Portlandorusnow has been on holiday from the matrix. We resume tonight noting a show opening on media art, a personal interest, Broadcast. The collection covers the late era of mass broadcast media, repurposed by artists. Radio and broadcast media receivers have achieved nearly 100% penetration in American homes, but it is the end of their era.
Artists began using cheap video making equipment as soon as it became available in the 1960's to create narrow channel broadcast art, communicating with their social networks. That effort by artists has now become mainstream, as was envisioned by media and arts theorist Gene Youngblood, over the Internet.
The show includes Korean artist Nam Jun Paik, widely considered the first video artist. He was active in the 60's Fluxus movement with artists such as Yoko Ono, and continued his career into the mid '90's. His work, Video Tape Study No. 3, 1967-8 is a remix of press conferences by President Johnson and Mayor John Lindsay.
Dangerous performance artist Chris Burden shows TV Hijack, 1972, in which he took a cable access announcer hostage at knifepoint in reaction to the station rejecting his art programming proposals. He demanded that the recordings of the show be destroyed. This exhibit includes stills of the event. Also showing are Burden's Four TV Commercials 1973-77 and 2000.
Christian Jankowski shows Telemistica, 1999, he documents his calls to broadcast television psychics in Venice to ask how his artwork will be perceived by the public in the Venice Biennale.
neuroTransmitter shows 12 Miles Out, 2005, themed on 1960's-80's offshore pirate radio stations in Europe, now made obsolete by the Internet. It's an audio piece. They also shows Frequency Allocations, 2005.
Dara Birnbaum is known for her piece Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, and is notable for her successful lawsuit to decommission a work when a client wanted to show advertising on her public artpiece, Rio Videowall. Birnbaum's Hostage,1994, is a six channel piece comprising news footage from a German politcal hostage situation of 1977.
Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter, working as Ant Farm, show The Amarillo News Tapes, 1980, the result of being artists in residence at a television station.
Gregory Green shows WCBS Radio Caroline: The Voice of the New Free State of Caroline, 89.3 FM, 2007 is a 1 watt pirate radio station. Much of his other work has involved being arrested by police.
MacArthur fellow Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle operates across media, often making work commenting on technology, such as several beautiful series on human genetics. His piece is Search - En Busquedad, 2001 is a simulated radio telescope using a Tijuana sports stadium. It is a comment on the parallels between the search of space aliens and the search at the border for illegal aliens.
MIT professor Antonio Muntadas shows The Last Ten Minutes, 1977, a three channel installation showing the last minutes in th elate night of broadcast shutdown in The US, Germany and the Soviet Union.
Long running San Francisco video collective Top Value Television, TVTV, active in the '70's shows Four More Years, 1972, their own news coverage of the 1972 election campaign of President Nixon.
Siebren Versteeg shows CC, 2003, news broadcasts captioned with unrelated random Internet blog content.
The show, curated in Baltimore, is at the gallery at Lewis and Clark College www.lclark.edu/hoffman_gallery Opening 5PM-7 Free
