2017 Exhibition
22. You Don’t Say Much, Do You?
The Museum of Contemporary Arts Detroit
In You Don’t Say Much, Do You? the sensational scripts of the nightly news are dislocated from their original programming to become raw material for associative wordplay. First shown in 2016 at Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art in New York City, the work pairs dialogue spoken by anchors on nightly news reports with a dictionary of television production commands used “behind the scenes” to find new relationships through a merger of these two coded languages.
In this second iteration of You Don’t Say Much, Do You? for Dlectricity 2017, excerpts from recent local Detroit newscasts will be used as new source material. The work will be produced live, on-site, from a mobile TV van with the aid of the audience themselves, as a 2-channel video projection with sound.
Artist Information
E.S.P. TV
Through [E.S.P. TV’s] attenuation of processes of production and transmission, they actually draw attention to the cultural construction and the symbolic value, within an artworld context, of televisual liveness.” -Maeve Connolly, "TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television"
Directed by Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie, E.S.P. TV utilizes a mobile television studio to explore transmission, analog and digital media, and broadcast. Through an ongoing series of live television taping events, they place the control room of the TV studio on center stage, making the means of production into a vehicle for performance. E.S.P. TV investigate the language of television through their practice and have built a strong network through artist collaborations. From this ongoing effort, they have amassed an extensive archive detailing these unique explorations of performance, sound, and vision.
E.S.P. TV has held over 85 live taping events internationally and has aired over 100 episodes to date. In addition to live tapings and screenings, they initiated the TUBE Archive as a means for republishing works and ephemera from early artist-based engagements with broadcast media. In Fall 2014, E.S.P. TV built a mobile broadcast van and in April 2015 toured across the United States in partnership with organizations and artists across the nation. UNIT 11, a yearly residency program in transmission and electronic arts, launched from this same news van in Spring 2016.
E.S.P. TV has worked with various venues and institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art, Printed Matter, Millennium Film Workshop, Hunter College Art Galleries, Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, Knockdown Center, Roulette (Brooklyn, NY); Queens Museum (Queens, NY); Harvard Art Museums, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Ballroom Marfa, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, General Public (Berlin), STORE (Dresden), Studio XX (Montreal), SAW Media Centre (Ottawa), Kling and Bang Gallery (Reykjavik), and Pallas Projects (Dublin).