On the stage of an abandoned television studio, a semblance of Alf¹ lies, suspended in the uncertainty of a possible return to the airwaves. A limp effigy of a somewhat outdated—and controversial—television star, the muppet appears as a rebus of a television activity held in abeyance, awaiting its potential revival. Within a scenography composed of floating textiles produced with the collaboration of Marie Descraques², a studio table made of pizza boxes, a series of screens broadcasting images from the Hibou TV channel and its prime show, abandoned costumes scattered here and there, and an unoccupied technical control room, a liminal environment unfolds, awkwardly inhabited by the familiar figure of the alien. Halfway between a talk-show set and an installation, Jean-Alain Corre’s new proposal at Bétonsalon invites both reverie and action. Caught between the nostalgia of a mass medium facing imminent obsolescence and a desire to invest in and extend the televisual realm, the exhibition presents the remains of the Hibou TV Show³, a phantasmagorical program co-written with author Gaëlle Obiégly, where Alf, a grandmother, a pizza delivery man becoming a TV host, old commercials, news, love, work, and the stars all coexist. By adopting the form of a talk-show —an entirely television format centered on the act of conversation itself (the talk is the show)—Jean-Alain Corre pursues a poetic, fumbling, and chatty exegesis of television. “Hibou TV Show” follows in the footsteps of “public-access television”,  developed by artist collectives in the 1970s, particularly in the United States. The television set becomes both a resonating platform for social and political issues rarely covered by mainstream channels, and a laboratory for experimental forms at the intersection of different media genres⁴. Claiming a certain DIY aesthetic and a playful, irreverent humor, these collectives embrace distortion, disruption, and the scrambling of the video signal. By parodying certain popular programs, spectacularizing artistic performances, and incorporating “off-screen” elements that reveal what goes on behind the scenes and the technical team, they expose the mechanics of image production in all their materiality and visual grammar. With its modular staging, deeply collaborative nature, and flexible programming schedule, Hibou TV chanel aims to be cumulative and self-reflective. It features videos co-produced with children, families, students from Émile Levassor elementary school (Paris, 13th arrondissement), students and staff from Paris Cité University and the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris Cergy, as well as the Bétonsalon team. Alongside these videos, other formats—capsules, test patterns, AI-generated cartoons—activate a shared imagination of popular television. They include references to iconic french show (Tournez Manège, Le Juste Prix, Le Bigdil), afternoon movies (Sister Act, Ghost), series and sitcoms (Beverly Hills, Premiers baisers, Heartbreak High), as well as old-fashioned commercials. Together, these materials contribute to expanding and enriching Jean-Alain Corre’s lore⁵. This “pocket fund” of television, inherited from a specific era with its joys and alienations, is reappropriated here in a hauntological⁶ and sensitive approach. These collective productions will be presented in the exhibition space and streamed online. The choice of a second broadcast channel, such as Twitch, where active communities gather around formats derived from television—serves a dual purpose: to infiltrate an existing network by playing with its codes and to encourage a form of direct interaction with online audience through the logic of feedback (and instant online commenting), which lie at the core of the ‘televisualities’ explored in the artistic field⁷. Behind this technological evolution, however, a shift in affect becomes apparent : yesterday’s popular shows seem to inhabit, even haunt, today’s audiovisual productions, in a nostalgic movement — whether real or feigned — blurred by the mirages that artificial intelligence generates from these memory vestiges floating in our minds. With Hibou TV, Bétonsalon becomes the stage for a resolutely open talk-show, where improvisation plays a central role. Uncompromising in the collective dimension of his approach, Jean-Alain Corre also invites the Bétonsalon team to take to the stage. In a joyfully chaotic horizontality, everything that happens at Bétonsalon can—or must?—lend itself to the game of television staging: conferences, surveys, meetings, workshops, tours, etc., thereby undermining the established hierarchies between what is presented in the art center and what unfolds off-screen in the institution. Hosted by non-professional actors and other excited TV enthusiasts, Hibou TV explores the malleability of roles and the dynamics of collective learning. Through this prism, our programs are reconfigured, our positions readjusted between the audience, the set, and behind the scenes, seeking new forms of redistribution. The aim is to produce amateur shows and perform them with seriousness, in order to discover in return the distorting mirror of our own organizations and projections. Playing at doing television will be as important as the images produced (the making is the show). By drawing on the codes and paradox of proximity inherent to the talk-show, Jean-Alain Corre’s “Hibou TV Show” creates a space to explore the contradictions of our television experiences. He thus continues the work begun by Johnny, a sort of fictional avatar of the artist and “slightly weirdo anti-hero,”⁸ who already multiplied attempts to “keep alive (these) machine(s)”⁹ that shape our daily lives, rhythms, and imaginations. In its determined quest to “transcribe the hazy syncope of a certain era,”¹⁰ the “Hibou TV Show” invites us to delve into the black box of our televisual ghosts, as if to stop skimming the surface and better play with its “promises of sparkle.”¹¹ Vincent Enjalbert, Elena Lespes Muñoz and Émilie Renard

A media theorist, filmmaker, cyberfeminist, navigator of seas and internets, Nathalie Magnan (1956–2016) contributed in a transdisciplinary, vibrant and generous way to the history of thought, media and technologies, feminism, and LGBTQI+ struggles. A teacher, webmistress, hacktivist, and artist—though she never claimed that title—Nathalie Magnan played a crucial role as a connector between geographic scenes, intellectual and activist communities, and disciplinary fields that rarely intersect or enter into dialogue. Favouring collective work, with feminist and rhizomatic methodologies in which do-it-yourself practices were both empowering and contagious, Nathalie Magnan consistently worked toward collecting, bringing together and intersecting images, texts, people, struggles and machines. As a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1980s, she worked as an assistant to philosopher and historian of science Donna Haraway, and later translated into French Haraway’s seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto. Nathalie Magnan was also involved in the public-access television collectives Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Television. After returning to France in the 1990s, she directed several films, including Lesborama for Canal+’s first Nuit Gay in 1995. A co-founder and for a time president of the Paris Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (now Chéries-Chéris), and a contributor to the magazine Gai Pied, she later became a professor at the École nationale supérieure d’art in Dijon, and subsequently in Bourges. Deeply engaged in cyberfeminist, tactical media and hacktivist circles, Nathalie Magnan organised digital counterculture events, moderated feminist mailing lists, coded websites, wrote and translated texts, and coordinated collective publications. In 2000, in response to the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) held in Paris without a single woman speaker, she organised an ISEA Off event in a women-only format at the Information and Documentation Centre of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2004 and 2005, in Finland and later in the Strait of Gibraltar, she organised two sea crossings entitled Sailing for Geeks, bringing together artists and activists around communication technologies, thereby drawing a parallel between sailing at sea and navigating the web. Nathalie Magnan passed away at the age of sixty following metastatic breast cancer. She leaves behind a legacy of struggles around gender and technologies, incisive reflections on how media shape our worldviews, a deep belief in each individual’s agency to produce their own representations, a participatory methodology of inquiry, and a sharp sense of humour. Many of those who knew her wonder what she would have thought, written, or done in relation to our present moment: social networks to which we entrust our intimate lives and data; a pandemic that has reshaped our relationships to distance and vulnerability; the possibilities of artificial intelligence; mainstream media controlled by the far right; and genocides broadcast live in the palms of our hands. Many are also deeply engaged with her archival collection, deposited at the Archives de la critique d’art in Rennes by her partner Reine Prat—a collection that joyfully blurs the boundaries between private and professional life, institutional culture and self-organisation, activism and transmission, reshuffling the deck of disciplines, genders and questions of legitimacy. The exhibition is not intended merely as a portrait or a tribute, but rather as a collective biography open to the present—one in which the thinking, struggles and bridges that Nathalie Magnan created resonate across different generations of artists and thinkers.