The Deptford.TV workshops started on the 3rd of march 2006 with TV hacking, presented by the bitnik media collective. Bitnik presented their projects and their focus on hacking media & mapping media. 
picture by James Stevens
video of the tv hacking presentation
video of the q&a of the presentation
the telestreet film
Carmen started showing their mapping project where bitnik programmed a software for mapping political situations in countries and to display them on a world map. In this project they try to show how the environment influences the information show and how people communicate – the mapping project was shown at the world summit on information society in Geneva – it was done with the suport of “science et citĂ©” – to debate the information poor & the information rich in our world.
In 2004 bitnik started to work with TV and the question of how to open up this one to many communication system to a many to many system. One starting point was with the question “how can a community make their own tv station?” and the other starting point was “how can the internet be used to achieve that?”.
Bitnik wanted to approach this experiment with the copy & paste attitude of the net generation. In TV hacking bitnik understands the internet as a tool to collect content. Bitnik started off by installing a pirate TV station by building a small broadcasting system with a range of 2km in Zurich, Switzerland
TV hacking referes to the tactical media project telestreet in Italy. Italy has a long history with tactical media because they have a very restricted television system which is control by one person: Berlusconi. They have a long history for pirate tv.
In the beginning they made pirate TV station which served the whole city – but soon they had to do a different approach, because they where easy to track. So they started to distribute over mini senders which where mashed up.
One of the first experiment was the distribution of football. Because sky had bought up all the rights for football in Italy fans could only watch it with a pay license – so telestreet started to distribute the games in two different ways: one in showing normal films on tv but as soon there was a goal they interrupted with people clapping and showed the score (of course if you liked the film more you missed something 🙂 and the other approach was that one guy bought a pay satellite dish and they re-broadcasted this signal to the neigbourhood.
Another project is van gogh television, trying to make television interactive they used, telephone, fax and modem – and played the game tik,tak,toe – they used also the news ticker which now days is used by almost an television station. In this new ticker they showed the television number and people could call up and participate. they distributed over satelite.
The third project influenced the work of bitinik was paper tigger television. A new york based collective which produces videos distributed to community television station arround the states. During the 91 gulf war they distributed a different view on the war. the first idea was let’s collect material from people and make a broadcast for several hours. But bitnik quickly realised that there where not enough people providing content. Bitnik decided therefor to search for content – do allow the community to search for content over the internet
Bitnik created the copyfight system a simple enginge see – copyfight allows you to upload clips to the server but also to search for clips over filesharing systems and to program them into the system which distributes over an antenna. In Switzerland it is not as big as a problem as the aerial distribution is mostly not used anymore – most of the tv distribution goes over cable – in comparison to the uk where freeview is coming.
Bitnik started experimenting with the system and started using it for parties as well during wich we used a bunch of tv’s in a whole house and distributed to all the rooms.
Stopp gap tv is a project which uses the concept of gap fillers on television. With the copyfight system bitnik didn’t had the producers to make a program – but bitnik also didn’t wanted to do a television program – bitnik where more interested in the research on tv and internet – they found out that in Switzerland the experimental TV is only during late night – as per example in the UK there are the game shows – so they realised that the night gap is the interaction time – bitnik was surprised on the big amount of people using this late night programs – bitnik build a roboter with a camera on the top of it transmitting data to the television station – which is driven by solar energy – on top we had the solar lights giving the power – the robot was recieving sms text send by mobil phone and the user could direct the robot and see the movement on the copyfight television.
The copyfight system uses also sources from the internet which can be downloaded to the server – you can make your own playlist – the idea is a self editorial system – a system which is open, the user connects to the web site and programs the system. Per example you can use the prellinger archive – per example “night of the living death” the zombie movie is in public domain – you can take it legal and distribute it. Copyfight is not a do it yourself system it is a compose it yourself system – three steps: 1. you find the clips per example over file sharing system – 2. you add metadata and add it to the database – 3. and last you distribute it over the copyfight system.
Bitinik thinks that the source of program produced by public television should be open, as the public paid for it – the BBC is running a project called creative archive – also have a look at free culture…
On the second day the 4th of march 2006 the workshop participants split up into groups and brainstormed what topics they could document, film, produce for the next workshop, the regeneration documentation.
please also see our brainstorming session…
Luke Hearn’s comment (workshop participant), quoted from archive.org wayback machine::
RE: generation collaboration
Running as part of the Node London’s ‘Deptford TV’ event cluster “Documentary Database” on Saturday was the third and final in a series of workshops, exploring audio-visual documentation of the regeneration process in Deptford.
Located at SPC media lab (previously Deckspace HQ), at Borough Hall, Greenwich, this has been host to the do-it-yourself media for over a decade, long before the Internet existed, as we know it today.
Run by Adnan Hadzi, an artist/curator and PhD student, the workshop is dedicated to the idea of bringing a community of individuals together who are interested in taking part in the democratisation of the media making process whereby we can all subvert the user/producer paradigm.
Consisting of mainly local film-makers, activists and students interested in documenting the so-called “regeneration” process, the idea behind the “Documentary Database” workshop specifically was to transfer this extensive (uncut) video documentation to a database on a server (provided by the Boundless.coop network) so that it is freely available (at watch.deptford.tv) under a Creative Commons “share-alike” license (permitting others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work).
As always not only is the project focused on user-based collaboration, but it is also enabled by collaborating with other artists and art groups. For instance the web-based software is custom built by collaborators bitnik. And of course the master of all things wireless, James Stevens is involved.
It will be interesting to see what kind of output this online material has. By the sound of things Adnan is very open to the possibilities, and not very specific about how this might work. Maybe because he’s not really sure yet himself, or perhaps because it is the process of sharing and collaboration that are more important to this project than the outcome.
The Deckspace space is a phenomenon which anyone having even the remotest interest in digital arts scene should be aware of. Check the Node.L calendar to see when the next Deptford TV event cluster event takes place.
We like to give space to interesting documentary showings and opportunities around the country and world. But at the moment, there are far too many exciting doc screenings and events coming up to give them the space they deserve, so here’s a quick whizz through them, and apologies for being too brief: