Blog
Introducing O:P:TV
We built our own television —
no ads, no algorithm,
no gatekeeper.
A dispatch from OBJECT:PARADISE — July 15, 2026.
Today we’re introducing O:P:TV, the sovereign video archive of the collective — live since June 2026 — and taking you on a tour of everything else that changed on the site this year.
O:P:TV was created to preserve OBJECT:PARADISE’s video archive on a platform that is ad-free and algorithmically independent, with the objective of celebrating the collaborative nature of our community. It is a channel we own — a deck you tune, not a feed that tunes you.
Why we built it
In June 2026, YouTube notified us of the permanent removal of the O:P account, deleting the footage and metadata we had carefully curated since 2018. Although devastating at first, it provided an opportunity for the team to reevaluate the role we wanted corporate gatekeepers to play in the preservation and distribution of our community’s work. (We wrote about the deletion itself here.)
OBJECT:PARADISE was established in 2018 with the core objective of making the literary arts an accessible experience. Our curations are interdisciplinary in nature — involving poetry, actions, performance, and music — to encourage visitors to have their own individual, subjective experience at our events.
We quickly understood that exclusion is important in defining any aspect of life: for art to exist, non-art must also exist. So the question is only who decides.
However, we feel uncomfortable defining exclusion at the convention level; we would rather define it at the context level. We believe the quality of art is defined by those who experience it, and all subjective experiences are correct. “Art,” then, becomes constantly dynamic, subjective, and dependent on where it happens and who gets to experience it. Exclusion doesn’t have to be about access to knowledge — it can be about access to the moment.
Exclusion doesn’t have to
EXCLUDE access to knowledge —
it can EXCLUDE access
to the moment.
When YouTube deleted our archive, we understood that mass platforms remove our agency to engage with our community through algorithmic moderation and curation driven by profit. We created O:P:TV to celebrate the work that we’ve done and to encourage community preservation and collaboration.
Exclusion doesn’t have to be a bad word in the art world; in fact, it’s a necessity. With O:P:TV, we return agency to our community regarding where and how that exclusion happens.
What else changed on the site
O:P:TV is the headline, but it arrived alongside a full rebuild of objectparadise.com. The whole collective now lives in one place: the site you’re reading is the front door, and O:P:TV is the deck. Here’s the short tour.
- The deck. O:P:TV plays every tape in the archive with no login and no paywall. It’s built to be handled like real equipment — SPACE plays and pauses, the arrow keys change tape and volume, F is fullscreen, S starts surf mode (auto channel-hopping), and X opens the VFX rack: hue, saturation, contrast, invert, multi-screen, and glitch. Nothing you do to the picture is permanent.
- The Network. A live map of the collective’s relationships — a Node Map, a Community Map, and a Poet Directory — all read from credits we curate by hand, tape by tape.
- Verified Poets & profiles. If you’ve performed with O:P, you can claim your profile, and a redesigned two-panel profile now gathers your tapes, photos, and history in one place.
- History with O:P. Every verified poet now carries a written record of their work with the collective — a dossier assembled from our own archive rather than a scraped bio.
- Discourse. A floating, draggable chat window that follows you across the whole site and the deck — pop it out, drag it, close it; it remembers where you left it.
- Search. One search box over the entire archive — tapes and poets both.
- Notifications. Verified poets choose how often they hear from us and are told when they’re featured, all from a single settings panel.
- KROTCH & print. KROTCH Mag, our quarterly samizdat-style zine, and the rest of our print and installation work now have a proper home under Media.
- Privacy & sovereignty. No ads, ever, and no recommendation engine deciding what you watch next. We set only the cookies the archive needs to function, plus analytics only if you consent. The full terms are in the Privacy, Archival & Community Policy.
New to all of this? The clearest place to start is the Manifesto — twenty mantras that guide every O:P happening — or the new FAQ, where we answer the questions we’re asked most.
From mock-up to launch
The OBJECT:PARADISE Archive dropped its veil and went public on Halloween evening at the Prague Microfestival at Kampus Hybernská.
Since the notice that our YouTube had been deleted in June 2026, we've been working tirelessly to create a digital space which houses and preserves our media archive while at the same time, celebrates the community who made it to foster opportunities for future collaboration within our network.
What resulted is a massive visual and social database, hosting 336 pages of KROTCH Magazine, 200 Films, hundreds of photographs, essays, and event recounts since the beginning of the OBJECT:PARADISE Collective. And there's still about 100 tapes to digitize.
The database serves to protect this media; but we've also implemented a variety of social features which provide opportunities to sustain the community we work with.
Below you can see some photos of the evolution of the site: design in Photoshop, and then their implementation using modern tools to provide an accessible way to navigate the entire network and media library.
The initial idea is that we wanted the playbar to stick to the bottom of the site wherever a user navigated so that the media would follow the user around the site—kind of like an O:P Event.
From feedback, we learned that this was quite annoying. We kept it anyways—but named it O:P Mode, a navigation preference you can choose where the media from a page—a video or an audio track—follows you around as you navigate the site.
The default viewing mode is called 'Focus Mode' which functions more or less like a 'regular' website. Choose your poison.
On this screenshot, you can also see that we implemented tape wheels which spin while a video is playing—we would later make this a functional system which toggles a VHS tape jog forward and rewind with sound effects and visual tape rolls to make navigating a video tactile.
The latest version of O:P:TV features our whole digitized library of films (with more to come), a video mixer with extended circuit bending controls, a tape jog mechanism, hotkey functionality, playlist generator, emoji selectors, ranked comments, captions (with translations), and the ability to mix, and download videos that a user is featured in.
The objective for the profiles on The O:P Archive is to celebrate how each person we've worked with is connected to each other.
Every video, event, zine, or photo on our site credits the people in it and the people who helped create it. What resulted is a massive database of connected nodes which can be visualized in a variety of ways across the site.
By claiming a profile, users have access to the high-res videos, photos, and zines that they've been featured in as part of the OBJECT:PARADISE Project.
With our massive database of content and network connections, we were able to map how each member is connected and by which media. We also feature community bands and collectives that users are associated with. By clicking on a poet's location—if they've opted in—you can see where they are at on the Globe so you can crash on their couch next time you're in town.
Poet profiles also feature an extended description of their activity with the O:P Collective—whether participating in events or helping in the production of events.
On the right side of a desktop page, users can feature their network connections, highlighted photos from events, or a looped video that they're featured in.
This is the very first mock-up of the live-control station which manages the live stream channel on the archive. Inspired by early renditions of TYKO:TV (dating back to May 2024), the objective of this page is to feature nightly broadcasts/live coverage of events where VHS can be streamed live to the public. As you can see, the initial design was very minimal and bare—a program monitor and a few scene selectors.
What came of the preliminary mock-up and after countless hours of engineering and design, is a fully functional broadcast unit with the ability to stream the O:P Archive and push live video directly from VHS whether tethered to desktop or mobile.
The live-control center features a customized titler, 8 input monitors, a preview monitor, and a live program monitor. The live-control center also allows us to push directly to Instagram live and at our own site at www.objectparadise.com/live.
Broadcasts of poets in the database are listed under each broadcast and are connected to their poet profiles.
The entire live-control system is hooked up with custom WIG LOAN commercials, weather, and even a Prague-3 News Channel — all of which update live.
When watching a live broadcast, we've also provided users the ability to mix the broadcast themselves with a video mixer control on the live site — you know, to make it theirs as well. Each broadcast features a chatroom exclusive to the stream.
We've wanted to implement a more Žižkov-feel to our homepage since 2024 and have struggled to keep it dynamic and functional across mobile and desktop. Here you can see the preliminary mock-up, done in Photoshop like the rest of the mocks. The objective for the landing page was to make it a live environment where each variable is interactive and draws the reader into one of the site's media streams: print, film, sound, action.
The first thing people see when they visit a website is the homepage, and, as obsessed with Žižkov as we are, we wanted to make sure that the room acted as a window into our ethos of the collective.
What started out as a static background in 2024, turned into a live landing page which changes with time, weather, and season. Oh, and make sure to check out what happens at 12:00 every first Wednesday of the month (Prague residents might have an idea).
Clicking on the window in the living room pulls up live sounds from the streets of Žižkov—at all hours of the night.
The radio and TV can be toggled on at the same time (and played over each other) if desired. The radio is even designed for the space—a bit muffled and a bit airy shooting from the left speaker of the browser.
You'll also notice that we kept the typewriter and bundle of beer bottles—clicking on both brings up more features on the site. An interactive typewriter which you can type and post pages on the community feed and your own profile. Each user can customize their own typewriter along with paper styles, font face, and ribbon color. Users can then type on other users' pages with their own typewriter and the co-created piece can be downloaded as its own work of writing. Clicking on the beer bottles takes a user to a hidden game: Žižkov Delinquent where you get to battle the Vinohrady artists as they try to defend their art degrees and theses.
Clicking on the stack of zines pulls up an infinite panel of KROTCH pages pulled from our 20 issues of the magazine. Click on a panel to see which issue it derives from. Registered users can also submit to KROTCH, O:P:TV, the Radio and photos as well.
With our huge database of media and network connections, we thought about how we could visualize this in a way that's both impressive and intuitive.
Inspired by the Wikipedia node Graph, we implemented a similar system which connects each poet with their tapes, magazines, events, and photos.
While visually impressive at the sheer data, early renditions of the network were quite unintuitive and difficult to navigate.
The O:P Galaxy — the O:P Network visualizer that sits next to The O:P Globe. With the evolution of .svg design and node mapping, we were able to implement a more visually impressive and intuitive navigation of the O:P Network which not only connects a poet to their media, but shows which other poets are connected to that media.
One of the greatest things that the OBJECT:PARADISE Project has brought us is community, friendships, and partnerships with others in Prague, Czech Republic, and Central Europe. Each person we've worked with is featured on this visualizer along with their connections to others and the media which unites them.
Click on any node and you can learn more about that media or person and how they've helped build and sustain OBJECT:PARADISE.
Want to join the network?
If you’re identified in a tape and want a credit fixed, a takedown, or anonymization, use the Curatorial Request button on the tape in question, or message the O:P Team directly. Sovereignty over the archive means nothing if it doesn’t extend to the people inside it.
And if you just want in — let’s hang out. This archive is a project of OBJECT:PARADISE, z.s. (IČO: 09829911); reach us any time at info@objectparadise.com.
