PAPER TIGER TELEVISION

Opening event: Thursday 29 January, 6–9pm.

It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are? presents the work of Paper Tiger Television (PTTV), a US-based video production and distribution collective that used the public access channels of cable television to make nearly 400 programmes. Over four decades of critical and creative activity, they also presented hundreds of workshops and trained countless video-makers. Founded in 1981, a conjunction in which the residual political optimism from the 1960s combined with an enthusiasm for newly available video technologies, PTTV used cable television to both critique the corporate control of mainstream media and provide a radical alternative to it. Underpinned by political activism, their work was often connected with, and reported on, grassroots campaigns and interventions. In formal terms, PTTV developed in the aftermath of conceptual art and avant-garde film but, at the same time, marked a clear departure from them, both in terms of its DIY strategies and homemade feel.