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Send Blank Tape: Flyntz
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Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org
featured the individual or group’s current base of operations, the gear they were holding, and what kind of work they were making.
Send Blank Tape: Radical Software and the Advent of Media-Sharing Networks
Revolutionary Engineering and the Living Room
“Portable video is a new, major medium. It is a high access form of our culture's dominant communications mode and precisely the opposite of product television which can accept only artificial behavior because it is based on a scarcity of time and equipment access.”
by Liz Flyntz
—Paul Ryan, “InfomorphOne: Organization of Ignorance”Radical Software 1(3)
“Software to me, was always programming— what was on the tapes. Hardware was the equipment. It was a radical break with television, creating a new kind of programming.” —Beryl Korot, interview with the author July 4, 2014
The first issue of Radical Software was published in New York City in 1970 by two women: Phyllis Gershuny and Beryl Korot. It was the very first publication to deal with the then-new technology of video. The magazine was published more or less quarterly until 1974, providing a
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growing video-maker community with a mix of content that included reviews of new video technology and DIY guides to equipment, interviews with makers, discussions of philosophy and schematics for various video-based projects. Activism Radical Software was the publishing arm of the Raindance Corporation—a collective think tank of media theorists and makers coalesced by artists and activists Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Ira Schneider and Paul Ryan. Participants included media/art collectives like Videofreex and Ant Farm, representatives of institutions like Antioch and Goddard colleges, and individual artists like Dan Graham and Woody and Steina Vasulka. This network provided an intimate one-to-one system of distribution. Each of the “nodes” in the network structure functioned as sites for archiving information, disseminating content, and collecting hardware. Participants were “users” and “viewers” rather than audience members or mass producers. The first issue of the magazine included a questionnaire, intended by the editors to solicit feedback from everyone then working in the field. An afterwards in each issue included a listing of participants in the video network, that
It was the very first publication to deal with the then-new technology of video
Intercourse 3
“Since only the user is in a position to know what is relevant for him and how he wants to access relevance and information, exchange must include the user from the beginning.”
This stacked delay/display piece, entitled Track/ Trace has three television cameras recording and transmitting the activity in the gallery space to the stack of monitors. The top monitor presents real-time feedback of the viewer, while each descending row transmits with an increasing delay. "The viewer becomes the information, which he receives both in real time and in four layers of delayed time, so that he experiences "self" at five different periods of time, simultaneously." (Frank Gillette, Volume 2, Number 5, page 26.) Frank Gillette is a founding member of the video art collective Raindance.
BLank VHS Tape
— Raindance essay, Radical Software Vol.1, No.3
In 1965, Sony introduced the very first portable consumer video recording device—the Portapak. Nam June Paik, widely considered the first video artist, and an early contributor to Radical Software, was often credited with using the first Portapak in the US. The Portapak consisted of a camera attached by cable to a bulky reel-to-reel recorder that could be slung over the shoulder. Previous consumer 16mm and 8mm reels had a maximum shooting time of approximately 10 minutes, but video made it possible and affordable to do long takes, allowing unscripted action to unfold in real-time. After the Portapak, the film camera became reminiscent of a cash register, with every frame of film clicking away like ringing up of endless small purchases. Video, a medium that allowed for immediate review and editing of footage, extinguished the cost of film, processing, and printing from the production budget. In the loft where Radical Software was published, new technology bred a new screening modality. Instead of the projection-based, arthouse screening model that had been the historical precedent for artist filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Jack Smith, the collective presented videos on several television sets distributed throughout the space. Audiences gathered around several small screens in an atmosphere that created an intimate counter-culture inversion of family home television viewing. “In those days it was hard to get your stuff seen because there just weren’t that many places to play tapes. Videofreex had an
Send Blank Tape: Flyntz
unpublicized screening on Friday nights at our loft. Sometimes there would be five people there and sometimes there would be 150 people. So we would just rack up all the tapes -sometimes we’d have a passive switcher and we’d go back and forth - we’d have several black and white monitors on the floor, stereo sound because we had big speakers - and we’d be behind in the control room.
People would be sitting on chairs and mattresses and beanbag chairs. We would put a camera on the floor and people could see themselves—that was amazing because people hadn’t seen themselves on TV before. It felt very powerful to hold this potential mass medium in your hands. The home made video experience felt powerful because it was television.” —Skip Blumberg, interview with the author July 1, 2014
Early video also mirrored TV in the formatting of the image—close-ups and closely cropped heads were favored, and subjects tended toward newsreel-style unscripted documentation, interviews, and unrehearsed, impromptu performance. Even the best exposed images on the early tapes look vaguely as though they were shot with black pantyhose stretched over the lens of the camera, very different from the tonality of film. Networks and Other Natural Systems
Radical Software was only published for five years, but in that time video grew up as a medium and greatly expanded its reach. More individuals were using video technology for various aims, and a greater number of universities and other institutions were investing in equipment and video-specific programs. The publishers began to farm out editorial control
Audiences gathered around several small screens in AN...inversion of family home television viewing
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At Antioch College in Ohio, the Media and Communication Center ran a free tape duplication program, collecting and archiving tapes that they would then compile and mail out to participants.
“The exchange was simple: Find a title you want in our catalogue, send us a program of your own and postage. Antioch Video would (a) incorporate the program sent to us into our catalogue, and (b) send the requester the program they desired. Our catalogue had gone out to a number of lists, through people we met on our various excursions, through educational networks, through alumni (a large number of whom worked in media), through cable access channels (some of which had been started by Antiochians), and a variety of other lists. We were copying tapes for Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party, for the Brown Berets in Texas, for senior citizen groups in George Stoney's interactive network, from environmental groups, and any number of educational institutions. It’s important to remember that we had videos of some of the most innovative dancers working at the time, as well as poets and writers whose work was not very accessible.” —Bob Devine, interview with the author July 4, 2014
Ant Farm, a California-based collective of architects-cum-media-makers, devised their own methods of radical decentralization and distribution. They created a “Media Van”—a Chevy retrofitted with sleeping berths and a video-editing
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desk that allowed for a fully mobile, on-the-road production and presentation studio.
Intercourse 3
Readers could send blank tapes and cash and have their tape filled up with selected programming. Titles ranged from interviews with Black Panther Bobby Seale, to instructional videos on canning and geodesic dome making, or free form experimentation with editing techniques and analog processing tools.
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Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org This illustration, by Ann Arlen,is from an article entitled "Public Access: The Second Coming of Television?" about the struggles of the early cable access movement in NYC.
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Readers could send blank tapes and cash and have their tape filled up with selected programming
“We spent three months building the Media Van and the life support system, now we have been on the road for two months. We are on the road back. We have only one Portapak but it has been adequate. At first we developed a style of editing-in-process—that is, making judgment on tape we had already shot and recording over slow parts. In the south and Midwest there were no support systems. Indeed the process was alien to almost everyone. …
This image is from a 1973 video per formance by Juan Downey called Plato Now, which was presented for the first time at the groundbreaking video exhibition Circuit: A Video Invitational at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. Plato Now was "Nine performers in meditation attempt to produce alphawaves. Their brain activity controls the recurrence of pre-recorded quotations from Plato's dialogues. 9 per formers / 9 videochannels / alpha-wave detectors / 9 audio recordings / public's shadows."
Send Blank Tape: Flyntz
Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org
of subsequent issues to video-making compatriots all over the country, allowing for them to focus on different aspects of media theory and video making. Later issues of the magazine give insight into what was going on at the time. In different parts of the world and in various sectors of the media environment people used video for social documentary practice, cable access TV, institutional critique, radical pedagogical tool, and as medium for formal artistic experimentation.
Send Blank Tape: Flyntz
Our tapes are a mix of our own bus trip; weird shit along the side of the road; survival mode stuff such as building Yurts, unknown talent and rural American commercial television. We are looking for people who had taken control of their immediate environment, especially older enviro-weirdos.” The VideoFreex, a collective who started out in NYC, moved upstate to an abandoned boarding house in Lanesville, NY, where they created a “Media Bus,” which they used to travel around New York State, shooting video to broadcast on their pirate TV station. Dean and Dudley Evenson of Raindance travelled all over the
country in their own mobile video studio and living quarters, the “Mobile Muck Truck.” “Hardware meant nightmares and frequent trips to Chicago to get stuff fixed. Software was a term that Shamberg had borrowed from Gene Youngblood and others, and meant the dimension of human interaction.” —Bob Devine, interview with the author July 4, 2014
Radical Software and the network of communities and movements it represented laid the groundwork for the movement away from uni-directional broadcast media exemplified by 1960s network television, and toward the rhizomatic, decentralized communication model presented by the early internet. Video itself as a medium led the way to non-linear editing, breaking away from the concept of time as straightforward, directed, and progressive. The early video movements saw decentralization of means of production and decentralized distribution of content. Our current media ecology in which media is produced for, and almost simultaneously consumed by, self-selecting social groups, is the direct result. Note: In the early 2000s, Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider, members of Raindance, worked with the Daniel Langolois Inst. in Montreal to create a history and searchable index of all of the issues of Radical Software magazine, which can be found at: http://www.radicalsoftware.org/
Ant Farm collective's mobile “Media Van” Allowed the artists to produce and present their Videos on-The-Road
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