Proposal for an artists and activists program during the G-8 summit in Germany, June 6-8 2007

A summit is a spectacle which is organized by and in favor of the media. Neither those who rule nor those who protest can avoid such logic, but whatever they do they become part of a monstrous production. Conventional strategies ranging from constructive criticism to furious refusing come to nothing, but find themselves as component of an omnivorous economy of attention which pretends to circulate around the eight allegedly most powerful persons of this world.

KEIN.TV is a parody, in the original sense of the word: a melody that is slightly misaligned and by that uncovering the mechanisms of the media staging due to a small delay and a certain distortion. It is not about humorous effects or satirical exaggerations, but about gaining something like common access, by relatively simple means, to the courtly theater of the governmental character masks.

In respect of the modest ressources of the project there is, of course, no chance to imitate the giant media apparatus. KEIN.TV is trying to make the best of it and organize together and in collaboration with media artists and media activists from across the globe some sort of artificial coverage of the events around the G-8 summit early June in Heiligendamm? A program that could be syndicated through peer-to-peer networks on the internet, and taken up, re-projected and re-broadcasted by cultural centers, galleries, museums etc. worldwide...

KEIN.TV is an experimental arrangement which is based on the experiences from independent media centers at the occasion of several summits during the last decade and tries to relate to even longer traditions of media activism. It should be understood as a platform for detecting and dissimenating contemporary forms of artistic and political expressions.

The schedule of KEIN.TV is based on active participation. The entire archive of all programs produced during before and after the summit will be published on the internet in a resolution that allows further professional use. Partners, subscribers, users of the KEIN.TV syndicate may schedule their own customized program according to their specific interests and needs, and re-broadcast it through videoblogs, local transmission or projections.

While the governmental bodies are agonizing over the protection of what they call "intellectual property" KEIN.TV is going to actively promote "open source" and "open content". The challenge will be to practically investigate over a short period of time, to which extent the strategic conjunction between a concept of radical openness and distributed decentralized editorial work -- given the actual technical possibilities -- may creatively overcome the aporias of similar attempts in former times. At the same time KEIN.TV tries to recover the long tradition of comparable projects in the art world.

Reflections on the spontaneously and in ad-hoc fashions emerging structure which in the first place will allow and often also complicate something like a continuous service will become an integral part of the content production in KEIN.TV. The idea is that the multiplication of this sort of "mediations" may collide in interesting ways with the medially constructed immediacy and intimacy with those who rule this world.

The program formats of KEIN.TV should be similar to those of conventional TV ranging from educational programs to news and reportages, from a movie program, documentations and live-casts to talkshows and daily soaps. Within those slightly alienated formats KEIN.TV tries to adress the main topics of the G-8 summit and the counter-summit, of the protests and artist interventions.

The full service of KEIN.TV is limited to the period of the actual G-8 summit, from June 6 to June 8, 2007. First programs will be availabl starting on June 2. All programs will be released under a creativecommons share-alike license and will be available free of charge as long as possible beyond the actual project.