• The telenovela spoof Cosmic Serpent plays at the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival on Wednesday at 7 PM.

Starting Monday at 7 PM and continuing through Sunday, May 24, Links Hall will host the first-ever Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, a celebration of works that blur the line between TV shows and conceptual art. Some of the selections were made for TV, some were made for gallery installations, and some will be created live at the festival. (Each night of the festival will conclude with a performance of some sort—local artists Seth Vanek and sometime Reader contributor Lori Felker will host live talk shows on the first and last evening respectively.) Spanning four decades, these works manipulate the distinct formal properties of broadcast television to create oddball humor, radical political messages, and abstract beauty. It’s as if “Weird Al” Yankovic had designed his beloved cult comedy UHF for the Whitney Biennial rather than America’s multiplexes.

Some of the younger artists in the Live to Tape line-up uphold the production methods of early citizen-made TV in hopes of capturing its democratic spirit. Portland-based artists Emily Bernstein and Julia Calabrese shot their telenovela spoof Cosmic Serpent (playing in Wednesday’s program) at their local public access station in front of a live audience. The LA-based collective Experimental Half Hour, who will present a live telecast from California next Thursday night, creates their work in a facsimile of an old public access studio. The low-budget studio environment brings with it certain conventions that are familiar to anyone raised on network television, such as a flat backdrops and three-camera setup. Many people find these conventions limiting, but in the right hands they can become exciting creative tools. “When you’re inside the conventions of television—the medium and also the physical space of a television box—what would be a subtle change in a movie could register as a shock,” says Malmed. “I’d say it’s a lot easier to shock [audiences] on television than in performance art, where people are prepared for it.” Classic TV often built upon a presumed intimacy between program and audience—a relationship that artists can pervert to get under the skin of their viewers.