Ecstatic Television Poster and Program

Designed, Curated, Programmed for the From Below Microcinema on May 22, 2025

Over the last several months, I’ve been digging deep into the juncture point of avant-garde art forms and television broadcasting, following a revelatory viewing of Nam June Paik’s Good Morning, Mr. Orwell. I put together this screening for the the From Below as the first cache of good finds I’ve dug up from this research in the media mines.

Here’s what I wrote in the program:

"Unlike all previous communication technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content... it is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content.”

Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form

"If we could assemble a weekly television festival, which comprises all kinds of music and dance from every nations, and disseminate it freely via proposed Video Common Market to the world, its effect in education and entertainment will be phenomenal." 

Nam June Paik, "Global Groove and Video Common Market"

Ecstatic Television, programmed for the From Below Microcinema, hearkens back to an era when broadcast media had a more pronounced potential for decentralized communication and community building. As noted by Williams above, the means of broadcasting television were generated before there was a set form or genre in which to fill the broadcasting hours, which, for the first generations maturing into a world filled with the boxed screens in most homes and other social settings, represented a space of revolutionary possibility. While techno-utopian thinking has earned a more unsavory reputation as we delve deeper into the 21st century, the era in which avant-garde artists, anarchic political activists, and radical hackers turned to television as a container to build their visions for a less corporatized future bears a thorough reinvestigation.  

The videos in this program are mostly taken from the era between the advent of the Portapak video camera in 1967 (which allowed for affordable and transportable instant video recording and playback), followed by the advent of local cable stations in the early 1970s (which hosted many of the videos shown here), and the winnowing of public arts funding by the Reagan administration that brought an end to the programming capabilities of those cable stations, and for the most part an end to the optimistic belief in television as the communitarian media of the future.

"It is well known that new media are habitually modelled on obsolescent networks of the recent past, but the amnesia surrounding the once great hopes for cable TV as a democratic force at the dawn of the 1970s is breathtaking... the thoroughgoring commercialisation of cable—its rapid devolution from an open form of commincation to a highly standardised array of entertainment products—is perhaps too painful a reminder for Internet boosters that commerce and radical democracy are rarely if ever compatible." 

David Joselit, "Tales of the Tape: Radical Software"

Optimism, especially in the direction of a media that from its very outset was built by corporations with no corollary mode of expression in local or decentralized spheres, is a tricky proposition. It may be easy to look at the projects embarked upon within the films in this program and see where they fell short of creating lasting shifts in media consumption and participation. At the same time, however, viewing Nam June Paik's joyous documentations of an East Village arts scene that has now all but left us, or seeing Ant Farm's capturing of the news industry's solipsism through as self-consciously ludicrous of a stunt as driving a car through a monument of televisions, or listening to Robert Ashley's frenetic, esoteric descriptions of something as quotidian as going to the grocery store and elevating it into operatic status, still fills this television skeptic with a resurrected belief in the power to create beautiful, disruptive moments, spread wide over the airwaves. 

Ecstatic Television Program Cover