In 2008 AV Festival invited Sarah Cook with curator Kathy Rae Huffman to curate the first official AV large-scale group exhibition Broadcast Yourself, which deliberately built bridges between video and newer media. The exhibition toured to Cornerhouse Manchester and was seen by over 9,000 people, and Art Monthly said "There is something immediately welcome ... about an exhibition devoted to the way that artists over the past 40 years have succeeded in opening TV up as a cultural forum " (Usherwood 2008). In Newcastle, the exhibition received the most visitors of any AV exhibition, around 4,700, and was described by audiences as of high artistic quality, "Compelling and illuminating" and "thought provoking", and by a festival artist Atau Tanaka as "A very well curated exhibit." (ANE 2008, pp. 11, 12, 73).
2008
Artistic/Creative Exhibition
Broadcast Yourself: Artists interventions into television and strategies for self-broadcasting from the 1970s to Today
http://www.broadcastyourself.net/
Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle; Cornerhouse, Manchester. Curated by Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman.
With work from Shaina Anand, Active Ingredient, Miranda July, Doug Hall and Chip Lord, Bill Viola, Chris Burden, VGTV, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie and others, co-curated with Kathy Rae Huffman for AV Festival 08: Broadcast. Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle, Feb 28 - April 5 2008; Cornerhouse, Manchester, June 13 - August 10, 2008.
The exhibition also involved:
- Broadcast Yourself paper presentation at Future Histories of the Moving Image, Conference, University of Sunderland, 16-18 November 2007.
- Broadcast Yourself invited speaker and paper presentation at Video Vortex Conference in Amsterdam on the panel Curating Online Video, 18-19 January 2008. The paper was subsequently published as "The work of art in the age of ubiquitous narrowcasting? What early artist-led interventions into television broadcasting can teach artists about putting themselves online." In Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, It is available online from http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/ or http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/inc-readers/videovortex/
- A performance and discussion with Joseph Delappe and Rod Dickinson at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, October 24, 2007.
- A performance and presentation by Cory Arcangel at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle, December 5, 2007 (transcription is in the process of being edited and will be made available online).
Broadcast Yourself: Artists interventions into television and strategies for self-broadcasting from the 1970s to Today