reenacttv.net: re-working the site(s) of new television: participants, contemporary and historical television, and the archive
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Phil Ellis
Abstract
This article investigates the potential for new television as arts practice. It explores this potential by revisiting acts and sites of television's history through processes of enactment, specifically the reenactment of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, the first drama broadcast by John Logie Baird (with the BBC) in 1930. This took place in Baird's studio at 133 Long Acre, London. The article outlines key features of various possibilities for a “new” television and a new television arts practice and considers how reenactment as an arts process might address the “trace” of historical television's archive, and in doing so also give it a particular contemporary relevance. Theorists of memory and storage (Ricoeur and Derrida) are drawn upon to develop forms of thinking about television and performance as archive which are then drawn on to consider the prospects for reenacttv.net. Reenacttv.net is an art and television history project which will reenact The Man with the Flower in His Mouth in the summer of 2012.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Revisiting Digital Media Technologies? Understanding Technosociality
- Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies
- Practices of place-making through locative media artworks
- Revisiting cyberfeminism
- Studying the interpretive and physical aspects of interactivity: Revisiting interactivity as a situated interplay of structure and agencies
- reenacttv.net: re-working the site(s) of new television: participants, contemporary and historical television, and the archive
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Revisiting Digital Media Technologies? Understanding Technosociality
- Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies
- Practices of place-making through locative media artworks
- Revisiting cyberfeminism
- Studying the interpretive and physical aspects of interactivity: Revisiting interactivity as a situated interplay of structure and agencies
- reenacttv.net: re-working the site(s) of new television: participants, contemporary and historical television, and the archive
