The broadcasting of the analogue-digital transition in Denmark, with its naturalised convergence discourse going along with the public campaign is also a fragile media event. As previously dis- cussed, Dayan and Katz (1994) notes the ceremonial aspect of a certain kind of media event such as coronations where ritualised outcomes are presented as emerging out of historical necessity (cf. Dayan, 2004, n.pag.). The broadcasting of such events tends to try and suppress any kind of conflictual positions in relation to the given ceremony, focussing on the result rather than the process. However, one of Dayan’s points is also that TV’s specific “dias- poric ceremoniality” leads to a situation where “A monumental but distant celebration triggers a multitude of micro-celebrations.” (Dayan, 2004 n.pag.; cf. Dayan and Katz, 1994, p. 145). These could for example come to the fore in the media event category which Dayan and Katz describes as the “Conquest” which “call on their audiences to be ‘conquered’ by the paradigm change that the ceremonial actor is trying to implement; to suspend skepticism.” (Dayan, 2004, n.pag.; cf. Dayan and Katz, 1994) This involves a “charismatic authority” (1994, p. 44) which in this case could be the public campaign on the analogue-digital transition in Denmark which was a multi-modal effort to turn this “digital coronation” into as smooth a process as possible. But as Dayan argues, it is also by way of this charismatic aspect that such redefinitions of norms become “subversive”, in that the change implied in a narrative of “conquest” is not as easily cast as determined by historical neces- sity and continuity as the “coronation”.
With Thrift’s notion of the cultural circuit (see chapter 2), we may say that here, a performative dimension opens itself up in the process of technological development, as a gap between the theory, understood as the supposed necessity of the change, and practice, understood as the material fragility of this media event. The poten- tial for subversion is in the case of the analogue-digital transition
not only to be located in the convergence discourse as a digital “conquest” narrative surrounding the event, but rather this aspect has to be seen in conjunction with the performative materiality of the event as an event within the media itself – where the TV- Hacknight tried to act as a transversal eventualisation, performing with this materiality.
Writing simultaneously of the analogue-digital transition as a broadcasted media event and as a material event in the television technology, Vejlgaard’s earlier quoted report notes:
The analogue shut-down will go down in TV-history, and this is why DR1 made the shut-down into an event on DR1, Saturday, October 31, 2009. Two of DR1’s well-known hosts featured in live segments in between the other programs, the whole evening until midnight. One minute prior to midnight, the transmission shifted to the control-room, where the viewers could see that the analogue signal was being shut-down just seconds before midnight. Both the viewers who were ready for receiving the new tv-signal, as well as those who weren’t, got a “black screen”. But the first group could watch television again after a few hours – and many could even watch the three new TV- channels from DR: DR Ramasjang, DR K and DR HD. (Vejlgaard, 2010, p.62)
When looking at the DR transmission referred to in Vejlgaards re- port, we find that the hosts describe the evening as a live “writing of TV History” (DR, 2009). Only, it should also be noted that there is a peculiar aspect to this piece of TV history: there is noth- ing to be seen or heard. The celebration is that of the end of a cer- tain kind of broadcasting and as such it is non-representable, con- sisting instead of a literal cut in the material flow of the medium. The way that the DR program handles this is also suggestive of this materiality as the hosts are seated not in the traditional TV studio but in a technical control-room. The male host, who’s the techni- cian, is interviewed by the female host and he somewhat down- plays the shutdown, claiming that the truly exciting stuff is hap- pening when they launch the new channels on the new digital net.
The DR broadcast downplaying of the technical nature of the analogue to digital transition resonates with the technical event in itself as difficult for traditional broadcast TV to actually represent in a comprehensible way to the viewers. As the moment of the turn-off approaches, the program presents a split-image between the control-room and a basement room where a technician, invisi- ble save for his hand, will turn off the signal. The female host bids “Farewell analogue!” as we see the technician’s hand wave and pull the plug. Now awaits six hours of black screen or white noise on all airborne transmissions, as the networks have to re-organise the technical infrastructure so that it allows for the transition to the digital only “multiplexed” signal, including the three new DR channels. Combined with the counter-acting of the charismatics of the “The New TV-Signal” campaign it was the performative possi- bilities of this material gap in the transmission that the TV- Hacknight sought to exploit as an event in itself.
Reclaiming the Black Screen
Throughout the night of Oct 31 / Nov 1, “short frequency” trans- missions were made directly from a workshop at the tv-tv studio, reaching the immediate neighbourhood (within a few hundred me- ters) as well as the crowded Folkets Hus café where a television set had been installed for receiving the pirate transmission. The mate- rial was then edited into a 30min program, as a documentation of the workshop and taking the form of an instructional video on how to set up your own analogue pirate-TV station. This program was aired nationwide on the evening of November 3, 2009 when tv-tv had its first transmission on the new digital channel for non- commercial TV.
As a meta-event reflecting on the transition, the TV-Hacknight is related to similar events that were staged when the digital switch- over was made in other countries. In one of the most publicised of such events, the American sci-fi writer and Wired journalist Bruce Sterling and Stanford University futurologist Paul Saffo were the main speakers at a "Funeral for analogue TV" held at the Berkeley Art Museum on February 17, 2009. In his "Rememberance" deliv- ery, Saffo (BAMFPA, 2009) notes that since TV has been digital
already for a long time, maybe it is not really analogue TV which is being missed but rather the prospects of "listening back" which are lost in the world of digital encryption and TV set-top boxes with proprietary standards and formats. Of course, one could add that all these can be hacked as well, yet they are not simply "out there" to be received by anyone with a radio or TV-set, which serves to marginalise any DIY, pirate transmissions as well. In this context of increased producer-user asymmetry, the TV-Hacknight was meant only as a temporary "hack", not only of the technology, but of the institutional frameworks of analogue and digital TV during the actual transition night.
The TV-Hacknight sought to engage with hacking in the spirit of what Otto Von Busch (2009) has called “the abstract machine of hacktivism” where hacking is transposed from the exclusive soft- ware context to the larger domain of DIY culture. The aim of this hack then, was to deconstruct the discourse of convergence associ- ated with the transition, mimicking the official campaign and re- educating the participants, departing from the fact that the ana- logue spectrum does not magically disappear with this digital “switchover” but is still residing in the ether and – still available for DIY culture appropriations.
The basic principles of the workshop, turning devices for receiv- ing into devices for transmitting and of connecting the new with the old, extends back in DIY media histories of which a few exam- ples will here briefly be touched upon as direct sources of inspira- tion. The first comes from the territory of radio production which in its infancy, before rigid state regulation, was seized upon by art- ists and social movements as a medium connected to Utopian fan- tasies of a democratic media. An example was the Weimar Repub- lic’s Workers Radio Movement which through associations such as the Freie Radiobund (FRB) were engaging in both legal and pirate transmissions, the goal of which were to educate the working-class not only in the reception but also in the production of the medium of radio (Lacey, 1996, p. 37). Katy Lacey (1996) observes that un- til it was cut short by the Nazi’s in 1933, one significant part of this movement was the focus on the technical resource-building as well as the program contents. As commercial sets were far too ex-
pensive for the working class at the time, the movement sought to teach workers how to build their own radio transmitters. It was under the influence of this movement that Brecht wrote his famous 1926 text, The Radio as an Apparatus for Communication, in which he also emphasised the potentials of the two-way aspect of the medium (cf. Zielinski, 1999, p. 127-28). The TV-Hacknight project followed a similar educational and economical DIY mode as found in the German Workers Radio, yet the context of the technology has changed as commercial technologies are now more widely affordable, shifting the focus from building technology from scratch to the rewiring of consumer-gadgets designed for receiving into tools of transmission.
Significant precursors to the reverse-engineering approach of audiovisual consumer technologies can be found in the Japanese “MiniFM” and “Micro TV” movements of the early and mid 1980’s. One of its main perpertrators, Tetsuo Kogawa, describes the MiniFM movement as being initially inspired by the 1970’s Free Radio experiments in France and Italy (Kogawa, 1993) but with the important modification of being even more short-range, a specific form of “narrowcasting” which came out of a combined regulatory and technological framework:
I stumbled upon Article 4 in the Radio Regulations Book. It permits transmitting without a license if the power is very weak and is intended to accommodate wireless microphones and re- mote-control toys, for example. Under this regulation, quite a few wireless transmitters were sold in toy stores and electronic markets. Also, several audio-parts makers sold the wireless ste- reo transmitters to link amplifiers to speakers without wires. My idea was to use this type of tiny unit for radio transmitting. (Kogawa, 1990, n.pag.)
What was initially an underground, left-wing movement inspired by micro-political thinkers such as Felix Guattari, MiniFM enjoyed an astounding success in Japan, reaching at least a hundred- thousand transmitters at its peak (ibid.). Some years later, Kogawa moved on to the medium of television, with the Micro TV move-
ment operating under the slogan that “every VCR could become a micro TV station” (Kogawa, n.d., n.pag). The explanation for this is the basic component from which low-range TV stations can be set up: the RF - Radio Frequency - modulator. Found in any VCR and any other device which relays the signal from a TV-antenna to a television set, such as computer games consoles, the RF modula- tor simulates a TV antenna usually operating both on the UHF as well as VHF frequency ranges. Put very simply, in a VCR, this de- vice allows you to watch television and record TV-programs at the same time: the TV-antenna cable goes through the RF modulator which then passes the signal on to the TV, and thereby the modula- tor is acting as a virtual antenna. Thus the RF modulator is a transmitter and by simply reversing the inputs and outputs, which means connecting an antenna to the modulator’s output instead of to a television set and a video/audio source to its input you will have a basic transmitter. As VHS VCR’s are now out of fashion, RF modulators can be cheaply ripped from junked technology, but they are also available as standalone units at practically any DIY electronics store.
The technological set-up of the TV-Hacknight workshop fol- lowed the basic principles of the Micro-TV set-ups: RF modulators set to unused VHF frequencies were connected to input devices such as VHS and DVD players, computers and live cameras, which combined with antennas could transmit to the immediate neighbourhood. The antennas used were also originally meant for receiving but were transformed into senders through a kind of transexual operation, revealing of how gender-roles replicate throughout technology hardware (cf. Chun, 2006). Through some cutting of cables, the “male” output connectors could easily be changed into “female” connectors and thus the antenna could re- ceive the inputs from the RF-modulated sources and pass them on in the ether. The set-up itself was quite simple yet the result was a complex media-ecology with many different inputs contributing to the contents of the transmission flow.
As seen on picture 4.8, the temporary Micro-TV station of TV- Hacknight was operating through a mix of analogue and digital, even networked inputs, making this a station with a transversal approach to technological development, utilising residual media forms as well as reverse-remediating the new into the old.
A specific precursor to this “reverse-remediation” approach that is also more pertinent to the convergence politics of the network culture context in the TV-Hacknight intervention can be found in the Italian “Telestreet” movement. Referred to as “convergence from Below” (Berardi, Jacquemet and Vitali, 2009, p. 124), this was a network of Micro TV producers that arose in 2002 as a challenge to the “Videocracy” of the Berlusconi media regime. Since, already in the 1980’s cultural critics in Italy such as Umberto Eco had dubbed the hyper-commercialised and monopoly-like Ber- lusconi television culture, “Neo-Televisione” (Eco 1984; cf. Pec- chioli, 2005), it perhaps seems curious that Micro TV resistance would appear this late. As Michael Goddard has commented on the phenomenon:
Picture 4.8. A Media Ecology of Pirate TV: RF modulator, video mixer, signal amplifier, antenna, cables, hands. Still from Reclaim Sort Skaerm/TV-Hacknight video, tv-tv, 2009. Image: tv-tv.
This experience which, coming as it did when the internet was already quite developed, has something anachronistic about it, as if it was the delayed media experience that the shocked soci- ety of the 1980s should have come up with but didn’t; an anachronism that perhaps accounts for its short duration. (Goddard, 2009, n.pag.)
The TV medium was already dead according to some of the main people behind the pioneer Telestreet channel, “Orfeo TV”, which started transmitting in a radius of 300m in Bologna, 2002 (Berardi et al. 2003, p. 22). The idea of Telestreet was not to mimic local- TV which usually transmits to a whole city or region but to engage in “proxyvision” (Ardizzoni and Ferrari, 2006, p. 176), a TV for neighbours and friends, using “shadow frequencies” in between the big networks. The wider connectivity came instead through the Internet as the Telestreets’ spread information on how to set up such stations and shared content through online networks.
Probably, it is the function of being a transversal net-television project that can be seen as the key for understanding the “anach- ronistic” approach of Telestreet, as TV was chosen as a medium harboring a certain kind of live socialisation which could be com- bined with the local-global aspects of the net. The Italian media ac- tivist and theorist Matteo Pasquinelli described this hybrid configu- ration in his “Manifesto for Urban Televisions”:
Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an exten- sion of the net: but to avoid another alternative ‘ghetto’, the horizontality of the net must meet the “socializing” power of television.
(Pasquinelli, 2003, n.pag.)
Telestreet can be considered a transversal project precisely because its subjects did not lock themselves to one medium: the Telestreet practitioners performed a convergence that was not technocratic but social, pragmatically sampling different forms of media and temporalities of network culture and creating for themselves Uto-
pian yet temporary spaces of communication, exploiting the gap between television and the net.
Even though numerous sources (Berardi, Jacquemet and Vitali, 2003; 2009; Narduzzo and Ordorici, 2006) states that the Telestreet network expanded to more than a hundred stations, from political activists to Catholic churches, their short lived na- ture suggests that not many of these were really actively transmit- ting. In a lecture at a video art festival in Copenhagen 2006, one of the main theorists of Telestreet, Franco “Bifo” Berardi already de- clared Telestreet as a practically dead phenomenon (Bifo, 2006; cf. Bazzichelli, 2008, pp. 234-235).
In 2005, Telestreet even made it big in the contemporary art world, as then Hugo Boss Prize winner Rirkrit Tirivanija set up a low-powered TV-station at the Guggenheim museum in NY, refer- encing Telestreet (Guggenheim, 2005). The same year a major ex- hibition on Telestreet and other “hacktivist” practices was held in Berlin, “Hack.itArt” curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Alexandra Weltz as a partner event of the transmediale festival, and which featured workshops and presentations from some of the main pro- ponents of Telestreet such as DiscoVolante and CandidaTV. It was at one such workshop that a representative of DiscoVolante, a Telestreet station in Senegallia, made a statement that resonates with many of the Telestreet projects, even when they were only temporary - that it was not the contents of the transmissions that were necessarily political but the acts of communication themselves (cf. Bazzichelli, 2008, p. 233). In this respect, the “brand” value of Telestreet might be seen as a success in itself, despite failures of building sustainable models in the specific Italian context. As dis- cussed in a paper by Narduzzo and Ordorici (2006), Telestreet is a story “where technology points out the limitations of the institu- tional context” in the sense that the hybridisation of the net and television was at the time used in a critique where: ”Institutional regulations were not ready to manage the people use (sic) of the broadcasting medium and in fact the new technologies that have been chosen to be implemented (i.e. digital terrestrial television service) are meant to keep the television close and regulated. ”(ibid. p. 3). In other words, Telestreet itself has to be seen as a temporary
hack, exploiting that moment when broadband Internet was not common enough to facilitate the current massification of online video and instead calling upon the micro-politics of low-range TV, which could be further relayed through online local-global com- munication flows.
The TV-Hacknight picked up this “hacktivist” thread of Telestreet and for one night “compressed” its essence of being an institutional critique and temporary intervention, now in relation to the Danish context of the analogue-digital transition. The con- text of course was different, in Denmark it was possible to obtain a license for broadcasting local television, which as previously dis- cussed had even become a form of institutionalised dissent. The in- centive to set up a Telestreet station would seem further lessened