The opening event of the symposium Guerrilla Television: The Revolutions of Early Independent Video, which took place in the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center April 19-21, 2024. This screening on Friday, April 19, features clips and short videos from the 1970s, with introductions by the individual artists, scholars, and curators.
“The Pop Video Test” was a joint effort between Scott Jacobs and Tom Weinberg of the Chicago Editing Center, and the Video Group of the Bell and Howell Corporation. This cooperative effort between the independent video community and a corporate video distributor was intended to test the viability of the home video market. The videomakers assembled ten hours of video pieces meant as an alternative to available pre-recorded programming (ie Hollywood movies). Fifty VCR owners in the Chicago area agreed to examine and review the tapes. Test viewers then received the programming two hours at a time, in groupings labeled Video Art, Documentary, Entertainment, and Potpourri.
Ant Farm promotes their ideas for inflatable living and demonstrates how to construct inflatables using basic materials.
This tape features a proposal for the Official Convention City, created by Ant Farm. In the mid-seventies, members of Ant Farm embarked on a journey to create a domed city in Texas with the sole purpose of using it to broadcast American political conventions. The proposal was meant to raise questions about the scripted and electronic aspects of political coverage. There is also footage of numerous news reports about Ant Farm’s various projects and other Ant Farm pieces including NASA moon walk, joy ride excerpts, and a time capsule news report.
This tape contains footage from the opening of the Houston Contemporary Art Museum in 1972. Produced by Ant Farm, the piece is a half-hour scrapbook of the events taking place during the opening gala, including Ant Farm’s creation of a time capsule. The videomakers speak with attendees and artists about their involvement in the event.
Thursday, September 20, 2007, 6pm, Gene Siskel Film Center. The 1970s gave rise to a network of radical video makers who set out to create a feisty alternative to broadcast television. Decades before the so-called media democratization offered by YouTube, cell phone cameras, and hundred-channel cable, these artist-activists turned their Portapaks on protesters, politicians, and the men-, women-, and children-on-the-street to create startlingly candid documentaries that aired on a system of closed-circuit, pirate, and early cable stations—even infiltrating broadcast television itself. Hailing from seminal guerrilla collectives Videofreex, Ant Farm, and TVTV, artists Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Chip Lord, and Tom Weinberg present an overview of their pioneering work and discuss its legacy today, in conversation with Amy Beste.
A recent edit (2003) of Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On July 4, Independence Day, 1975, what a TV newscaster described as a “media circus” assembles at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. A pyramid of television sets are stacked, doused with kerosene, and set ablaze. Then a modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, piloted by two drivers who are guided only by a video monitor between their bucket seats, smashes through the pyramid destroying the TV sets.
Preceding the event are clips from various TV news broadcasts that covered it (many of the TV reporters make the comment that they “didn’t get it”). The tape includes interviews with invited guests, a speech given by Doug Hall as President John F. Kennedy explaining the message of Media Burn, the dramatic unveiling of the Phantom Dream Car, several sequences of the car smashing through the TV sets, and its triumphant return from the end of the Cow Palace parking lot.
Pilot for the award-winning TV series The 90’s. This episode features the following segments: