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  Pop Video Test IV: Entertainment, parts 1 and 2

  Ant Farm, Arts & Culture, CLIR, Guerrilla TV, On the Media, Performance, Roots of Video, Skip Blumberg, Tom Weinberg

  “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.

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  Inflatables Illustrated

  Ant Farm, CLIR, NHPRC, Performance, Roots of Video

  Ant Farm promotes their ideas for inflatable living and demonstrates how to construct inflatables using basic materials.

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  Official convention city tape plus more

  American Way, Ant Farm, NHPRC, Outside Agitators, Roots of Video

  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.

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  Opening of Exhibition 10 at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum

  Ant Farm, Guerrilla TV, NHPRC, Outside Agitators, Roots of Video

  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.

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  9/20/07: Guerrilla Television at Conversations at the Edge

  Ant Farm, Chicago, Events, Guerrilla TV, Nancy Cain, Roots of Video, Skip Blumberg, Tom Weinberg, TVTV

  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.

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  Media Burn by Ant Farm, 2003 edit

  Ant Farm, Guerrilla TV, Outside Agitators, Performance, Roots of Video, Viewers Choice

  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.

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  [Ant Farm time capsule opening] – El Livahpla

  Ant Farm, Outside Agitators

  0:00 Opening of the 1972 Ant Farm Time Capsule at The Art Guys Museum in Houston, Texas in 2000. Sound is very poorly recorded and is hard to understand. This is raw footage of the event and is not a completed piece.  After general footage of people milling around the gallery, there is a speech by  the museum archivist about the events of 1972.  Curtis Schreier, nearly naked in a bizarre costume, gets onstage and does a semi-inaudible performance. 14:00 […]

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  Image Union, episode 0210

  Ant Farm, Chicago, Image Union

  Compilation episode of Image Union featuring “Defense for Atomic Attack” by Allen Ross of Chicago Filmmakers, clips from “Media Burn” by Ant Farm, and “The Pope’s Visit” by Joseph McGarry.