March – May 2011
420 Broome Street
New York City
Borderland, curated by Andrea Hill, employs video to explore the groundbreaking role of the public access network’s call to create and publicize content, serving as an antecedent to the Internet and future user-generated media. Other videos point to the Internet as television’s successor. The majority of the works premiered on public access networks and examine the formats and experience of television. The hub of public access activity in the United States was the Alternate Media Center at New York University, founded by George Stoney and Red Burns in 1972. Airing mostly unedited material and setting up viewings in vacant storefronts, apartment lobbies, barber shops and community centers, the Center responded to the widespread unavailability of home cable. In the spirit of these early viewings, Borderland converts a storefront located at the crossroads of Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho, into a broadcast station for videos which integrate narrative with formats ranging across documentation, infomercials, public service announcements, late night television, and Saturday morning cartoons.
The installation is in two parts with a large monitor broadcasting the works of artists Benjamin Crotty and Nour Mobarak, Noah Feehan, Rainer Ganahl, Tatiana Kronbert, and Adam Shecter. A separate work by Feehan, The Place Clock (2011), uses a sophisticated computer program to survey the street, activated by unintentional and active participants alike. Using a “slit-scan” technique to drag the central vertical axis of the camera’s image across the screen, the artist produces an accretion of daily changes – a record of the color of sunset on the walls, the shadows of passing clouds, the shapes of passers-by. This project is made possible due to the generous support of The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.