short form
Send Blank Tape: Flyntz
short form
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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