The Channel

A deck you tune, not a feed that tunes you

It is built to be handled like equipment rather than browsed like a website. Tapes play end to end. Nothing recommends the next one; you pick it, or you hit surf mode and let the channel wander. There is no watch history held over you and nothing learns from what you linger on.

Everything plays for anyone who walks in — no login, no paywall. An account only matters when you want to act rather than watch: claiming your poet profile, messaging other poets, building shelves of tapes on your own page.

Why we built it

In June 2026, YouTube permanently removed the O:P account, deleting the footage and the metadata we had curated since 2018. We wrote about that here. It was devastating for about a week, and then it was clarifying: it made us decide what role we wanted corporate gatekeepers to play in preserving our community’s work. The answer was none.

OBJECT:PARADISE has been making the literary arts an accessible experience since 2018 — poetry, actions, performance and music, curated so every visitor has their own subjective experience of it. Along the way we came to a position that sits underneath this whole archive: for art to exist, non-art must also exist, so the only real question is who decides. We would rather that exclusion happened at the level of context than of convention. The quality of a work is decided by the people who experience it, and all subjective experiences are correct.

A platform that moderates and curates by algorithm, for profit, takes that decision away from the people in the room. O:P:TV takes it back. Exclusion is not a dirty word here — it is a necessity — and this is us choosing where and how it happens.

What is actually in it

Readings, performances, actions, films, live mixes, interviews and a lot of Žižkov. Most of it is VHS, which is a choice rather than a limitation. Every tape is credited by hand, poet by poet, and those credits are what feed the Poet Directory, the Network Map and the search — so a missing credit is a poet missing from the whole archive, and worth telling us about.

The tapes themselves are preserved on Archive.org under the OBJECT:PARADISE label, so the collection does not depend on this site — or on us — continuing to exist.

Have you got a tape?

We are a bit iffy about new videos — see above, re: VHS — but the archive is the community’s, and things that belong in it are still out there on other people’s hard drives. If you filmed a reading, played the set, or kept the tape nobody else kept, send it. A person reads every submission and we write back either way.

Worth knowing before you start: submissions are a link to the file (Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer — not YouTube), you keep your copyright but you need every right to what is in it, and anything we accept is preserved permanently on Archive.org. Verified Poets can send videos of themselves; Supporters can send one made in collaboration with a Verified Poet from the Poet Directory. The form spells all of it out.