This dissertation analyses social critique, communication critique and aesthetical critique in television produced by artists. Theoretically it draws on research on alternative media, TV studies, especially genre analysis and narratology, and media aesthetics. It conducts a text-production study of three examples of alternative television from the period 2004-2008: Contemporary Art Center TV (CAC TV): A show produced by the CAC in Vilnius, Lithuania and aired on a commercial TV-channel; Good TV who aired video art on a local public access channel in Stockholm, Sweden; and Candyland TV, a pirate transmission from an art gallery in central Stockholm.

Empirically it builds on TV-texts, web sites and documents, as well as interviews with participants. Through a study of form and stylistics, relation to conventional genres and modes of narration, it engages in a discussion about the features of a critical, alternative media text.

The study shows how these televisions work in a tradition of alternative television and connects them to tactics and aesthetical forms as found in historical examples, but also how this type of formalist media critique might inform an understanding of alternative media. From the analysis of relations between social and formalist aspects of alternative television, a distinction between alternative as ”alternative worldview” and as ”alternative expressions” is suggested, a distinction that contributes to the development of theory in the study of alternative media.