ASU Art Museum reception to feature live TV performance

The ASU Art Museum will present a special performance from New York-based media artists E.S.P. TV in conjunction with the museum’s season opening reception, Feb. 20.

This one-night-only live videotaping and performance event will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., with a members, ASU alumni and press preview from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

E.S.P. TV is directed by Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie. The expansive project utilizes a mobile television studio to explore the analog and digital media, artist dialogue with broadcast transmission and televisual “liveness.” Each event is a collaboration with local artists to create a new work that utilizes live taping and video mixing teams in front of an audience. They have worked with numerous other venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and General Public in Berlin.

“E.S.P. TV’s live TV studio hybridizes technologies old and new to realize synthetic environments for performance that also expose the process of production,” said Kiernan and Keddie. “Our mission is threefold: to expand on the idea of an artist collaboration and the 'live' experience; to preserve television as a relevant outlet for cultural practice; and to create programming that works against the categorization of creative communities. Each program features a mix of experimental video, performance, music and otherwise unclassifiable projects.”

At the ASU Art Museum event on Feb. 20, the group will be joined by local artists Adriene Jenik, Rachel Bowditch, Body of Light and Angela Ellsworth, and will feature videos by Peter Burr, Sabrina Ratté, Jeremy Couillard and Jeremy Rotsztein. The performances is supported by the Ovitz Family Collection in conjunction with the exhibition “Unfixed: New Painting,” on view at the ASU Art Museum through June 6.

The recording of the live performance will air at the ASU Art Museum and on Manhattan Neighborhood Network public television weekly and online. For more information about E.S.P. TV, visit esptv.com.

To learn more about the ASU Art Museum, visit asuartmuseum.asu.edu.