This event highlights the work, “Daytime Viewing” (1979-80) by Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom. Daytime Viewing is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane. Newly transferred and never before seen footage from pilot performance, early video work by Rosenboom on a Radioshack TRS-80 computer, and a live fashion show of tele-characters from the piece will make up this multisensory event.

We have invited six contemporary artists working across media in performance, video, sound and fashion to interpret six characters depicted in the Daytime Viewingteleplay for a live televisual fashion show. Erica Magrey, Heidi Jien Jouet, Dana Bell, Johanna Herr, and MV Carbon will reinterpret the original character studies of Daytime Viewing in a live broadcast event. The newly transferred video and photographs of the original performance by Humbert and Rosenboom will be integrated into the larger exhibition set, in large scale projections, monitor playback, and a real time, live to tape mix. The full piece will be taped and mixed during the actual event for television broadcast — both online, and on Manhattan cable TV.

Special thanks to David Rosenboom, Jacqueline Humbert, and Tommy McCutchon, Unseen Worlds. The event coincides with the release of “Daytime Viewing” as an LP by Unseen Worlds.
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