[Reader-list] Telestreet and NGVision achieve the “Award of Distinction” at the Linz Prix Ars Electronica 2005

[casa logic]

- press release - 

Telestreet, the Italian network of street televisions and
NewGlobalVision, online video archive and distribuition project,
achieved the "Award of Distinction" at the Linz Prix Ars Electronica
2005.

The Prix Ars Electronica, currently addressed towards its nineteenth
edition, is the most accredited international competition concerning
arts, technologies, and digital media-based social practices. The
"Digital Communities" category rewards the innovative projects
concerning e-democracy, digital cities and citizens' participation.
"Evaluations will honor visionary and forward-looking projects; those
that display consummate social and technological innovativeness and
that have been successfully set up and established. Digital
Communities projects should enable human beings to enjoy the widest
possible access to technology networks, and the 'Digital Commons'"
(Prix's call for works).

The international prize represents an acknowledgment for the
Telestreet and NewGlobalVision network activity in reclaiming the
right of free open access of the means of communications within a
country, as Italy, where the right of expression seems loosing value.
The movement of "antennas toward people" aims at enabling citizens to
freely use the communication channel of television not only to receive
information but especially to produce it. By so doing, it places
individuals in the position of closely interacting and sharing as much
as of producing information. "Don't watch TV, just do it!" is the
slogan of the street televisions.

The first street television, Orfeo TV, has started to broadcast on
June 21st 2002 in Bologna. Since 2002, over 150 street-tvs were born
all around Italy. They transmit via ether utilizing the so-called
"shadow cones" where the signals of commercial terrestrial
broadcasters cannot reach because obstructed by natural or manufacture
barriers.

We are dealing here with tiny street or neighbourhood televisions. The
very low cost of the equipment gives everyone the opportunity of
transmitting information usually not gathered by mainstream networks.
Moreover, antenna broadcasting is combined with the Internet allowing
the sharing of video works and the management of the circuit of the
street-tvs scattered all over Italy.

The international acknowledgment allows in thinking to claim the media
free access even within new grounds like digital terrestrial and
wireless. Convergence between terrestrial broadcasting and internet
streaming dismantles the mediascape as we know it and creates a new
one on the principles of decentralization of production,
decentralization of resources and decentralization of points of
emissions.The theme uphold by Telestreet in Italy is going exactly
toward this direction: the acknowledgment of 10% of the ether
frequencies for communitarian use.

www.telestreet.it
www.ngvision.org

Orfeo Tv - Telestreet	
mail: 
orfeotv at telestreet.it

NGVision.org
mail: ngv at ecn.org