![Paper Tiger Television, Ynestra King Reads Seventeen: Selling the All-American Girl,1982 [still]. Painted by Johanna Vanderbeek.](/media/cache/45/88/4588db2c7d49c8d2b22a35b4f798d4f0.jpg)
![Paper Tiger Television, Joan Does Dynasty, 1985 [still].](/media/cache/22/d1/22d14587ec19711e68f22f1fff791fdc.jpg)
St James’, New Cross, London SE14 6AD
It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are? is the first exhibition in the UK to present the work of Paper Tiger Television (PTTV), a US-based video production and distribution collective. Over four decades of critical and creative activity, they made nearly 400 programmes for the public access channels of cable television, presented hundreds of workshops and trained countless video-makers. Founded in 1981, a conjunction in which residual political energies and optimism from the 1960s combined with an enthusiasm for newly available video technologies, PTTV critiqued corporate control of the communications industry and provided a radical alternative to it. Due to franchise agreements made with local municipalities, which ensured that most cable systems in the United States had a few public access channels, PTTV enacted its ideological critique on television itself.
