Shattered glances from the Italian mediascape

It’s at home that consensus grows up: family and television are the basic tools to create consensus and social control. If we want to traverse the trajectories of television consumption we have to become the media in the space of communication flux. In the last ten years we have witnessed a process of diffusion regarding communication technology, wider accessibility to media tools, and an increased awareness of one’s expressive possibilities. This situation favors the mutation of the consumer into the producer. Technology can be reverse engineered and you can transform your video player and electrical junks in a microTV station. The consumer, following her/his own natural instinct towards consuming, develops the expertise to find online the shows of her favorite soap opera or the latest Hollywood movie, and download them easily at home. This increasing experience in sharing facilitates the encounter of users with networks made of independent producers and independent consumers.

NewGlobalVision (NGV) is the first Italian free access video archive, a visual encyclopedia organized according to content and author. It collects and distributes videos on the Internet using peer-to-peer networks to overcome the bandwidth problems related to the size of video files. It is a collaborative and open archive in constant development, a reaction to corporate capitalism and its global censorship.

NGV is a basic tool for the network of Telestreet, the independent TV network in Italy. Telestreet are (still) pirate TV and transmit with low power kits, which cover a few kilometers. Enough to make a difference. NGV provides the networking structures to the different telestreets, which are scattered all over Italy and have the power to cover with their broadcast only small geographical areas.

Telestreet’s network is not just a response to the Prime minister’s monopoly over communication (he is just an agent of global business elites), but it springs from the awareness that TV is a biopolitical weapon. The Telestreet phenomenon is the natural reaction of those who grow up with a television as a baby sitter; those who consider TV as one of the more natural and diffuse means of communication and at the same time are dispossessed of the rights and the tools to communicate.

To self manage a small TV broadcast means to understand how much it is important for everyone to appropriate her/his time out of the market logic. To make your own television is a way to spend time together, to make new relationships; a small broadcast TV station is a meeting point to carry on common projects and to change our life as we know it.

The creation and filling of a daily palimpsest is actually the most expensive need of independent TV. NGV provides a perfect solution: you can share and download movies, fiction, spots and information from all over the world and broadcast it to the local audience; vice versa everyone can produce locally and distribute globally bypassing the media mainstream. NGV works as a blood network and as a nervous system that feeds and gives feedback to the whole body.

For example, events of common interest that are not covered by the mainstream media for political reasons (such as World Wide or local demonstrations), NGV and Telestreet’s network are able to bridge the lack of information thanks to ad hoc live streaming and to the telestreets capability to reach an audience which is otherwise cut out from digital fluxes of communication.

Telestreet’s network needs to work at different speed on different levels: the affirmation of independent media autonomous zones is as much important as the infiltration of language viruses in the everyday public flux of consciousness through the practice of subvertisment. The creation of new landscapes in the actual media reality is a revolutionary gesture whose goal is to dismantle the status quo of the communication ivory tower; the use of the Internet to share creative resources is a Trojan horse to enter the new mediascapes. Sharing video online is a vital practice.

NGV and Telestreet together form a powerful dispositive: we need to build a network made up of a multiplicity of open points of broadcast, capable of changing perceptions and social behavior around the medium of television.

Awful, impossible futures are chasing us, it’s a reality show where we are all prisoners and it’s happening right now. To write scripts that we like to play, we need to be a critical mass aware of our power: a small viral signal can multiply itself when communication is no more one-to-many but many-to many.