Following my exposition in the methodological chapter, this case study involves equally my own practice and the practice of others as “objects” of the research, drawing both on the practice-based methodologies of artistic-research and cultural analysis in the form of close-readings of cultural objects and processes such as in this case, TV-programs and production flows.
As my personal involvement in tv-tv spans a five-year period, the empirical material for the study primarily departs from a partici- pant’s perspective akin to the earlier discussed practice- or -artistic research based models. The field of artistic research as described by various actors such as Hannula et al. (2005) or Mäkelä and Rou- tarinne (2006) involves a cyclical, hermeneutic methodology which is clearly inherited from earlier action- and practice-based research agendas (cf. Elliot, 1991; Winter 2002). Discussing the relationship between the notions of action and research in critical hermeneutics, Kevin Kelly (2000, p. 1) writes that “The kinds of projects where these arguments are most applicable fall under the rubric of ‘par- ticipatory action research’, where there is a strong accent on the communicative processes leading to formulation of interventions and evaluation thereof.“ My research work in this case study has taken place along a similar logic as it is based in my long-term en- gagement in tv-tv as a form of participant-observant, to the devel- opment of small (often collaborative) projects and workshops. These have then lead to further questions and reflections which in turn lead to the development of more coherent projects along with a deepened analysis according to the main themes of the research. In the tv-tv case, these activities have also been complemented by a
limited set of interviews with the other main practitioners.2 The function of these interviews has mainly been one of contextualisa- tion of the history of tv-tv as an art project, the collaborative or- ganisation of production and to a more limited extent, the individ- ual experiences arising out of specific tv-tv productions.
Taken together, my various activities within tv-tv, while also in- corporating close and comparative readings of “texts”, could on the whole be described as fitting into what Hannula et al. (2005) have characterised as a “Collaborative case study”: “Collaborative
case studies is a name for such approaches in which one tries in
one way or another to influence the research object and include people other than researchers in the research.” (p. 88). In this con- text, the authors stress the long-term engagement of collaborative case-studies and the permanent interaction with a given commu- nity.
In a collaborative case study the interaction between the re- searcher and the community being researched is not clearly de- fined temporally or thematically, but is permanent or at least long term. Essential in the permanence is the active interaction between the researcher and those being researched, as well as a commitment to certain commonly agreed goals. The researcher acts within the practice she researches, not alone but with oth- ers, together searching for solutions. The collaborative case study enables simultaneously both the scientific and practical approaches. (Hannula et al., p. 43)
As the quote above belies, the goal of action-research oriented work is often stated as being the “improvement” of practice in some way – the common searching for solutions. In engaging tv-tv as a re- searcher, my goal is not to develop a specific tool or design but rather to set in motion critical reflections on this kind of media production at the interface of art and activism. Rather than positing
2 The interviews were carried out in 2008 and 2009 and the interviewees were both active and for-
mer members of tv-tv. The interviewees were: Morten Goll, Joachim Hamou, Kent Hansen, Ulla Hvejsel, Jakob Jakobsen and Signe Skovmand. Kirsten Dufour and Jo Zahn also provided their in- sights through more informal conversations.
myself as a researcher intervening into tv-tv, my work with tv-tv has always been an organic collaboration which is used as a spring- board for projects departing from tv-tv as an institution intervening in the television and media landscape at large. Thus the collabora- tive case study in itself is not the goal but a consequence of the ac- tion-based nature of the research. My focus is rather on the prac- tice-based and artistic/aesthetic working through of specific prob- lems of media culture than on functional changes of practice. With the tv-tv case study, I wish not so much to reflect on the process and experience of collaboration as such but on how the specific projects and results coming out of the collaborations speak back to the questions and concepts of the research. Through cultural analy- sis connected to the practice and through theoretical concepts, I make the projects as objects speak back in the dissertation, develop- ing the initial concepts and taking them in new directions.
In such a context of highly “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988), it could be argued that knowledge will always be biased and thus non-scientific. Here, I wish to again stress that the goals of the research is not to evaluate the projects of the case study on the ba- sis of their instrumental success or failure but rather that the disser- tation must be thought of as at the same time less and more than the projects themselves – it is a tool for advancing the development of new critical concepts for analysing, thinking about and instigat- ing transversal media practices across old and new media.
Excavation
Community media is local television in Denmark, microradio and public access television in the United States (…), local news- letters produced by women in Bengal, and the web-based Indy- media that operates in cities around the world (...) (Ellie Rennie, Community Media – A Global Introduction, 2006. p. 3)
Context is key for alternative media production, argues alternative media scholar Chris Atton (2002). Research on alternative and community media also frequently seems more preoccupied with the
contexts of particular processes of communication and citizens’ knowledge transfer than on content-analysis or theorising the aes- thetics of the projects considered (cf. Howley, 2005; Rennie, 2006). In this case study I will try to accommodate both the con- textual and the content-based analysis, following the assumption that, especially given the status of tv-tv as a project partially situ- ated in an art context, one cannot separate the politics from the aesthetics. As for the wider contextualisation of tv-tv in the com- munity media context, I first turn to the local media field, which as Rennie points out in the quote above is the main setting for alter- native media practices in Denmark. In this background section, I will also focus on TV-Stop, not only the predecessor to tv-tv, but also a local media station that has become inseparable from the development and history of alternative media in Denmark.
My intention in this section is to explore that history as well as to ask questions about the transition to a new media context: that of how networked digital media impacts the modes of production at play in a project like tv-tv. Because of its particular story and “interstitial” position, I will argue that tv-tv cannot simply be re- duced to a retro-art-activism project and because of the converging media cultures of today we cannot think of it as outside of digital and networked contexts.3
Even though they might seem antithetical, the development of privatised and alternative DIY media have frequently been operat- ing in tandem, pushing new forms of production and distribution as well as sharing a common opposition towards state regulated media. Without commercial forces pushing for the expansion of cable based TV-networks in the USA, the first experiments in Pub- lic Access television might not have seen the light of day. In the 1970’s, laws were passed in the United States dictating that the new commercial cable networks had to provide a certain percent-
3 At the same time as tv-tv was founded, the Italian Telestreet movement was active, fusing the pro-
duction methodologies of the Internet with local television. See for example Matteo Pasquinelli’s article “Manifesto for Urban Televisions” (2003). See also Fredrik Svensk (2005) for a good critical account of the Italian Telestreet movement and its influence on contemporary art practice. The idea of the net forming a vanishing point for TV has also been further developed in an Italian anthology (Pecchioli, 2005) appropriating Umberto Eco’s concept of Neotelevisione, originally devised in the 1980’s as a concept to describe the emerging Berlusconi mediascape.
age of funding for the establishment of non-commercial public in- terest channels, paving the way for so called Public Access and Ca- ble Access TV (Ellie, 2006, p.53).
A similar story applies to the European model of “Open Chan- nels” which, as David Garcia and Lennaart van Oldenborgh de- scribes (2007, p. 99), were started as an illegal activity by Dutch media activists who pirated Amsterdam’s first cable-networks in the mid-seventies. This activist/entrepreneurial approach has been pre- sent also in Scandinavia, where the first challenges to the State media monopolies of both Sweden and Denmark came from pirate radio stations, transmitting the pop-culture sounds of the commercial mu- sic industry from ships in the surrounding oceans (Ahm, 1972; Nør- gaard, 2003).4 This description of the juridical trickstery of the first Danish “pirate ship”, hosting the commercial Radio Mercur, shows how early media entrepreneurs were using activist methods that ex- ploited gaps in the local-global contexts of media production:
The ship is officially rented at the London-based BALTIC PA- NAMA SHIPPING COMPANY by the Zürich-lawyer dr. Jan Flachmann’s Swiss INTERNATIONALE RADIO MERCUR ANSTALT, set-up with the same purpose, and which equipped it with transmitter and transmission-pole, prior to when the Danish RADIO MERCUR company rented it! (Ahm, Leif, 1972, p. 154)
Being one of the very first Danish chroniclers of this story, Leif Ahm also reports on similar attempts going on in television piracy, now taking to the airwaves quite literally: the Radio Mercur people planned to have a plane rented in Germany, equip it with a televi- sion transmitter, and let it circle over Denmark (Ahm, p. 154). Thus prior to the existence of the Internet, other nets where fre- quently mobilised by reterritorialising media producers.
In the Danish as well as the Swedish case, this pirate activity sof- tened the state radio’s approach to popular culture and in the nine- teen fifties forced it to also include popular music (Nørgaard 2002;
4 See also Ljunggren, Bohman, and Karlsson (2002) on the Swedish pirate activities which led to the
Kotschack, 2009). Later, in the sixties there was pressure to de- mocratise also the access to the actual production and distribution of media. This pressure came mainly from two different directions; liberal forces wanted to break the monopoly in order open up me- dia production to the private market; while left-wing parties and grass-roots groups were interested in the possibility of democratis- ing citizen and special interest groups’ access to media. The Danish state however was reluctant to break the monopoly of the Danish Broadcasting Company (DR). When an experimental scheme for local-radio and TV was eventually tried out in the beginning of the nineteenseventies it was modelled exclusively on the concept of creating mini versions of the DR stations around the country. The initial inspiration came mainly from the Canadian and American experiments with Cable-TV but due to the lack of sustainable models the original idea of strengthening democracy through direct contact between citizens and local governments was not realized.5
The differences between the Scandinavian and North American media landscapes are worth considering as possible contributing factors to this initial failure. The Danish state was sceptical to- wards the liberalisation of access to media production and distribu- tion, meaning that there were no sponsors from the commercial sector to support the project. This meant that it was up to the state alone to devise the scheme, failing in sufficiently addressing the grass roots, instead adopting a top-down organisation structure re- garding the issuing of broadcasting licenses.
A second scheme for local media was devised by the Danish so- cial-democratic government at the end of the 1970’s and put into ac- tion in the early eighties. The focus was still on non-commercial me- dia but this time a more systematic subsidy system was built in as well as a consideration of the grass-roots more in style of the Euro- pean Open Channels (Jauert and Prehn, 1995). Consequently, wire- less broadcasting was also included in the licensing system and ac-
5 For this historical outline, I have relied on the extensive work of Per Jauert and Ole Prehn (1985,
1995, 2002, 2003), leading researchers on local-media in Denmark. I also build the story on a lec- ture by and discussion with Preben Poulsen, a veteran activist of Danish local-radio who gave a prac- titioner’s view on the subject of the Danish media political development of non-commercial local- media from the beginning of the 1980’s until today at a seminar of the association SAML in Avedøre, Denmark October 20, 2006. Data are from my own notes and Thomsen, Gitte et al. 2006.
cording to Jauert and Prehn (1995), as many as 150 licenses were issued for local radio and television during the first years.The crite- ria for obtaining a license was set by the ministry of culture and stressed the importance of “advocacy”-media, meaning that local media should foster citizen’s involvement and promote debate in lo- cal democracies in stark contrast to the national television’s orienta- tion towards broad public interests. This practically meant that the new framework for local media in Denmark would be twofold: ac- commodating both community (local) and advocacy (special interest, political) media. Different groups who were active in establishing the first channels were organisations with roots in the worker’s move- ment, religious and immigrant communities (Poulsen, 2006).
However, the goal of creating advocacy media catering to a kind of alternative political sphere in local communities was quickly un- dermined by a number of factors. According to the Danish radio activist Preben Poulsen, politicians were early on waning in their support, fearing the outbreak of renegade broadcasters who would influence the Danish public (Poulsen, 2006). A reason for this change in attitude could also be attributed to the fact that there was a change in government: the local-media scheme was planned by a social-democratic government but actually implemented under the rule of the conservative party.
Another undermining of the advocacy approach was the process by which the grassroot stations themselves, fearing they would get too few listeners, also increasingly commercialised their broadcasting, by for example playing music off the hit charts. This led in many cases to the complete erosion of the initial committed and advocacy media ideals and that many local-radios became professionalised competitors to DR’s national and regional broadcasters. In 1983, some of these now very popular stations let political parties buy ad time for their upcoming elections. This meant that even if in theory the founding na- ture of Danish local-media was non-commercial, in practice it was now opened up for commercial exploitation as well.
A consequence of the opening towards commercialisation by the local media was increasing liberalisation of the Danish media land- scape, culminating in the establishment of the first nation-wide com- mercial channel, TV2, by the mid 1980’s. Ironically, it was the non-
commercial and supposedly grass roots media themselves that had taken a significant step towards this change. This also led to concrete changes in the local-media policies which by the mid-nineties came to recognize both a commercial and non-commercial layer (Jauert and Prehn, 2003, p. 5). The result was an increasing polarisation, where the remaining non-commercial stations would be the ones to carry on the original ideology of advocacy-media, evident for example in the forming of the organisation SLRTV for promoting the rights of non- commercial community media in Denmark.
Throughout the 1990’s, the non-commercial local media were supported by the State through a subsidy pool covering the produc- tion of programs and administrative costs. Similar to the model of public access television in the United States, the criteria for support were often formulated according to ideas of alternative public spheres stressing both citizens involvement in local communities and giving a voice to minority or under-privileged and special in- terest groups. The different Danish associations for non- commercial local-media such as SAML or SLRTV also stress this mix of access and plurality as founding principles of their existence (SAML, 2012; SLRTV, 2012).
TV-Stop
One of the most notable TV stations that appeared on the Danish non-commercial local media scene was the predecessor of tv-tv, TV-Stop. For about a twelve year period, the channel enjoyed a mix of state-support for local media as well as support from vari- ous private funds for its left-wing political advocacy reporting (Henriksen and Mazanti, 1997, p. 18). The TV-Stop project was an initiative of people from the Danish squatting movement, hav- ing its centre in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen and other alter- native-milieus such as the Christiania community (Foreningen Støt Stop, 2012). Over a course of a few years in the early to mid- nineties, TV-STOP became the most well known local TV station in Denmark and is generally regarded as having had a significant
impact on media politics as well as on the style and contents of re- porting in Danish TV journalism.6
The TV-Stop station was especially notable as an alternative voice in the Danish media during its first five years of transmis- sions in 1990-1995. In this period, TV-Stop gained recognition for its dedicated street-style reporting and fighting for the rights of al- ternative media in Denmark. Most famously, TV-Stop was a key player in uncovering the truth behind the tumultuous events of May 18 in 1993, where masses of people in Copenhagen took to protesting in the streets, opposing the state’s ignoring of the out- come of a vote related to the Danish exceptions to the EU related Maastricht deal. During the protests, the panicking Danish police used their guns (unheard of since the Nazi occupation), acciden- tally killing one protester. As the mainstream media usually showed short, sensationalist clips of burning cars and violent pro- testers and usually shooting from the point of view of the police, TV-Stop were moving around in the crowd of protesters, shooting long sequences following the whole length of the events (Mathi- asen, Nordkap and Rugaard et al., 1998).
As TV-Stop sold their footage of the demonstrations of May 18