Not Channel Zero was a video series produced by Black Planet Productions--a New York City-based video collective of Black and Latine video artists that formed in the early 1990s. The series combined alternative television style with a critique of commercial media, using low-end, accessible technology and extremely small budgets, sometimes only fifty dollars. For three years, the collective produced regular programming for Manhattan Neighborhood Network on the anti-Gulf war movement, homophobia in communities of color, police brutality, sexism, and urban issues.

Revising the famous Gil Scott Heron phrase, their motto was "The Revolution, Televised," asserting they were making "grassroots, Afrocentric television aiming at politics, culture, and re-education." The collective adopted Afrocentric style, form, and content, bringing hip hop strategies of slow motion, fast forwarding, and repetition to their videos as they appropriated commercial media images. NCZ GOES TO WAR (1992) was featured in this year's Signals Exhibition at MOMA.

Stream the films and join the panel talk with NCZ members and a newer collective, Shadow Work Media August 2nd at 6 PM ET.

Sponsored by Third World Newsreel and cosponsored by the Documentary Forum at CCNY

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