3ETV on Somerset House Studios
3ETV is a bespoke 9-channel TV station curated and produced by Somerset House Studios, and developed in collaboration with HEK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel), M+ (Hong Kong), Onassis ONX (Athens/New York) & Pioneer Works (New York).
Broadcasting online from 12 October - 18 December 2026, it allows audiences to navigate their own viewing experience, moving between each channel's distinctive programme of artworks, film and archive, alongside live capture of the one-off performances presented at 3 Evenings: Experiments in Performance and Technology. Taking place in London (Oct 16-18), 3 Evenings is a live event which playfully reimagines 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (1966), which took place in New York sixty years ago and is widely considered a pivotal moment in the history of artists working with new technologies.
The original 9 Evenings event brought together artists and engineers in an unprecedented collaboration, with artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Deborah Hay, John Cage and Yvonne Rainer working alongside more than 30 Bell Labs engineers to create a series of large-scale, cross-disciplinary works. The event introduced closed-circuit television, fibre optics, infrared cameras, and wireless transmitters into performance for the first time, fundamentally reshaping artistic practice and how artists would make performance going forward. At the London event, artists have been invited to respond to the question 'what does it mean to perform with technology today?' - in front of a live audience, at a former hydraulic power station, echoing the original staging.
3ETV extends this environment online and explores how performing with technology has evolved, in a world where closed circuit tv is no longer closed, anyone with a phone can broadcast and the algorithm is sovereign. As well as curating a programme of commissioned artist responses and provocations, experimental shorts and archival material, Somerset House Studios has invited HEK, M+, Onassis ONX & Pioneer Works to collaborate on decentralising and pluralising the response. Each collaborator has guest-curated a channel, presenting new works, past commissions and moving image works from their archives, the resulting programme a beautiful cacophony for browser and phone, an evolving online experiment.
During the three nights of 3 Evenings, audiences will be able to view the performances at Wapping Powerstation live from multiple angles on both the venue screens and via 3etv.net. Alongside the wider online programme, the power station and 3ETV will become a networked space for the duration, with video works and performances broadcast into and out of the live event.
Additional works are presented in collaboration with CIRFA, Electronic Art Intermix (EAI, New York), EMAP, Trisha Brown Archives, and Julia Stoschek Foundation.
3 Evenings is supported by Glass Castle Foundation, the philanthropic organisation behind Wapping Hydraulic Power Station.
ONX supports artists working across artificial intelligence, immersive media, gaming, time-based works and digital culture, providing them with resources, mentorship, and access to an international network of institutional partners. The video works presented for 3ETV, drawn from across the Onassis ONX community, approach technology not as a simple set of tools, but as a mercurial environment in which bodies, identities, memories, and futures are continually produced and renegotiated. The channel moves across procedural worlds, virtual performance, generative systems, speculative cinema, networked spaces, and other hybrid forms that resist easy distinctions between live and mediated experience.
At the heart of this channel are questions about what is human and where its boundaries now lie. Systems can appear as conspirators, performers, witnesses, and agents of control, yet always in relation to the human they mirror, serve, or seek to manage. Avatars become vessels for embodied histories and invented selves, blurring the line between a person and the figure that now stands for them. Artificial intelligence improvises, observes, reconstructs, and distorts, pushing the limits of human authorship. Simulations persist without human intervention, while entire digital infrastructures surface as both material realities and imaginative spaces.
The channel also looks beyond technology and toward the histories and conditions embedded within these works. Ecological collapse, extraction, labor, surveillance, queer histories, ancestry, intimacy, and collective memory resonate throughout the channel, often collapsing past, present, and speculative futures into the same frame. These virtual and algorithmic spaces offer opportunities to rehearse other ways of living, with bodies becoming sites of both resistance and transformation.
Together, these works reflect a broader ethos within Onassis ONX, where experimentation is an essential mode of inquiry. Media in flux can expose how power operates beneath familiar interfaces and open space for realities that have not yet fully arrived. Technology may now act as both infrastructure and collaborator, capable of extraction and control, but the stories and questions explored here remain fundamentally human.Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies.
List of works
Peter Burr - INTERSTITIAL MAINTENANCE
Nancy Baker Cahill CARBON 1, 2, 3
Sean Capone - CHANGELINGS
Adam Cole - Multi-Head Attention
Kordae Jatafa Henry - The Third Horizon
Sean Kennedy - Daemon
Sarah Rothberg - Three Meetings
Miriam Simun - Contact Zone (Level 1)
Ambrose Trataris - Electric Apostles
Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou - New Suns (Single-Channel Adaptation)
Yaloo - Project Shininho (Work in Progress)