KURATOR  curating + research

reenacttv.net: re-working the site(s) of new television

Phil Ellis PhD project

http://www.reenacttv.net

Date:

2009

The PhD project is centred on early John Logie Baird experiments: the first television drama broadcast and an interactive ‘chat show’ reenacted on an online TV channel. The research function will be that they will facilitate the articulation of a new knowledge in relation to the dialogic process between participants and contemporary and historical television systems, both in terms of technologies and uses: political and social implications of the user-producer as ‘flow-er’. While these new modes of reception and distribution allow for a critique of the contemporary position of television use, the new technologies, through the process of reenactment, will allow us to revisit the past in an insightful way and engender an intellectual liberation of the flow-er. This will be evidenced in the ‘process’ of the reenactment of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth and in the ‘subject’ of the reenactment of the chat show.

Research Questions / Aims

The future research will seek to investigate the following questions:

• Does a dialogic process between participants and contemporary and historical television systems, both in terms of technologies and uses, shed new light on both current and early systems?
• What are the political and social implications of the user-producer as ‘flow-er’?
• Does the process of reenactment allow us to revisit the past in an insightful way and engender an intellectual liberation of the flow-er?

Research Context

The ideas of expanded, open, networked, viral participatory flows were the starting points of thinking around this area of new television and of note is that the low-grade technical quality and production values of web cam sites (such as Camfrog) and YouTube-type original content and mash-ups mirror early television’s ‘darkened stage’ and the single camera often encased in concrete, realised on the (literally) small screen. This spirit of the culture of use and activity evident in web cam sites and spreadable media was actually evident from the first moments of television production. As a way of addressing the potential of the present, the research looks to the potential of the present in the past.

John Logie Baird’s early experimental television drama, the first ever UK tele-play: Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (BBC: 1930) is known as the first such broadcast, chosen mainly for technical reasons as the two main characters’ movement is almost nil. The screening of The Man with the Flower in His Mouth might have been the model for the subsequent 75 years of broadcast television but the interactive experiment encapsulates the spirit of new television with active and intervention-minded audiences.

The project investigates reenactment as participatory art in relation to the revisiting of these 80 year old events. One can trace a trajectory through from Dada, Situationism, Happenings and participatory art through to contemporary reenactments. Clearly there are important considerations such as the impossibility of, as Jennifer Allen suggests ‘capturing a totality … the society of the spectacle and its many attendant visual technologies, from photography to television, complicates all reenactments by transforming them into reproductions. Captured by the camera lens, the reenactment becomes a reproduction of the past and a reproduction of itself … the question is not “Is this reenactment true to the past?” but “Is this reenactment true to our present?” While spectators appear to wield a new power over the past – as the ultimate “actors” in the reenactment – they are alienated’ (Allen 2005:195). However, this alienation circuit can potentially be broken by the direct involvement of the ‘spectator’ as re-enactor and flow-er through Brechtian tactics and the tactic of the open work.

Reenacttv.net investigates the potential for participatory audiences in current television possibilities – a way of ‘telling ones own history’ as Peter Watkins suggests, through the re-enactment of the past. La Commune (de Paris, 1871), Peter Watkins’ 2000 film allows for the audience to bring themselves into the reenactment (to the detriment of his relationship with his financiers as it increased the length from 1.5 hrs to 5hrs). As Steve Rushton points out, ‘the issue is not what re-enactment is but what re-enactment does’ (Rushton 2005:11). Watkins subverts the current broadcast medium of television in his five hour film. It is partially this long as he ‘asked the cast to do their own research on this event in French history’.

What defines such works around reenactment is the dialogic process between past and present, the construction and representation of the image/sound then and now. Evident in the Watkins piece are the beginnings of the kind of flow-er dynamics of participation outlined in the above stated goals of this reenactment research.