A forum for the attendees to reminisce on this golden era of activity, reflect on their (and others’) accomplishments, and remember those members of the guerrilla TV movement who are no longer with us. Recording on Sunday, April 21 at 9:30AM as part of the Guerrilla Television Symposium at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center.
The dawn of the Portapak era saw a flurry of activity in New York City, but almost immediately video spread to San Francisco and Chicago, but also to western Ohio, to upstate New York, to rural Kentucky, to New Orleans… all over the country, in cities and towns, at colleges and at local TV stations. This panel looks at the unexpected centers of production that arose in the 1970s, and the importance of these community-based organizations to the wider Guerrilla Television movement.
Moderator: Angela J. Aguayo, Associate Professor Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media. Panelists: Deirdre Boyle, professor emerita of media studies at The New School and author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited; Ariel Dougherty, mediamaker, teacher, producer, advocate, co-founder of Women Make Movies; Gene Fredericks, archivist, New Orleans Video Access Center; Tom Weinberg, creator/producer of Image Union, Center for New Television, founder of Media Burn Archive; Denise Zaccardi, founder and executive director, Community TV Network.
The Portapak allowed for a new approach to political image-making, in which videotape became central to activist efforts. The camera recorded protests and speeches; it was used by feminist collectives to share information about women’s health and abortion; it recorded landlord neglect and other abuses of power. The video camera inspired organization and action, and connected activists all over the country. This panel explores the range of video activism in the 1970s, and its legacy 50 years later.
Moderator: Tara Merenda Nelson, curator and director of public programs, Visual Studies Workshop. Panelists: DeeDee Halleck, media activist and co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish TV Network, author of Hand-Held Visions: The Uses of Community Media; Judy Hoffman, filmmaker and Professor Emeritus of practice in the Department of Cinema of Media Studies at the University of Chicago; Mona Jimenez, former Professor and Associate Director of the Moving Image Archiving Program at New York University and co-editor of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued; Gordon Quinn, filmmaker and co-founder of Kartemquin Films; Mirko Popadic, media activist and member of Communications for Change.