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 Sunday, April 21, 10:30 am panel from the Guerrilla Television Symposium at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center, which engaged with questions such as: What was Guerrilla Television and how, and where, has it persisted through today? This discussion includes the perspectives of media artists who are working today in the independent, activist tradition, including moderator Judith McCray (videomaker and journalist, Juneteenth Productions) and panelists Caullen Hudson (Soap Box Productions), Raphael Nash (Endangered Peace Productions), Tom Poole (member, Black Planet Productions and creator, Not Channel Zero) and Steven Walsh (Omni Media).
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 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.
Compared to film, video was cheap and easy to learn. And unlike the film and TV industries, there was no entrenched hierarchy that kept out women, queer people, and BIPOC. Video quickly became central to a growing network of feminist videomakers and collectives dedicated to encouraging, sharing, and celebrating the work of women. This panel focuses on women video producers and the culture of festivals, videoletters, and video exchanges that arose during the 1970s. Panelists: Eleanor Boyer, videomaker and director, Loop YWCA’s Women’s Video Project, Chicago; Deirdre Boyle, professor emerita of media studies at The New School and author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited; Tracy Fitz and Barbara Jabaily, videomakers, founding members of L.O.V.E. (Lesbians Organized for Video Experience), now known as LoveTapesCollective; Julie Gustafson, videomaker and co-director of Global Village; Susan Milano, videomaker and co-founder of the Women’s Video Festival.
The histories of video tend to separate the gallery artists using video – Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci – from a larger, documentary-based independent television movement. But the worlds of “video art” and “Guerrilla Television” were never entirely distinct. This panel explores the exchanges and crossings between independent, community-based videomaking and the gallery.
Moderator: Tom Colley, director, Video Data Bank. Panelists: Pat Lehman, videomaker and educator; Joan Logue, artist and video portraitist; Dan Sandin, artist and designer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois Chicago; Steve Seid, retired curator of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and author of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, Ant Farm 1968-1978, and Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of An Image; Barbara Sykes, video artist and former professor at Columbia College Chicago.
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.