Deirdre Boyle: Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997)

24 July 2009, dusan

Filed under book | Tags: · 1970s, activism, art, collective art, critique, television, video, video activism, video art

“Part of the larger alternative media tide which swept the country in the late sixties, guerilla television emerged when the arrival of lightweight, affordable consumer video equipment made it possible for ordinary people to make their own television. Fueled both by outrage at the day’s events and by the writings of people like Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, the movement gained a manifesto in 1971, when Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Corp. published Guerilla Television. As framed in this quixotic text, the goal of the video guerilla was nothing less than a reshaping of the structure of information in America.

In Subject to Change, Deidre Boyle tells the fascinating story of the first TV generation’s dream of remaking television and their frustrated attempts at democratizing the medium. Interweaving the narratives of three very different video collectives from the 1970s–TVTV, Broadside TV, and University Community Video–Boyle offers a thought-provoking account of an earlier electronic utopianism, one with significant implications for today’s debates over free speech, public discourse, and the information explosion.”

Keywords and phrases
Michael Shamberg, Megan Williams, guerrilla television, Freex, Paul Goldsmith, portapak, WNET, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Rucker, KTCA, TVTV Show, Greg Pratt, TVTV’s, Ira Schneider, Cajun, David Loxton, cable television, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Appalachia

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1997
ISBN 0195110544, 9780195110548
286 pages

Publisher

PDF
Excerpt published in Art Journal, 1985.

Comment (0)

Dona Kolar-Panov: Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination (1997)

3 July 2009, dusan

Filed under book | Tags: · 1990s, australia, migration, video, war, yugoslavia

Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination is an incisive study of the loss and (re)construction of collective and personal identities in ethnic migrant communities. Focusing on the Macedonian and Croatian communities in Western Australia, Dona Kolar-Panov documents the social and cultural changes that affected these diasporic groups on the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. She vividly describes the migrant audience’s daily emcounter with the media images of destruction and atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia, and charts the implications the continuous viewing of the real and excessive violence had on the awakening of their ethno-national consciousness.

Publisher Routledge, 1997
ISBN 0415148804, 9780415148801
270 pages

Keywords and phrases
Serbian, Western Australia, Stjepan Radic, Serbs, SFRJ, Perth, SBS-TV, Vukovar, semiosphere, Republic of Macedonia, Zagreb, Opuzen, satellite television, Skopje, video tapes, Sibenik, Aegean Macedonia, folk music, Croatian diaspora, intertitle

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF

Comment (0)

Radical Software (1970-1974)

10 June 2009, dusan

Filed under magazine | Tags: · art, computer art, electromagnetism, software, technology, television, video, video art

The historic video magazine Radical Software was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists and other potential videomakers. Though scholarly works on video art history often refer to Radical Software, there are few places where scholars can review its contents. Individual copies are rare, and few complete collections exist.

Radical Software was an important voice of the American video community in the early 70s; the only periodical devoted exclusively to independent video and video art at the time when those subjects were still being invented. Issues included contributions by Nam June Paik, Douglas Davis, Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Beryl Korot, Charles Bensinger, Ira Schneider, Ann Tyng, R. Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Gene Youngblood, Parry Teasdale, Ant Farm, and many others.

Eleven issues of Radical Software were published from 1970 to 1974, first by the Raindance Corporation and then by the Raindance Foundation with Gordon and Breach Publishers.

Radical Software, Volume I, Number 1
The Alternate Television Movement,
Spring 1970
PDF