reenacttv.net: re-working the site(s) of new television: participants, contemporary and historical television, and the archive

This article investigates the potential for new television as arts practice. It explores this potential through revisiting acts and sites of television’s history through processes of enactment, specifically the reenactment of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, the first drama broadcast by John Logie Baird (with the BBC) in 1930. This took place in Baird’s studio at 133 Long Acre, London. The article outlines key features of various possibilities for a “new” television and a new television arts practice and considers how reenactment as an arts process might address the “trace” of historical television’s archive, and in doing so also give it a particular contemporary relevance. Theorists of memory and storage (Ricoeur and Derrida) are drawn upon to develop forms of thinking about television and performance as archive which are then drawn on to consider the prospects for reenacttv.net. Reenacttv.net is an art and television history project which will reenact The Man with the Flower in His Mouth in the 2011.