Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - Television

Citizens Banned?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:08:20 +0000

ByAnthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

Is a rabble run media becoming a possibility, and are artists leading – or blocking – the way? The AV media arts festival in the North East of England last month suggested the ambivalence of artistic interventions into state and corporate broadcasting, report Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

The Hatton Gallery lounge in which artists' TV interventions were displayed

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:27:27 +0000

Yuko Mohri, Bairdcast Media: A History of Machine Translation

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:25:58 +0000

Credit:
Yuko Mohri, Bairdcast Media: A History of Machine Translation. This piece investigated the work of early TV pioneer John Logie Baird and his spooky puppet

Ian Breakwell, still from an episode of Continuous Diary, 1984

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:36:51 +0000

Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway, New Yorkers participating in Hole in Space, (1980)

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:39:01 +0000

Getting Closer to Bigger Screens

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:31:09 +0000

ByRichard Wright

The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants

A Wall is a Screen

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:31:26 +0000

Screening by the German collective 'A Wall Is A Screen'

Slumsploitation – The Favela on Film and TV

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:27:17 +0000

ByMelanie Gilligan

Brazil has long sold its sunny side to holiday makers, but since the blockbuster film City of God a flood of movies and TV shows have capitalised on the narrative potential of the country’s plentiful favelas, adolescent drug soldiers and ultraviolence.

Blockade the airwaves (Piquetero TV in Argentina)

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:36:37 +0000

BySebastian Hacher

Mute has recently covered the appearance of street TV in Italy. Here, Sebastian Hacher reports on the emergence of a new form of self-instituted community media out of Argentina's piquetero movement

Time Keeps on Slipping (Some Recently Projected Videotapes by Alexander Kluge)

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:03:29 +0000

ByMarina Vishmidt

Three of Alexander Kluge's 1988 videos, made for the German television programme '10 vor 11', were screened last month at Whitechapel Gallery. Here, Marina Vishmidt unravels their tangled collage of wartime imagery, advertising and philosophy, in relation to Kluge's conception of an 'oppositional public sphere'

Breaking the Waves: Ondes Sans Frontiers

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:08:36 +0000

ByFrederic Madre

France's Ondes Sans Frontieres puts the Public back into Broadcasting

French TV never experienced the burgeoning freedom that FM radio thrived on after its liberalisation in the 80s. It was born old, conservative and buckled up, worshipping the American industrialisation process while choosing to retire somewhere between status quo anaesthetic and cynical provider of disposable trash. This nauseating formula made TF1 the most successful channel in geographic Europe and a model that even state-owned France 2 and 3 are eager to emulate.

Spun Spooks

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:34:43 +0000

ByMark Fisher

In the BBC’s latest spy-series-cum-M15-promo 'Spooks', the spies have come in from the cold and are lounging about on designer sofas. Mark Fisher investigates their passage from ghosts to yuppies

Blockbusting the Election

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:52:07 +0000

ByBenedict Seymour

Benedict Seymour on the evolution in televisual aesthetics in the UK’s Party Election Broadcasts.

Shamen of Discontent or The Revenge of the Mirror People (A Detective Story in four Acts)

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:16:26 +0000

ByStewart Home

When Stewart Home appeared in The Falconer, the second of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s strangely convoluted film trilogy about hidden cultural memory and its avatars, he found himself sucked into an underworld of allusion, repetition and false trails. He resurfaced seriously damaged, but no sooner had he done so than Mute hired him to go back and solve the still uncracked enigma of the project.

Factory 2000

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 14:46:19 +0000

ByChris Darke

In the 60s, Andy Warhol’s Factory manufactured celebrities out of self-obsessed nobodies but did so at a jaundiced distance from Burbank. Big Brother takes Warhol’s model and, in a surveillance-rigged encampment, creates Factory 2000. At a dispassionate level, it’s intriguing to see how media and technology seemlessly converge around the rhetoric of celebrity. Wanna be famous? Ya gotta pay. The gladiatorial character of BB’s media-saturated survivalism tells us a lot, not just about the technocrat-mandarin TV execs for whom psyche-shredding is ‘good tv’, but about ourselves as well. I keep telling myself “It’s only a game show”. But the words ring as hollow as Davina McCall’s soul. So how to fuck up BigBro? Let me know.