Through [E.S.P. TVâs] 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.â -Maeve Connolly, "TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television"
E.S.P. TV is a collaboration between artists Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie that utilizes a mobile television studio to explore televisual language. They focus on the performative nature of production itself: through installations, broadcasts and live television taping events. They have built a strong network through artist collaboration, amassing an extensive archive detailing these unique explorations of performance, sound, and vision.
To date, E.S.P. TV has held over 100 live television taping events internationally and is broadcast and streamed weekly in several cities across the USA. In Fall 2014, E.S.P. TV built a mobile electronic studio out of a defunct television news van and in April 2015, toured it across the United States in partnership with local artists and arts organizations. Now named UNIT 11, the van is a mobile studio for the study of broadcast, transmission, and electronic arts.
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, New School, Recess, Hunter College Art Galleries (NY, NY); Interstate Projects, Spectacle Theater, Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, Roulette (Brooklyn, NY); Queens Museum (Queens, NY); Harvard Art Museums, Franklin Street Works (Stamford, CT), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX), 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).
E.S.P. TV is also a recognized 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization. We have received grant funding from Franklin Furnace, Wave Farm, and the Augustine Foundation and have been Artist-in-residence at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Pioneer Works, Museum of Art and Design New York, and Recess Gallery. Workshops and lectures have been conducted at Hunter College, Wave Farm, Cranbrook Academy of Art, (MI), Camera Club New York, PNCA (OR), Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (AZ), Parsons/ New School, and Carnegie Mellon School of Art (PA).
Image still credit: E.S.P. TV at Knockdown Center, Queens, NY 2015
Crew
Creative Directors:
Scott Kiernan: scott@esptv.com
Victoria Keddie: victoria@esptv.com
Production Assistants:
Ethan Miller, Lee Lichtsinn
Camera Operators:
Matt Bonner, Julia Biasi, Joe DeNardo, Jeffrey Hagerman, Michael Hernandez-Stern, Lauryn Siegel, Josh Steinbauer, Greg Thomas, Cat Tyc