestic violence and the claim that Andre signals the birth of a new cult (a right-wing conspiracy theory that Fairey references in his manifesto) point to liberal-multicultural and conversative reactions to an intentionally meaningless sign. Even in his purportedly “meaningless” attempt to prank the mayor, Fairey, and TV220 by exten sion, clarify higher truths about ’90s American politics.

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The production process behind TV220 resem bles what media scholar Henry Jenkins terms a “participatory culture.” Participatory culture necessitates three conditions for Jenkins: (1) technologies that facilitate remix, retelling, or reappropriation; (2) a subculture that engages in “DIY” media production; and (3) horizontal narrative and visual flows between media “channels.” He claims that participatory culture promotes “community building, intellectual exchange, cultural distribution, and media activism.” TV220 seems to satisfy these criteria to a tee.

TV220 took a practical approach to commu nity-centered video production. In my interview with Z, she described how, perhaps for acces sibility’s sake, TV220 combined a veritable mixture of production technology that ran counter to the hasty movement to the digital in the late ’90s. Additionally, the curation of TV220 from the Providence community suggests a leveling of what constitutes the role of ‘artist’ itself. It is also through its television slot that TV220 occupies a place usually reserved for a gaze at ‘mass culture.’ Uniquely voluntary and participatory, TV220’s structure made a submissions-based regime compulsory for the program to sustain itself. A circular relationship developed in which community participation kept TV220 alive, and, as such, TV220 became more and more open to new possibilities for participation.

Rather than edit on the computer, to this day, Amy Z’s video practice centers on tangible and handheld machines.

“When editing … I’ve always preferred to use things that I can touch, things that I can hold, knobs that I can turn, and buttons that I can press instead of clicking on a mouse.”

As Z details, the production of TV220 combined various standard and emergent tech nologies: the Amiga Video Toaster for editing, the MiniDisc for storage, cassette tapes, and Sony video cameras. TV220 employed produc tion conditions resistant to hyperspeed, against trends, and certainly apart from expectations of technical prowess. Z thinks differently about editing with mouse and keyboard, that editing with novel software suggests precision, cleanli ness, and distance, while a hands-on approach feels tangible and satisfying. Scrappiness was built not only into the philosophy behind TV220 but also into the production technology itself. +++

TV220 itself speaks to anxieties inherent to the democratization of artistic production. In a segment called “Genius Artist at Large,” the mayor seeks an artist whose work will then attract people in large numbers to move to his ‘Renaissance city,’ Providence, Rhode Island. After soliciting submissions, the city supposedly finds a ‘worldwide-known’ artist to showcase. During the unveiling of that artist’s painting, it’s revealed as just a blank face, made with three brushstrokes (like ‘:|’). At once, the skit describes how the ravenous pursuit of artistic status comically forebodes low quality.

Like Providence’s fictional platform in “Genius Artist at Large,” early internet video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo offered a pseudo-democratic space for the proliferation of memetic images, ironically jokey clips, :|s. In her second book The Virtual Republic, critical theorist McKenzie Wark describes “tele-” technologies (telegraph, telephone, television) as heralds for the development of a “third nature.” Adaptation to new objects is second nature—as in, “riding a bike became second nature”—getting used to the big informatic noise, a “third.”

She thinks that the ubiquitination of online platforms necessitates not just adaptation to new technologies but subjection to constant streams of information, at once knowledge-producing and sensorially overwhelming. In my interview with Richard, I asked him what he thinks about the internet as a site for video production.

“Sometimes it seems like the greatest resource in the world, but then sometimes it seems like a landfill.”

It’s impossible to discuss ‘art and partic ipation’ as if one specific model satisfies an ambiguously defined ‘community need.’ Rather, the capacity for participatory creation remains subject to medium, capital, and gaze. In his book Pure War, Paul Virilio makes the claim that the internet accelerates speed, and speed remains inseparable from violence. He explains it along class lines as such: “People say, ‘you are too rich,’ but no one ever says: ‘You are too fast.’ But they’re related.”

Taking Wark’s and Virilio’s focuses in mind, we arrive at a consideration of contemporary video production that foregrounds sheer density: speed plus volume. With regard to participa tion, it’s difficult to envision the internet and its corporate platforms as a facilitating force. Rather than that aforementioned circular model between community participation and episode production, the mere capacity to opt in to a monetized structure leaves voice always at the behest of advertisement, clicks per minute, the platform’s bottom line. YouTube harnesses speed and volume and has grown into a dominant format from constant and omnipresent, large and small production lines and creators. Is it possible to pull back from acceleration in the current day? With the move toward streaming platforms and away from cable, I think not. TV220’s lack of profit motive, as a cable-access show, left it available week-by-week for open submission, a format lost by the current media landscape.

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When I asked Goulis about why TV220 ended in 2004, he hypothesized two possible reasons. (1) Personal. Amy Z and Heather Sylvester probably got bored after all those years of producing. (2) Structural. The rise of available video content and production opportunities online through YouTube and Vimeo left public television in the dust. As sources for entertainment get more and more diffuse and streaming gains popularity, cable seems less on the way out the door than in the driveway.

Early YouTube and Vimeo provided not only an easy-access means by which to locate content but also the opportunity to engage in a community with the aesthetics of democracy: a star-rating system and comment section. Video streaming sites meet that first condition for “participatory culture” but certainly don’t facil itate flows between media channels. In addition to the ability of fans to “opt in,” they’ve quickly developed tendencies for the promotion of virality and reciprocal production that remixes, each more divorced from the primary source.

During our interview, Goulis expressed a fantastical, apocalyptic outlook in reaction to a tangent about internet addiction.

“Someone talks about this apocalyptic event, ‘there’s no electricity, people are living inside of burned-out tanker trucks, and, you know, catching radioactive fish in ponds to survive on.’ I find solace in that. I find relief in the apocalypse … Like people are sort of getting back to natural things.”

As with most invocations of the nature/ culture divide, a desire to return to the former elides a more vulnerable expression of anxiety about how to fit into the latter. I take Goulis’ expression in stride, and I think it’s comparable to a metaphor that Wark uses in “Mapping the Antipodes” for how both of them envision the internet as a harsh edge upon which we’re teetering. In that chapter, Wark describes the balance between material and digital spheres as like “living too close to the freeway.” It’s a noisy road where drivers constantly rocket somewhere else, a humming liminal space where touch feels unreachable. As opposed to the kinds of impersonal and parasocial audience-producer interactions that internet production foregrounds, TV220 promises a step back from the crushing noise for a focus on its local community.

Potentialities for such participatory television production appear wholly unviable today, and the screen certainly facilitates the grating individualization of artistic production. There's a story from TV220 called "Dirty" about a man in a suit who wants to erase every trace of himself from the world. "I'm not antisocial, just nonexistent." Expressions like these make me think of the Freudian death instinct, the desire to return to a mythical place "pre-birth," to self-efface, to seek the human in the infantile. It's difficult to resist the fetishization of the pre-digital past as somehow "more human." That impulse becomes all the more magnetic as visions for even the short future become more and more opaque. Rather than either impulse, maybe we bear in mind models for the present. From TV220, these might include community integration, working with "small means," admitting the avant-garde, squishing your way into spaces where no one wants you. The man in the suit, later revealed as "Andrew," gets a call in his motel hidey-hole one day. Someone's just had his child, and she pleads with him to return her call. Cut to him as he dives into the motel pool and resurfaces.

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For all the TV220 stories I haven't told, here's a brief highlight reel.

(a) "Artists in Recovery." A sequence of addicts discuss painting, philosophy, religion, aesthetics. "[My] decision to be a junkie was a decision based on the information I had about being an artist."

(b) "Bingo #1." Content warning reads "homophobia." Monologue about the differences between straight and gay porn stars. "Why are the men in straight pornographic films ugly as hell, and the gay ones, they're beautiful and they're pretty?"

(c) "John's Deli." Ends with a leather jacket-clad beautiful biker kissing a girl who works at the deli, wears a baseball cap. "Take it easy kid."

I'd like to thank Providence Public Library Curators Kate Wells and Jordan Goffin for their help with this project.

KIAN BRAULIK B'24 now seeking genius artist in a Renaissance city.