About Tele Visions

Tele Visions was an experimental TV intervention — a 5-day, 24-hour pop-up channel broadcast that occupied the television spectrum during the final days of analog TV in Australia. Devised by directors Emma Ramsay and Alex White, the project brought together screen-based and commissioned live televisual art works created specifically for and about the medium of television.

Mission

At its core, Tele Visions explored the imbalance of access to TV broadcasting — a spectrum overwhelmingly controlled by corporate and government entities, with little room for public or artistic intervention. By inviting artists to occupy the airwaves in real time, the project questioned who gets to speak through television and what television can become when its conventions are disrupted.

Exhibition & Touring

Selected works from Tele Visions were exhibited at the Experimenta: Recharge 6th International Biennial of Media Art in an interactive installation devised by Ramsay and White. The Tele Visions Afterlude touring program opened at RMIT Gallery in Melbourne on November 28, 2014, and subsequently traveled nationally across Australia. The installation featured generative channels that allowed viewers to navigate through the works, recreating the experience of channel-surfing through the original broadcast.

Approach

Rather than treating television as a passive delivery mechanism, Tele Visions treated it as a site for live artistic practice. Artists performed, screened, and broadcast works that ranged from durational live pieces to curated video art and experimental TV commercials — all transmitted across a dedicated pop-up channel for five continuous days.

Learn more about the directors →

Read about the end of analog TV in Australia →

The project emerged from a moment of technological transition, when the familiar static and signal interference of analog broadcasting were about to give way entirely to digital transmission. This threshold space became fertile ground for artists and media practitioners who wanted to interrogate television not just as a content delivery system but as a cultural and technological phenomenon in its own right. By temporarily occupying the broadcast spectrum, the intervention reclaimed a sliver of public airwaves typically reserved for commercial and state-sanctioned programming. The works produced for this window engaged directly with the materiality of television—its scan lines, its rectangular frame, its domestic placement in living rooms—while also reflecting on what might be lost or gained in the shift toward a fully digitized media landscape.