PUBLIC ACCESS PARTY is an on-going curatorial analog video project conceptualized by a.r. havel with collaborating participants. performers are asked to envision their anachronistic public access persona in a faux-studio backdrop designed by havel. Some are personal ads, some are educational PSAs, cooking demos, or late-night basement no-Talent Shows. In every case, virtuosity is OUT. So, Tune IN now!
<< This installation of the project at Lagos Space in Mexico City in the Winter of 2023, featured original videos from the project spanning 2010 to 2023, but also included videos from Paper Tiger TV’s archives from the 1980s.
Participants were asked to fill out Public Access Orientation worksheets where they can explore their possible persona, often an absurdist caricature of themselves. The project invites audiences to consider lineages of media access and the democratization of video/image creation with the wide-spread use of smartphones. For younger participants, the concept of having to carve out mediated space is novel; and more contemporarily, with the prolific use of A.I. to create whole virtual mediated worlds, the D.I.Y. aesthetics harken beyond a nostalgic idea of production; they lend themselves to the inherent political questions that an organization like Paper Tiger TV represented.