Envision Television: charting the cultural geography of homelessness

Abstract

of budding urban artists and disaffected young people, Curry Loc addresses the camera with a proud and defiant rap. Dressed in shades of blue that mark him as a member of the Crips – one of several gangs that inhabit the streets of Brooklyn, New York – he recites a litany of social and economic ills that make up his day, and the days of his family and friends. But this is not another styleconscious gangsta rap music video revelling in violence, misogyny and conspicuous consumption. Nor is it one more in a series of spurious investigative news reports on troubled times in America’s ‘inner cities’ – an Orwelian turn of phrase, popular with bureaucrats, politicians and television talking heads, that obscures the economic deprivation and racial divisiveness it is meant to reveal. This video, and others like it, was produced by a team of homeless teenagers as part of a media arts and training programme called Envision Television (e-TV). e-TV is the latest youth programme offered by Downtown Community Television (DCTV), a media access centre located in New York City’s Chinatown. Founded in 1972 by documentary film-makers Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno, DCTV provides free and low-cost video production training, equipment and services to individuals and community groups whose voices and perspectives are largely absent from mainstream media. In addition to facilitating video programme production, DCTV exhibits and distributes programming that is rarely, if ever, available through commercial or public service media outlets. Over the years, DCTV’s in-house productions and community projects have graphically demonstrated video’s potential as an agent of progressive social change and a vehicle for local cultural expression. Of DCTV’s most notable tapes, those dealing with the immigrant experience in America, everyday life in Castro’s Cuba, exposés on the condition of the city’s health care and prison systems and the consequences of substance abuse have won numerous awards for their aesthetic innovations and journalistic integrity. Like other media access initiatives, then, DCTV plays a significant but largely unacknowledged role in enhancing the social, civic and cultural life of local communities. Supported through the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, the e-TV scholarship programme offers media literacy and video production training at two of the city’s temporary housing facilities, the Amboy Neighborhood Center in Brooklyn and the HELP centre in the Crotona section of the Bronx. This unique training programme gives 40 young people living in temporary housing unprecedented access to digital video cameras, lights, microphones and related