E.S.P. TV, Athena Christa Holbrook, Kit Fitzgerald & Liz Flyntz

Teaches at Pioneer Works

E.S.P. TV hybridizes technologies old and new, contemporary and obsolete, to realize the live TV studio as a site for performance-based works and utilizes a mobile TV studio to explore transmission, analog and digital media, and broadcast. Through an ongoing series of live television taping events, they place the control room of the TV studio at center stage, turning the means of production into a vehicle for performance. They investigate the language of television and have built a strong network through artist collaborations. E.S.P. TV has worked with a wide variety of venues and institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Spectacle Theater (Brooklyn), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Museum of Human Achievement (Austin), S1 (Portland, OR), Nightingale Cinema (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, General Public (Berlin), STORE (Dresden), Studio XX (Montreal), Kling and Bang (Reykjavik), and Pallas Projects (Dublin).

Athena Christa Holbrook is an audio-visual archivist dedicated to the history, preservation, and presentation of time-based media art. She is a Collection Specialist in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art. She has extensive experience working for artists, private art collections, and major arts institutions. She specializes in the preservation and collection management of film, audio, analog and born-digital video, software-based artwork, and performance.

Combining what she terms the “cool, electronic art of video and the warmer, naturalist arts of painting and music,” Kit Fitzgerald creates gestural works that suggest vibrant moving canvases. Working with the Fairlight Computer Video Instrument (CVI), Fitzgerald generates and orchestrates imagery in real time, creating vivid compositions of color, form, light, time, and sound that unfold by the artist’s hand. Since 1985, she has applied this technique of improvisational “video painting” to live music/video performances with musicians, including Peter Gordon, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Max Roach.

Fitzgerald is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Program. She was artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen from 1977 to 1982, and has been a member of the Directors Guild of America since 1980. She was a 1989 Fellow of the American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women. Fitzgerald’s work has been broadcast around the world, and exhibited at festivals and institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Gallery Watari, Tokyo; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Bonn Videonale; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She lives in New York.

Liz Flyntz is a curator and writer focusing on media art, networks, and emergent technologies. She studied art and communications at Antioch College, media art history and theory in the Media Study Department at SUNY Buffalo, and media art and design at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Liz has organized exhibitions, festivals, and symposia in Baltimore, MD, Washington, DC, Olympia, WA, Buffalo, NY and Weimar, Germany. Liz lives in Brooklyn and is currently working on a research project about the radical media/architecture group Ant Farm and early video sharing networks.