Gaia Light’s Independent Reality TV Channel on Youtube, started as a video experiment provocatively based on the idea of focusing on the “real” of everydaylife in the contemporary city versus the hyperactivity of so-called reality television.

Light TV casually documents instances of urban serendipity that we all encounter in going about our daily routines, while also presenting equally absurd scenarios that are staged only insofar as human beings are incessantly performative creatures at heart. Part spectacle, part cinéma vérité, these very short documentary videos are also charismatic studies of human nature, or exemplary moments – some banal and some over the top – that are, in fact, the very basis for reality television. Since Calderon and Shakespeare, we know that life is often a dream and the world often a stage. What Light TV tells us is that the inherent theatricality of the world is also intensely lyrical and intricately baroque, by degrees, and that the “real” of the real world is so much more rewarding and interesting than the “real” of reality television.