OpTV

OpTV is a videoprogram assembled for an outdoors video screen in Transvaal, a working-class neighborhood in Den Haag. The area is facing radical changes as a result of the extensive urban renewal plans of the local council. 3000 houses will be demolished to make way for 1600 more expensive houses. Its residents are being asked to move out, a process that takes place in stages: block by block. In the middle of this exodus, there is Optrek, a mobile art office, with a big TV screen attached to it.

This is the framework of OpTV, a site-specific TV, operating within an expiring public domain. OpTV is a window through which issues that are conditioning the transformation of the neighborhood are examined (security, control, urban plans and the consequences in the private life of the inhabitants), at the same time that reflects on its functionality and disfunctionality in the local context. The questions are: what is the function of this TV channel in the middle of a neighborhood that is becoming extinct? Can it operate within the social fabric of Transvaal, by offering its services as a message board for and of the local community? Can it play a critical role in placing the experience of daily life in Transvaal within the broader context of urban processes and changing political policies? Or is it condemned to playing its part in accompanying the neighborhood through the transition, as an ambivalent propaganda medium for the urban renewal project?