May 22, 2025

This week we’re presenting ECSTATIC TELEVISION on Thursday, May 22nd at 8pm.

Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10! This Thursday, May 22, the From Below Microcinema tunes in to the tube with ECSTATIC TELEVISION, a program of avant-garde and experimental insurgences into the ‘idiot box.’ Broadcast television has always occupied a strange paradox amongst the visual arts, with its origins thoroughly tied to corporate interests in ways that go beyond even the industrial birth(s) of film a half-century earlier, it nonetheless represents an egalitarian potential for distribution and community-formation around what could have previously been inaccessible and cloistered forms of art-making. In our 21st century moment, it’s harder to see television as a distinct medium and form, as digital filmmaking has become de rigueur, screens become arbitrary sources of all visual practices, and the powers that be prefer us to think of it all as one endless flow of ‘content.’

ECSTATIC TELEVISION invites us to return to the revolutionary potentials of the TV box. In the latter half of the 20th century, artists and filmmakers both established and underground would make attempts to bend the broadcast waves in their image, creating weird and wonderful pieces celebrating more proactive futures for a mediated humankind. The program is anchored by Nam June Paik’s riotous and ramshackled live show “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” which went over the airwaves at midnight on January 1st, 1984, featuring a cast of characters from across the metropolitan avant-garde scene: John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman, Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham, Oingo Boingo, all hosted by a very sardonic George Plimpton. An incredible blend of late night variety show and Lower East Side Happening, “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell” is charming for, rather than despite, the numerous technical difficulties beset by trying to simultaneously broadcast it to 25 million viewers from WNET in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris, as Nam June Paik’s belief in the power of television’s indeterminacy and unpredictability comes to fullest fruition.

Along with Nam June Paik’s work, we’ll be showing an episode of Robert Ashley’s made-for-TV Opera Perfect Lives, an early example of media jamming and disruption by the Bay Area collective Ant Farm, an installation-based work of broadcast remixing by Aldo Tambellini, and a few other televisual tricks and treats. We look forward to surfing the channels with you this Thursday, May 22nd.

Electromagnetically,

Charlie, Stefan, Stark