Review
TV Swansong
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Giorgio Sadotti, ‘Virtual bootleg’, 2002.
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Neil bromwich, 2002.
Photo: Colin Gray.
www.swansong.tv 20 March
On Wednesday 20 March, the artist-led organisation Somewhere, realised its biggest endeavour to date – a live webcast entitled TV Swansong. The culmination of three-years' preparation, TV Swansong took to the air from 15:45 to 21:00 GMT with a programme of eight widely ranging commissioned works staged at locations around the UK and beyond.
The evening's proceedings were not without inevitable technical difficulties. Initially we had trouble viewing anything and the chatroom confirmed that problems were being experienced nationwide due to server overload from 17,000 hits within the first hour. A far cry from the seamlessness we take for granted on TV – but such technical hitches are part of the territory and something we can only hope will soon be ironed out.
TV Swansong is the brainchild of artist-coordinators Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope. As the title suggests, the curatorial handle on the event refers to a shift in television's importance in contemporary culture. Quite shrewdly, TV Swansong does not cite TV as a dying breed, rather it celebrates the TV we once knew and anticipates the move towards a more fractured and self-determined audio-video experience mediated through a combination of TV and the internet.
Artists were selected not so much for their technical familiarity with webcasts, but for their ability to bring something innovative to this developing medium. Several contributors appropriated existing TV/radio programme forms, such as Graham Fagen's Radio Roselle – a Radio Caroline tribute in which he deejayed a live set of Scottish-Caribbean material from the mid-Atlantic – although it looked for all the world like a Glasgow flat!
First published: a-n Magazine May 2002
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