PTV: Performance TV
Chapter 6
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Is television dead – or are we living in a post-TV era? Can everyone have their own channel? PTV: Performance TV is an experimental performative programme in the form of a television studio. The starting point is the impact of the medium and its idiom on current artistic practices. We have invited contemporary artists who employ formats such as soap opera, talk shows, documentary and video clips – and also those who proclaim the death of television and are out to prove that it is the Internet that has taken over TV’s former function in society. The project draws on the democratic nature of the latter medium, and is based on the idea that today everybody can create their own TV.
- In 2019, the PTV: Performance TV project is being carried out in two parts. TV will be broadcast terrestrially through performances, discussions and projections at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art as well as throughout the network of a specially set up YouTube channel to cater for works that use the Internet as their medium of choice.
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Chapter 6
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The question returns: What impact do the new technologies have on shaping contemporary television? Who are today’s viewers – passive consumers or themselves TV material ready for consumption? Is the digital real? In his new work sight seeing, the performance and visual artist Julian Weber will transport the audience from the white sheet of paper on to the stage. The participants in the performance are the subjects and objects that move in the staged framework, between the margins, trying to define themselves. In the choreographed set, a number of different characters have been immersed, somewhere between a flat surface and the third dimension – searching for temporary attractions and their own origin of existence. ‘The fear of invisibility in our digitized world becomes a driving force for physical and choreographic questions. Over the course of this debate, sight seeing is confronted with what constitutes a human being and what represents the inhuman’, Julian Weber stated for PTV. Please join in the sight seeing!
- Julian Weber is a choreographer/dancer and visual artist. He studied at HBK Brunswick, Academy of Arts Vienna, HZT Berlin and the Theaterschool in Amsterdam. He reflects and deconstructs pictorial strategies in cross-format works, in which he examines the areas of friction between images, bodies and materials for their choreographic potential. The often amorphous and mobile stage situations refer to the formation of cultural identity and institutional bondage alike. He collaborates with artists such as Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz and Tino Sehgal and creates his own work at the intersection of visual and performance art. Lately he also develops more frequently scenographies in collaboration with artists such as Jeremy Wade or the suddenly-collective. In 2015 he won the Berlin Art Prize with his work the toruist.
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Next time
- We invite TV viewers for another instalment! As a starter, we bring you an online serial directed by the artist, writer and popular Instagram poster Zofia Krawiec. As she explains: ‘Hate and narcissism appear to be the two key phenomena in contemporary culture. Their existence and rise are closely linked to technological changes. Online, everybody can be anyone they want. The incessant opportunity to peep on the lives of others and comparing oneself to them breeds great resentment that can manifest in ways that are comical, but also horrific and dramatic in consequences.’ Part 7 will culminate in meeting Amos, the malicious doll created by Cécile B. Evans, who, in the series lampoons a visionary modernist architect. The individual episodes, against the backdrop of a brutalist stage set, stem from the series of performances that took place during 2017 and 2018.
