Underground Networks

New York City's downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s is synonymous with underground film, video, and performance art. Many of the artists who would come to define this period also dabbled in public access cable television-which was then a very new technology-as host, producer, guest, or studio audience member. Drawing on archival research and personal interviews, this book, the first full-length study of this vibrant body of work, explores how poets, painters, and filmmakers produced talk shows and soap operas that warped the heteronormative conventions of prime-time fare. Working outside the established art world, artists screened their shows in lofts and nightclubs and aired them live on Manhattan Cable, provoking frequent tabloid censure. Affirming the importance of cable television to the downtown art scene, Underground Networks recovers an essential strand of avant-garde screen culture and a user-driven media ecology with uncanny contemporary resonance.

Benjamin Olin is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Shue Yan University, where he teaches literary, film, and cultural studies. His writing has appeared in Art Journal, Framework, and Millennium Film Journal.