members: Joshua Pearson and Gardner Post

EBN used to drive around Providence RI and beyond in the early 90's in a souped up science fiction ambulance-looking station-wagon with monitors pointed outwards and a transmission/reception apparatus on the top of the car. Having already created one of the first midi-triggered video systems, EBN has continued their playful and innovative work, experimenting with scratching video and multi-screening, and dealing with the some of the more occultish aspects of vampling. We haven't seen their fantastic media wagon in a while unfortunately, but their work continues.

As with Coldcut, the frontiers of this multimedia entity are not delineated. EBN has created soundtrack music for films like Scream or Seven, performs live, works on music videos... Like Negativland, their live shows often include some kind of rant, while the media overload rolls on, not unlike Costes' "Opéra porn" of 2001. They speak of this media overload like channel surfing at high speed. Their vampling methods integrate risk through their AV version of exquisite corpsing, creating a random shuffle Burroughs and Gysin style.

ATTENTION

"Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) in voluntary cooperation with Institute of Technology will be testing and demonstrating new signal jamming technologies. This test may affect electric, cable TV, and telephone service within the test area."

Thank you Rotting Static for sending us the pic!

EBN has worked quite a bit with live streaming from cable/satellite sources. This is perhaps the most inventive way, maybe the only way, to have hundreds of video feeds. Their live performances are said to have cured more than a few of their television addiction or other media intake side effects. The video sampling software which enables them to scratch video, running on Macintosh Quadra 950 computers, was created with EBN by Mark Marinello at AVX Design.

The group formed in part as a response to the media coverage of the first Gulf War (Desert Storm) and their politics were definitely in the right place. Strangely, around the same time that Negativland was being sued by U2, EBN was collaborating with them, doing projections on the Zoo tour. Stick together pirates! "They had been working on a Nike commercial, but that project fell through." (good!). Then again perhaps these jobs are only to learn the way of the enemy as Nietzsche and Sun Tzu have taught us!

"We honestly don't see what we do as theft and robbery. We pay for cable service; we pay for the VCR; we pay for the tape we record on. The airwaves should be free; they're just particles traveling through space. We have the capability to drag them in-- why not use them? We're also not repackaging MTV and selling it. We're making something genuinely new."-- Josh Pearson