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Curator’s Notes
Paper Tiger Television celebrates 25 years of media art, activism and analysis with the premiere of a new documentary, Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television and a California Art, Activism and Analysis Tour.
To celebrate two and a half decades of leadership in media art, activism and analysis, PTTV has organized an Art, Activism and Analysis Tour in eight venues throughout California. REDCAT’s screening will be followed by a discussion of the continuing relevance of PTTV’s pioneering work and the ongoing need for innovative and independent information in today’s new multi-media environment.
Socks Ads: Judith Williamson Consumes Passionately in Southern California 1988, 28 min., video
Judith Williamson examines consumer culture in America, from the multiplication of products and their functions to capitalism's colonization of the body. What is the meaning of freedom in modern day America? Is it the freedom to change the world or the freedom to change our socks? Williamson is the author of Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (Boyars, 1978), Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (Boyars, 1986), Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism, 1980-1990 (Boyars, 1993) and L'Homme Fatal: Watching Ourselves at the Movies (Random House, 1999)
A ground-breaking innovator in video art and public access television in the early 1980s, Paper Tiger Television developed a unique, handmade, irreverent aesthetics that experimented with the television medium by combining art, academics, politics, performance and live television. PTTV, founded on the ideal that freedom of speech through access to the means of communication is essential in a democratic society, regularly exposed the hidden agenda of the mainstream media and questioned the powerful grip of corporate influence on media content to become the first nationally disseminated public access television program. As comments Dee Dee Halleck, one of the original founders of PTTV, “it is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. It is quite another to create viable alternatives.”
PTTV has been recognized for critical analysis of information sources and for being on the cutting edge of video with screenings, exhibits and installations in museums and galleries around the world. PTTV productions have proven to be invaluable video documentation of the ideas and insights of some of our nation’s most notable media critics and public intellectuals. The PTTV archive houses one of the most unique and important historical alternative media collections, encompassing critical components of the evolution of public access television, video art, video activism, and media reform.
PTTV influenced and supported grassroots media activist organizations through providing an innovative model for community media spurring the global development of a do-it-yourself (DIY) community media movement. Today’s burgeoning independent media movements can trace their roots directly to the network of media activists developed by PTTV throughout the 1980s. With the recent explosion of Internet video distribution, DIY media has grown from an isolated endeavor to an increasingly powerful international phenomenon. Now is the ideal time to look back at the pioneering work of a New York City video collective that began making its anarchic, improvisational commentary and satire on modern media culture 25 years ago.