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A Genealogy of Video A Genealogy of Video Paul Ryan Abstract-The authordiscusses the struggle that took place in New York City between 1968 and 1971 over whether video would be considered a tool of social change or a medium of art. The struggle is traced in terms of six dimensions:technological, theoretical, political, institutional, economic and cultural. The author's position is that video mutated from a countercultural gesture to an art genre. The question asked is how this genre will articulate its own genealogy. I. INTRODUCTION of possibility that early video held. The New York. During the course of one anecdote be illustrative. The term 'genealogy' indicates a following might festival, in either 1974 or 1975, a plenary In the mid-1970s the author of particular sort of writing concerned with session of over 100 people was stopped Ken ran a cold a resonant voice with an rediscovering struggles without shrinking Independent Video, Marsh, by odd, series of video festivals from the rude memory of the conflict. It is in Woodstock, insistent quality: "I want to know what's an effort to establish knowledge, based on local memories, that is of tactical use to the reader. Whereas a history is generally written as if a struggle had been resolved, a genealogy assumes that the -I-.... ,. _ I 3 present resolution is subject to change. The genealogies offered by Michel Foucault of phenomena such as modern prisons and medical clinics depend on extensive library research by a non- participant [1]. By contrast, this genealogy is constructed primarily out of FjLlJFIE[SlfM{f the rude memory of the conflict itself by a UEMSo]LW] participant in the struggle. Hence it is a Sll i1E LdTfLI genealogy, not the genealogy of video. Other participants would have other versions. To go beyond the sketch I provide here, a complete genealogy of video would have to take account of other versions and place early video within the context of the wider array of significant social shifts going on at the same time. What I believe saves this piece from being a merely subjective memoir is that it is constructed in terms of a fault line, a discontinuity in video history that is in danger of being ignored. My contention is that any serious account of video must take account of that fault line. Video itself mutated from a counter- cultural gesture to an art genre. When video was principally a countercultural gesture, it held the promise of social change unmediated by the art world. Now, whatever promise of social change video holds is mediated by the art world. This is a significant difference. People unfamiliar with the mutation find it difficult to appreciate the unlimited sense MmT1L d Fig. 1. Cover of RadicalSoftware, No. 1: TheAlternative TelevisionMovement(1970). Articles in the first issue of Radical Software included Frank Gillette, "Is EVR a Good or Bad Thing?"; Gene Paul Ryan (artist, author), P.O. Box 306, High Youngblood, Excerpts from The Videosphereand Video Cassette Image Publishing, a pirated Falls, NY 12440, U.S.A. transcriptionof an interviewwith R. BuckminsterFuller videotapedby RaindanceCorp.; Nam June Received 13 December 1985. Paik, "ExpandedEducation for the Paperless Society"; and Paul Ryan, "Cable Television:The Raw and the Overcooked". ? 1988 ISAST Pergamon Journals Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. LEONARDO, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 39-44,1988 0024-094X/88 $3.00+0.00 going on with video. I just got $5,000 technologies to work toward a society Tadlock to produce 'broadcastable' from the New York State Council on the that could avoid Vietnams. I convinced video works for a show called The Arts to do video and I'm blind. I'm a the draft board to let me do my Medium is the Medium. With the blind man! What is going on?" alternative to military service working exception of Alan Kaprow's Hello, which Literally translated from the Latin, directly with McLuhan while he was a broadcasted randomly switched signals 'video' means 'I see'. That the Arts visiting professor at Fordham University, from a system of cameras and monitors Council would grant a blind man $5,000 1967-1968, the year he wrote War and set up around Boston, all these works to produce video demonstrates that part Peace in the Global Village [3]. During relied heavily on processing the image on of what was going on was a powerful that year, I started exploring the new the surface of the screen. Only Aldo belief system. Perhaps through this portable video. My experimentation led Tambellini's Black, about black life in wondrous new technology, the blind to a position as the New York Arts America, dealt with explicit social would see. The story indicates the extent Council's first video consultant in 1969, content. to which the Arts Council, and many to work with the alternative video group Processed imagery also dominated others, had willfully suspended disbelief Raindance and to a series of essays on much of the "TV As A Creative Medium" to allow a new fiction called 'video' to be video entitled Cybernetics of the Sacred show assembled by art gallery owner generated. [4]. In this report, I will trace the Howard Wise in the spring of 1969. Today, critical discourse is replacing genealogy of video's initial phase in terms Tadlock, Siegel and Tambellini were suspended disbelief. The following of its technological, theoretical, political, joined by Joe Wientraub and Earl account of the preconditions that made institutional, economic and cultural Reiback in presenting processed image video possible by someone who played a dimensions. pieces. Paik's iconoclasm produced the role in generating the original fiction is TVBra, an actual brassiere with monitors intended as a contribution to that critical wired to the cello of performer Charlotte discourse. Technological Moorman. Paik also showed Participa- In technological terms, the genealogy tion TV, which showed images of the of video is best described by distinguish- viewer on separate monitors in different II. TOWARD SOCIAL CHANGE OR ing between processing signals for the colors. While it can be said that ART? surface of the screen and using video as a Tambellini's Black and Paik's TV Bra The genealogy of video is a history of system of communication [5]. The effected social change by producing the struggle between the drive to use distinction between surface and system images that helped alter social mores video as a tool of social change and the can be clarified by considering a man about race and sex, the route of reference drive to use video as a medium of art. cutting down a tree with an axe. A to social change was through symbol Specifically, this version deals with New systems understanding pays attention to manipulation, not the systemics of York City video from 1968 to 1971. I how the differences in what the man sees communication. settle on the term 'drive' because during make differences in how he swings the Two works in the Wise show did that period there were no clearly defined axe. The differences in how he swings the concern themselves with the systemics of factions of art versus social change. There axe in turn make differences in the gashes communication: Wipe Cycle and Every- were videomakers who thought of on the tree. These differences in turn man's Moebius Strip, which both grew themselves as artists and saw their work make differences in what the man sees, out of experience with the Sony portable as promulgating social change, and there and so on, as the cycle repeats itself. A video system. Wipe Cycle by Frank were videomakers working for social surface understanding frames that part of Gillette and Ira Schneider involved a grid change who considered their work the tree where the axe repeatedly strikes of nine monitors displaying broadcast artistic. Activity in the video field tended and concerns itself with the 'composition' images, prerecorded tapes and timed toward one or the other of these diverging within that frame. tape-delay images of the audience in poles. Choices could be made according Prior to the arrival of the Sony portable front of the monitors. Everyman's to an agenda of social change, and video system in 1968, 'video art' was Moebius Strip, the piece I did for the Wise choices could be made that individuated primarily a matter of manipulating show, provided a private feedback booth, oneself as an artist. signals within the frame of the television where one could record oneself going As a participant/observer, I entered screen. Magnets were applied to TV sets, through a series of simple exercises and the fray with a bias toward using video as internal circuitry was altered and black see the playback in private before the tape a tool of social change. This bias stemmed boxes were attached. Inspired by the was erased. primarily from my opposition to the music of John Cage, Nam June Paik used Wipe Cycle and Everyman's Moebius Vietnam War. I applied for and received a these tactics to achieve a certain playful Strip were based on an appreciation of conscientious objector draft status based iconoclasm. He broke down conventional the new portable Sony as a communica- on the philosopher John Dewey's notion expectations about TV images and tions system, complete with record, of God as the tension between the ideal introduced a sense of possibility for the storage and playback capacity. It allowed and the actual. The ideal put forth by screen. Eric Siegel, who was more the user to 'infold' information and set up MarshallMcLuhan of a more harmonious knowledgeable about circuitry, colorized feedback circuits, not merely manipulate society based on electronic communica- the gray tone scale and processed images, the TV terminals of the broadcast system.
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