University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s Peter Sachs Collopy University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Communication Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Collopy, Peter Sachs, "The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1665. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1665 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1665 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s Abstract In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving images on magnetic tape, previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for artistic expression, psychological experimentation, and political revolution. Video became portable not only materially but also culturally; it could be carried by an individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation to the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ officeso t art galleries, and from prisons to state-funded media access centers. Between 1967 and 1973, American videographers across many of these institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing not only practical knowledge about the uses and maintenance of video equipment, but visions of its social significance, psychological effects, and utopian future. For many, video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness, the communal consiousness that—influenced yb the evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global village. Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced yb the psychedelic research of the 1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as a science of both social systems and interactions between humans and machines, by anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by revolutionary political movements in the United States and around the world. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History and Sociology of Science First Advisor John Tresch Keywords Consciousness, Media, Video Subject Categories Communication | United States History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1665 THE REVOLUTION WILL BE VIDEOTAPED: MAKING A TECHNOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LONG 1960s Peter Sachs Collopy A DISSERTATION in History and Sociology of Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation ———————————————————— John Tresch, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science Graduate Group Chairperson ———————————————————— John Tresch, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science Dissertation Committee Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Professor Emerita of History and Sociology of Science Nathan Ensmenger, Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Fred Turner, Associate Professor of Communications, Stanford University To my family: Marianne Sachs, Fred Collopy, Andy Collopy, and Deanna Day ii Acknowledgements The history of experimental video that I recount here is one of interactions between participants in many fields, and the process of writing it has also required such collaboration. Thanks first of all to the members of my dissertation committee, each of whom has supported my research and career with great generosity. I began researching experimental video in seminars taught by Nathan Ensmenger and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, each of whom has shaped this work deeply through their advice and questions. John Tresch has been an endlessly creative mentor, suggesting new disciplinary contexts and historical continuities for my research. And Fred Turner has been an inspiration in making technological countercultures a subject of historical research. I also owe particular thanks to the experimental videographers who have supported me with conversation, advice, and access to archives, especially Stephen Beck, Skip Blumberg, Fred Collopy, Davidson Gigliotti, Andy Gurian, DeeDee Halleck, Ben Levine, Richard Milone, Tom Nickel, Ira Schneider, Parry Teasdale, Ann Woodward, and the late Paul Ryan. I have learned a great deal as well from other scholars, curators, and documentarians who are persuing this history, including Deirdre Boyle, Beth Capper, Sarah Chapman, Liz Flyntz, John Giancola, Andrew Ingall, Jon Nealon, Jenny Raskin, Robin Simpson, and Ed Webb-Ingall, and from scholars of video history more generally, including Zachery Campbell, Joshua Greenberg, Lucas Hilderbrand, Joshua Kitching, Dylan Mulvin, and Michael Newman. The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science has been a wonderful place to persue this research. Every member of the faculty has iii supported my work, including Mark Adams, Robert Aronowitz, David Barnes, Etienne Benson, Steven Feierman, Robert Kohler, Harun Küçük, Susan Lindee, Beth Linker, Jonathan Moreno, Projit Mukharji, Adelheid Voskuhl, and the late Henrika Kuklick. The community of graduate students has been my most stimulating intellectual home; thanks for making it so to Eram Alam, Ekaterina Babintseva, Nadia Berenstein, Josh Berson, Paul Burnett, Elise Carpenter, Jason Chernesky, Tabea Cornel, Meggie Crnic, Deanna Day, Rosanna Dent, Heather Dill, Kate Dorsch, Erica Dwyer, Rachel Elder, Allegra Giovine, Matthew Hersch, Eric Hintz, Matthew Hoffarth, Andrew Hogan, Christopher Jones, Andi Johnson, Prashant Kumar, Whitney Laemmli, Elaine LaFay, Jessica Martucci, Luke Messac, Marissa Mika, Jonathan Milde, Mary Mitchell, Rebecca Mueller, Samantha Muka, Jeff Nagle, Tamar Novick, Jason Oakes, Emily Pawley, Joanna Radin, Lisa Ruth Rand, Sara Ray, David Reinecke, Alexis Rider, Maxwell Rogoski, Corinna Schlombs, Jason Schwartz, Perrin Selcer, Brit Shields, Jesse Smith, Nellwyn Thomas, Roger Turner, Nicole Welk-Joerger, Kristoffer Whitney, and Damon Yarnell. Thanks also to graduate student interlocutors outside my department, especially Neşe Devenot, Amy Paeth, and Will Schmenner, and to other Penn faculty, particularly Michael Weisberg. The first two chapters of this dissertation were shaped far more than I expected by the workshop In-n-Out California: Circulating Things and the Globalization of the West Coast; thanks to organizers Tiago Saraiva, Cathryn Carson, and Massimo Mazzotti and participants Eric Avila, Soraya de Chadarevian, Mihir Pandya, Joshua Roebke, and Robert Schraff. Thanks also to participants in the Working Group on the History of the Human Sciences at the Center for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, iv particularly Erika Milam and Babak Ashrafi, and to those in the First Annual Conference on the History of Recent Social Science, particularly Jamie Cohen-Cole, Phillippe Fontaine, Eric Hounshell, and Mark Solovey. And thanks for their comments on my papers at conferences to Tom Haigh, Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Lisa Kannenberg, and Bruce Schulman. Other scholars who have contributed to this work through conversation and feedback include Dan Berger, Geoffrey Bowker, Andrew Cornell, John Duda, Christina Dunbar- Hester, Paul Edwards, Andrew Fearnley, Jacob Gaboury, Alexander Galloway, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Ben Gross, Lars Heide, Nicholas Knouf, Ronan Le Roux, Jennifer Light, Patrick McCray, Eden Medina, Thomas Misa, Jan Müggenburg, Lisa Nakamura, Laine Nooney, Andrew Pickering, Alicia Puglionesi, Jonathan Sterne, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Kenneth White, and Audra Wolfe. I owe additional thanks to Mara Mills for her careful reading of a draft of my first two chapters. I've also benefitted from conversations with neighbors in West Philadelphia about experimental video, media activism, and the histories of the counterculture and the New Left; thanks in particular to Austin America, Steve Beuret, Daniel Flaumenhaft, Esteban Kelly, Joshua Marcus, Alison Miner, Joseph Newland, Hannah Sassaman, and John Wenz. Librarians, archivists, and other managers of repositories have helped me find and access a wide variety of rare print, manuscript, and video sources for my research. Thanks especially to David Azzolina, Lapis David Cohen, Ed Deegen, and William Keller at the Univerity of Pennsylvania; Henry Lowood and Tom Noakes at Stanford University; Luisa Haddad at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Sarah Romkey at v the University of British Columbia; Joy Weiner at the Smithsonian Institution Archives of America Art; Claudia Gehrig and Christoph Blase at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe; Tom Colley at Video Data Bank; Carolyn Lazard at Electronic Arts Intermix; Allison Pekel at WGBH; and the staff of the Pacific Film Archive Library and New York State Archives. Thanks to Phillip Guddemi for permission to photograph the Gregory Bateson Papers. Finally, I owe my greatest gratitude to my family, who have provided intellectual companionship as well as love and support, and have taught me practices of cultural politics and communal consciousness