Video activism

Eleanor Boyer (left) and Karen Peugh. (Source)

Delphine Seyrig, Maria Schneider and Carole Roussopoulos during the shooting of Sois belle et tais-toi, 1975.

Wendy Appel and Rita Ogden filming with Sony Portapak, c.1972. Photo: Paul Goldsmith. Photo courtesy of TVTV.

For an activist, alternative, artist, community, experimental, guerrilla and tactical video and television

Projects, collectives, artists, activists

• 858.ma
• Ant Farm
• Bak.ma
• Black Box
• Skip Blumberg
• Eleanor Boyer
• Deirdre Boyle
• CAMP
• Candida TV
• CEFREC
• Centro de Arte y Comunicación
• COR TV
• David Cort
• DCTV
• Deep Dish TV
• Deptford.TV
• FAVIT
• Davidson Gigliotti
• Frank Gillette
• Global Village
• Menno Grootveld
• Adnan Hadzi
• DeeDee Halleck
• Judy Hoffman
• Infermental
• Les Insoumuses
• Alexandra Juhasz
• Kartemquin Films
• Beryl Korot
• Labournet.tv
• London Community Video Archive
• Media Bus
• Medienwerkstatt Freiburg
• New Arts Laboratory
• Next 5 Minutes
• Original Videojournal
• Pad.ma
• Paper Tiger TV
• Produzentengruppe ATV
• Rabotnik TV
• Radical Software
• Raindance Foundation
• Paul Ryan
• Ira Schneider
• Delphine Seyrig
• Michael Shamberg
• Spectacle
• Tommaso campagna
• Keiko Tsuno
• Tv-tv
• TVTV
• UKRAiNATV
• Undercurrents
• Van Gogh TV
• Video Congress
• Video Hiroba
• Video Information Center
• Videofreex
• Ed Webb-Ingall
• Tom Weinberg
• Zapp Magazine

also: Whispered Media, Witness, Appalshop in the USA [1]; Chiapas Media Project in Mexico; Drishti Media Collective, Indian People's Media Collective Kritika in India; Undercurrents, I-contact video network in the UK; Labor News Production in South Korea; INSIST in Indonesia; Karahaber and Videa in Turkey

Platforms, projects, collections, resources

• 858.ma, an archive of resistance. Created in 2018 by the Mosireen Collective, a nonprofit media collective, as an “initiative to make public all the footage shot and collected since 2011” regarding the Egyptian Revolution.

• bak.ma, a participatory video archiving site seeking to create a living memory of the social movements. Created in Turkey in 2014.

• Guerrilla Television Network "provides an access point to thousands of videos from archival collections all over the world. These collections include the work of a diverse, varied community of artists, activists, and journalists made on videotape during the Guerrilla Television movement, roughly 1968-1980." Project led by Media Burn Archive and University of Chicago.

• London Community Video Archive (LCVA), preserves the work of the Community Video movement in the 1970s and 80s, in London and the South East. Based at Goldsmiths University and the BFI. YouTube. Vimeo.

• Maqam.tv, an itinerant broadcast channel airing video content from North Africa and South to Central Asia. [2]

• Media Burn Archive, Chicago. The website features a digital archive of videos from the 1950s onward. "The collection forms an unmatched portrait of 20th and 21st century American life, created by individuals with a deeply rooted commitment to increasing our understanding of other human beings and communities." [3] [4]

• Preserving Guerilla Television: TVTV, BAMPFA, University of California. Digital collections. [5]

• TV Free Europe, artist project, 2020-2021. "A Tele- Theatre Vision, an international collaboration encompassing the fields of performance and multimedia art, cultural heritage and art education. What happened to the hopes of freedom after the end of the Cold War? What does free Europe mean today? What can liberate you at all in times of a global pandemic? And what’s up with the borders?" With Pneuma Szöv. a.o.,

• UKRAiNATV, "an experimental, collective and cross-sectoral project in the field of media culture. It deals with new relational strategies and new HYBRiD production forms in the field of hybrid PRESENCE. It’s an Internet TV station specialized in building live audiovisual bridges, a multi-channel streaming hub, recording studio and glocal network, all at once." Est. 2022. Affiliated with the Faculty of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts Kraków.

• Van Gogh TV research project, 2018-2021. Exhibition (2021). Online companion.

• Video Activism 2.0, research project on the attention strategies of video activism on the social web.

• Video Digest Magazine, 2023. The online magazine "initiated by Videonale and IMAI - Inter Media Art Institute takes up impulses from historical video magazines (such as Infermental, Video Congress or Zapp Magazine) and uses a series of dialogically presented current works to examine the resistant potential of moving images in various communication channels from a contemporary perspective. The newly commissioned videos, performances and zines by Ji Su Kang-Gatto, Ayesha Hameed, Becket MWN, Rangwane and Leyla Yenirce (in collaboration with Mazlum Nergiz) make use of diverse languages and strategies of protest and mobilization (but also of apathy and resignation) and reflect a current video landscape shaped by on-demand smart TVs, YouTube/Youku, TikTok and Instagram." Booklet PDF.

Films

• Spin, dir. Brian Springer, 1995, 57 min. Pirated satellite feeds revealing U.S. media personalities' contempt for their viewers. [6] [7]

• Videogramme einer Revolution [Videograms of a Revolution], dir. Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, 1992, 106 min. 16 mm (transferred from video). (link to a version with ES subs)

• Storytelling Method no. 4: Two or More; Media as Process, dir. Alex Martinis Roe and Alexandra Juhasz, 2025, 20 min. Navigates the archives of Alexandra Juhasz to uncover feminist media methods developed within the NYC Community Video Movement in the 90s. Juhasz’s methods look to collectively address how women were affected by AIDS and to construct histories of queer-feminist media activism. [8]

Publications

• 

  Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s-1980s, 2019, Log, PDF.

• 

  Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, 1997, Log.

• 

  Michael Shamberg, Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television, 1971.

• 

  Radical Software, 1970-1974.

2020s

• Andrew Roach, Community Media: A Handbook for Revolutions in DIY TV, 2023. Toot.

• Giovanna Zapperi, "From Acting to Action: Delphine Seyrig, Les Insoumuses, and Feminist Video in 1970s France", Konturen 12: "Feminism, Theory, Film: Critical Intersections in the Practice and Theorization of Experimental Filmmaking since the 1970s", ed. Sonja Boos, Apr 2022, pp 24-46.

• Francesco Spampinato, Art vs. TV: A Brief History of Contemporary Artists' Responses to Television, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 368 pp. Publisher. Review: Day (Art Hist).

• Sandra Ristovska, Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession, MIT Press, 2021, 288 pp, EPUB. [9]

2010s

• Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s-1980s, eds. Giovanna Zapperi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Mercedes Pineda, Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2019, 231 pp. Exhibition. Podcast. Video interviews.
  • Musas insumisas: Delphine Seyrig y los colectivos de vídeo feminista en Francia en los 70 y 80, Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2019, 231 pp. (Spanish)

• Freya Schiwy, The Open Invitation: Activist Video, Mexico, and the Politics of Affect, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.

• Freya Schiwy, "Thresholds of the Visible: Activist Video, Militancy, and Prefigurative Politics", ARTMargins 8:3, Oct 2019, pp 7-28. [10]

• Michael Goddard, Guerrilla Networks: An Anarchaeology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 358 pp. TOC & Introduction. [11]. Review: Gloor (H-Soz-Kult).

• Gülüm Şener, Nihan Gider Işıkman (eds.), Video Aktivizmde. Kavramlar Sorunlar Uygulamalar, Ankara: um:ag Yayınları, 2018, 230 pp. Publisher. [12] (Turkish)

• Ege Berensel (ed.), Video'nun Eylemi, Istanbul: Alef Yayinevi, 2017, 238 pp. [13] (Turkish)

• Chris Robé, Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017, x+469 pp.

• Brian Holmes, "Tactical Television. Movement Media in the Nineties", Regarding Spectatorship, 2015.

• Kris Paulsen, "Half-Inch Revolution: The Guerrilla Video Tape Network", Amodern 2, Oct 2013.

• Sara Chapman, "Guerrilla Television in the Digital Archive", Journal of Film and Video 64:1-2, Spring/Summer 2012, pp 42-50.

• Stephen Partridge, "Artists' Television: Interruptions - Interventions", in Rewind: British Artists' Video of the 1970s and 1980s, eds. Sean Cubitt and Stephen Partridge, John Libbey, 2012, pp 75-90.

• Journal of Film and Video 64(1-2): "Early Video History", ed. Elizabeth Coffman, Spring/Summer 2012. TOC. [14]

• William Merrin, "Still Fighting “the Beast”: Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube", Cultural Politics 8:1, Mar 2012, pp 97-119.

• Ege Berensel, "From Guerilla Television to Video-Activism, from Witness Video to Media-Activism: How to Resist Using Video", Goethe.de, 2012.

• Stéphanie Jeanjean, "Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives", Afterall 27, Summer 2011, pp 5-16.

• Nancy Cain, Video Days and What We Saw Through the Viewfinder, Palm Springs, CA: Event Horizon Press, 2011.

2000s

• Videokronik: Aktivisme Video dan Distribusi Video di Indonesia, Yogyakarta: KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, and Collingwood: EngageMedia, 2009, 70 pp. Publisher. (Indonesian)
  • Videochronic: Video Activism and Video Distribution in Indonesia, Yogyakarta: KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, and Collingwood: EngageMedia, 2009, 68 pp. Publisher.

• Jesse Drew, "The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism", in Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945, eds. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp 95-113.

• Carolyn Faber, Jakob Jakobsen, Guerilla Television and Activist Video: A View from the Last 35 Years, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Free University, 2007, 56 pp. Excerpt, [15]. Booklet with an interview with tv-pioneer Tom Weinberg - by Carolyn Faber, documents from the Media Burn Archive and a Guerilla Television Lexicon.

• Carlos Fernandez, "Movements and Militant Media: Communications Technology and Latin American Grassroots Politics", in Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority, eds. Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, AK Press, 2007, pp 229-235.

• Sher Doruff, with Nancy Mauro-Flude (eds.), Connected! LiveArt, Amsterdam: Waag Society, Sep 2005, 160 pp. "The Connected! Programme spanned a two year period from January 2003 to January 2005. It officially concluded with a celebratory Birthday party for Art in the Theatrum Anatomicum of Waag Society, the local ‘home’-base of many Connected! projects. Although most of the people present at that event agreed with Federico Bonelli’s assessment “that art could have committed suicide in 1984” – the research and the show goes on."

• Sara Chapman, "Alternative Television: A Short History of Early Video Activism in Chicago", 2005. BA thesis.

• DeeDee Halleck, Hand-Held Visions: The Uses of Community Media, Fordham University Press, 2001, 486 pp, IA. Publisher.

• Laura Stein, "Access Television and Grassroots Political Communication in the United States", in Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, ed. J. D. H. Downing, Sage, 2001, pp 299-324.

1990s

• Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, Oxford University Press, 1997, 286 pp, PDF.

• Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, Duke University Press, 1995, 316 pp. Author. Publisher.

• Alexandra Juhasz, "So Many Alternatives: The Alternative AIDS Video Movement, Part 1", Cineaste 20:4, 2 Nov 1994, pp 32-41; Part 2, Cineaste, 28 Nov 1994, pp 37-39; repr. in From ACT UP to the WTO, eds. Ben Shepard and Ronald Hayduk, London: Verso, 2002, pp 298-305. [16]

• Tjebbe van Tijen, "A Context for Collecting the New Media", in Next 5 Minutes Video Catalogue: Catalogue of Videotapes Shown During the Festival on Tactical Television held in Paradiso Amsterdam, 8-10 January 1993, eds. Bas Raijmakers and Tjebbe van Tijen, Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1993.

• Wolfgang Stickel, Zur Geschichte der Videobewegung: politisch orientierte Medienarbeit mit Video in den 70er und 80er Jahren: am Beispiel der Medienwerkstatt Freiburg und anderer Videogruppen und Medienzentren in der Bundesrepublik, Freiburg: Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg, 1991; corr.ed., 1992; 2014, 187 pp. Master's thesis. Excerpt. (German)

1970s-1980s

• Martha Gever, "Video Politics: Early Feminist Projects", Afterimage, Summer 1983, pp 25-27. [17]

• Michael Shamberg, Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television, New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt Rinehart and Winstin, 1971, 108 pp. TOC. Ad. Review. [18] [19] [20]

• Radical Software, 11 issues, eds. Beryl Korot, Phyllis Segura, and Ira Schneider, New York: Raindance Corporation (later Raindance Foundation with Gordon and Breach Publishers), 1970-1974.

Events

• On Television, exhibition, Carriage Trade, New York, 10 October 2024-26 January 2025. With Ant Farm, Gretchen Bender, Skip Blumberg, Eli Coplan, Stan Douglas, Barbara Ess, Harun Farocki, Lee Friedlander, Takeshi Murata, Muntadas and Reese, Radical Software, Aldo Tambellini, Not Channel Zero.

• Public Service Television as Scene for Experimentality, seminar, Heirloom, Copenhagen, 14 September 2024.

• Guerrilla Television: The Revolutions of Early Independent Video, symposium, University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall 307, Chicago, 19-21 April 2024. Presented by Media Burn, the University of Chicago’s Cinema and Media Studies Department, and the School of the Art Institute’s Video Data Bank. [21] [22]

• Video Digest, exhibition, Moltkerei Cologne, 25 November-10 December 2023. An exh. of newly commissioned videos, performances and zines, together with issues of the historical video magazines Infermental, Video Congress and Zapp Magazine. Curators: Miriam Hausner, Nele Kaczmarek, Tasja Langenbach. Concept: Tasja Langenbach, Linnea Semmerling. Booklet PDF.

• People Make Television, exhibition, Raven Row, London, 28 January-26 March 2023. Curated by Lori E. Allen, William Fowler, Matthew Harle and Alex Sainsbury. Panel (audio, 75 min).

• Testcard, programme of artists moving-image that takes the format of a 24-hour TV variety show which included a combination of live and pre-recorded material to draw on the history of radical and public broadcasting, open publishing and transmission, 24-25 September 2022. Developed by Nastassja Simensky and Anneke Kampman.

• The Power of Activist Videos, conference, ICI Berlin, 12-13 May 2017. Organised by Jens Eder, Britta Hartmann and Chris Tedjasukmana.

• Video Vortex #10 Istanbul: Art, Activism, Archive, Istanbul, 19-20 September 2014. [23]

See also

Video art, Live video, Tactical media, Community radio, Community servers, Art and activism