After a brief clarification of the case study methodology and my own involvement in tv-tv, I move on to the case “excavation”, that estab- lishes the context through an outline of the history of local media in Denmark, the field in which tv-tv is most concretely situated. The section traces the first steps of local broadcast media to the present politics of media production in Denmark, where forms of self- organised and DIY media expressions are situated in shifting medial, economic and regulatory systems. This will be a brief analytical his- tory of local media in Denmark, seen as part of the politics of par- ticularised civil culture and as a kind “institutionalised dissent” ex- isting in the tensions between state-regulations and an oppositional public or counter-public sphere. As will be made increasingly clear, tv-tv existed within this ambiguous territory, as it was simultane- ously a regular non-commercial local-TV channel transmitting through the airwaves and a DIY art project with a clearly stated in- tent to form a kind of media counter-public. This means tv-tv was subject to all the juridical baggage and regulations of the Danish state for local media associations at the same time as it was organ- ised in a decentralised manner by a network of producers, coming mostly out of a contemporary arts background, with the explicit in- tent of creating an alternative voice in the Danish media through self-organising, collective and DIY modes of production.
The tensions between different organisational logics in the tv-tv project resonates with the notion of counter-publics developed by Michael Warner (2002a; 2002b). For Warner, counter-publics are a precarious form of organisation built on the same discursive powers as that of hegemonic publics, and which while queering these powers in different ways, are always prone to appropriation by the social mainstream. The counter-publics perspective is used for the section following the initial historical contextualisation, and entails an initial analysis of the tv-tv manifesto as a founding document of tv-tv, and as a text which attempts to call tv-tv as a form of counter-public into action. The analysis of how the mani- festo is part of a counter-public discourse will serve as an entry- point to a close-reading of Alle kan lave tv (Om Bush)/Everyone
guably only, tv-tv programs explicitly produced in the spirit of the tv-tv manifesto text.
The analysis of Everyone can Make TV (About Bush) is also a comparative one, considering that I bring in the context of 1970’s TV-activist projects in the form of the “historical tv-tv”, namely the North American cable access organisation TVTV and their production Four More Years (TVTV, 1972). Through this com- parative analysis I wish to discuss the tension in the organisation and production of tv-tv as on the one hand being a project that tried to constitute a kind of mass-media counter-public by echoing earlier forms of activist television in the style of Guerilla Television
(Shamberg, 1971), and on the other hand, being an art project working in the tradition of institutional critique. Rounding off this analysis of tv-tv as a form of counter-public, I discuss some of the observations that I’ve made during the research period of the tv-tv working structure, especially concerning the stations’ recruitment process and how that again relates back to its ambivalent status in between art and activism. Some of the different tv-tv strategies of participative production as well as interventions into the television institution are discussed through my further analysis of a number of programs and tv-tv projects.
Finally, the “Intervention” section will talk about a specific pro- ject that I organised within the tv-tv framework. The main and concluding focus of this section will be the TV-Hacknight interven- tion which explicitly addresses the analogue/digital switch-over in Denmark and also marks the end of tv-tv as a local TV-channel.
On the whole, the case study chapter follows a timeline which, despite some detours and bifurcations along the way, is mostly chronological, starting with the birth of tv-tv as a local TV station in 2005 and concluding with the restructuring of the station for the national digital net at the end of 2009.
Apart from the direct heritage of the predecessor of tv-tv, the left-wing advocacy and community channel TV-Stop, the practice of artistic media-activism as critical interventions into television has in itself many historical precedents (cf. Joselit, 2008). This case study deals with some of the TV-Stop context, providing compara- tive readings wherever it is beneficial for the main concern of situ-
ating tv-tv’s transversal position in the contemporary media-scape. A disclaimer is suitable though: my goal is not here to write a his- tory of community media and artistic projects within television on a whole, but I have tried to accommodate these contexts through references made to earlier practices in the actual analysis of tv-tv projects such as the close reading of Everyone can Make TV
(About Bush) contra Four More Years.