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.
00:01Copy video clip URL Media Burn’s Adam Hart introduces moderator Tom Colley and panelists Pat Lehman, Joan Logue, Dan Sanding, Steve Seid, and Barbara Sykes.
01:15Copy video clip URL Colley delivers introductory remarks, discussing the origins and history of the Video Data Bank and the broad, fluid definitions of what videos are considered to be “art.”
6:45Copy video clip URL Seid talks about the early history of artist videos in San Francisco. An interdisciplinary/multi-disciplinary workshop at KQED, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Early experiments in looping video. The Experimental TV Project, lasting from 1966-1969, renamed The National Center for Experiments in Television. Steve Beck completing his Direct Video Synthesizer in 1971. The development of video synthesizers. Forming the Bay Area Video Coalition, most of the artists working in video at the NCET no longer using video after leaving the center.
25:32Copy video clip URL Logue screens a video of police abusing a protestor during the Occupy Wall Street actions. She speaks about her history of video portraiture while a silent portrait of Noam Chomsky plays in the background. Video portraits “meant to replace painting.”
36:24Copy video clip URL Sandin talks about joining the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, to bring computers into the curriculum. Developing his first video synthesizer in collaboration with Phil Morton. Other video synthesizers he worked on. Sandin plays an archival interview in which he explains the workings of the Sandin Image Processor. The Electronic Visualization Events in the 1970s.
46:44Copy video clip URL Sykes discusses generating abstract and figurative images using the Sandin Image Processor. Mixing poetry, dance, martial arts with video. Using the Rutt-Etra and Paik-Abe synthesizers during residencies at the Experimental Television Center. Documentary and photography work after the 1970s.
53:14Copy video clip URL Lehman discusses working “in a vacuum” in Colorado. Working on analog computers with the Computer Image Corporation. Being an aspiring filmmaker but discovering video. Studying documentary with Richard Leacock at MIT and teaching film and video at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Returning to Colorado to teach and make videos. Screening her videos at the Women’s Video Festival in New York. Making video art and documentary when she didn’t have access to computers.
58:59Copy video clip URL Colley asks a question about community and cohorts influencing artistic work. Sandin and Sykes discuss the necessity of community for artistic production, but especially for Image Processing, as the tools and their usage were fundamentally collaborative. The unique identities of the communities within New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
63:14Copy video clip URL Logue discusses her community of artists and neighbors being the subjects of her portraits. Financial struggles among videomakers. Living in a building with Davidson Gigliotti, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Joan Jonas, Howard Klein, and others.
67:55Copy video clip URL Lehman discusses her own upcoming documentary project on scientist Fred Solheim.
72:05Copy video clip URL Sandin discusses the functional operation of Image Processors. “Well it’s all mathematics. It’s addition, subtraction, multiplication… That’s the bottom line. What you’re actually doing with an instrument like that is you’re setting up, essentially, equations of activity that manipulate images. That’s one level. I’m sure that’s not quite the level you were asking about but it’s the level I think about. You could ask, ‘What’s a violin player doing when they’re playing a violin?’ Well, they’re taking something abrasive, making a piece of fabric… they’re vibrating. But what you’re really doing is interacting with the instrumentality that’s teaching you how to control it, based on stuff coming back to you that you want to see. So that’s to me the activity of interacting with an instrumentality to expand your ability to change the world and then learning from that. And of course you know playing a piano is just pushing buttons. But from my point of view it really has to do with the interaction of the instrument to teach you how to make stuff on screen to do what you want.”
74:07Copy video clip URL Sykes discusses the process of interacting with Image Processing equipment as a “dance” with the technology. The spontaneity of real time feedback.
76:18Copy video clip URL Skip Blumberg asks about the relationship between Guerrilla Television and video art. He suggests that “breaking rules” is fundamentally political. Colley posits a spectrum of political video in which experimenting and working outside of the system is political, though not in the same way as activist-aligned video. Sykes distinguishes video art from the explicitly political aspects of Guerrilla Television but finds its “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” character to be political.
80:39Copy video clip URL Ron McCoy asks about the repeatability of Image Processing procedures, pointing out that there were no numbers or labels on the knobs of the Sandin Image Processor. Sandin thinks that “it’s a pretty reproducible instrument, in terms of performance,” but emphasizes its feedback/responsive element.
82:11Copy video clip URL Mark Blotner, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, asks a question about Tom DeFanti and the Z-Grass programming language. Sandin discusses the productive responsiveness of Z-Grass as a programming language.
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