The New American Art Union launches its Couture series with an opening tonight. Ruthann Brown has competitively selected artists to take over the entire gallery with an installation. The opportunity, so rare in Portland, comes with an even rarer stipend.
The first NAAU Coture is The Video Gentlemen - Carl Diehl, Jesse England and Mack McFarland - with their installation Bring Your Own TV (BYOTV).
This affects you. So for a little background, this map shows how radio waves are used in the USA. All the large blue areas are AM radio, FM radio and TV. All of the other little slices are used by everything from garage door openers to WiFi, satellites, taxicabs, navigation for ships at sea, GPS, thousands of little uses. Sidestepping for a moment the content value today of television, the television spectrum is literally valuable, on the order of $5 billion per nationwide channel if it's used for mobile phones. In our democracy, the radio frequencies are considered owned in common by you and me. Thus the government, acting on our behalf, decides who gets to transmit what on each frequency, under the approving authority of the UN. The government decided in the early 1990's, in response to Japanese competition in high definition television, to move TV to digital in a project known as "The Grand Alliance". That situation seems so quaint now. Integral to the move, is shutting off the analog TV broadcasts that began in 1926. (Cable TV, satellite TV and Internet TV are not affected) If your TV gets its programs from an antenna, it will be useless after February 17, 2009 without a converter box and maybe even an antenna on the roof. That is called the "analog shutoff", which was conveniently scheduled to be after the Superbowl TV broadcast.
Note your TV may also be toxic waste because all tube TV's contain lead to keep some of the x-rays in (really). So don't just throw that TV in the trash! The [LCD] flat screen TV's, in contrast, have mercury as a dangerous ingredient for the next few years.
You can read about the Video Gentlemen's take on all of this and bring your own TV to the gallery to receive their artistic transmissions of some pretty awesome content.
The Video Gentlemen reference artists' use of TV and video which is documented in the excellent reference Illuminating Video. Early video artists, such as Nam Jun Paik were invited nto television studios to make work. As equipment became affordable, they moved into the DIY realm. There was a pretty awesome use of infrared video, then available only to the military, in Rauschenberg's Open Score, produced in the 1960's by E.A.T.
The wedge shaped room taking most of the gallery is actually a secret TV studio of circuit bent video gear. It's complete with a green screen to chromakey talking heads live into video's virtual world. The artists will produce live programs from the secret broadcast room at times during the show's run.
The real interests of the show are the videos the artists have selected to broadcast. Check the broadcast schedule, and tune in!
Artists' reception tonight. At New American Art Union 922 SE Ankeny 5PM-7 Free
