#truthco

[freyaskatt]

Video Note #1

Recently I watched the video about the early experimentation with video technology during the 1970s in the Bay Area.

The political context of that time in the US was quite tense due to the failure in the Vietnam War in 1973. This circumstance coupled with the growing pacifist movement among students, led to massive youth protests against the participation of the US in Vietnam military operations. The early 1970s period is also characterised by the rise of civil awareness within the society pursued by the development of media technology.

Video cameras originally designed for television broadcast in the 1960s were large and heavy, mounted on special pedestals, and wired to remote recorders in separate rooms. In the 1970s, as technology improved, out-of-studio video recording was possible with compact video cameras and portable video recorders. Obviously, miniaturisation of video devices has led to an increase in public accessibility. It allowed a lot of artists in the Bay Area to start experiments with video technology.

Most of the video experimentation was politically charged. Artists used the language of mass media broadcasting to challenge the ways official media present information to the audience, and further to reveal socio-political issues of the time. One of the projects, TVTV (by ANT Farm) aimed to create an alternative video coverage of political conventions.  Also, ANT Farm presented videos about Vietnam veterans, the case that was completely ignored by the official mass media.

Another collective of artists, T.R. Uthco, was interested in a way the meaning is constructed through visuals.  In collaboration with ANT Farm, they created such projects as ‘The Eternal Fame’, a recorded performance which was a re-enactment of the assassination of J. F. Kennedy.  Another piece was called ‘Media Burn’ – footage of American car that crushes into the wall of TVs.

Basically, most of the artistic video works produced in the 1970s in the Bay Area meant to interrogate the privileged power of mass media in order to question and re-think the objective reality of the world.

Another interesting point of artistic practice at that time was a fascination with technological possibilities of a new medium. Artists such as Skip Sweeney used a ‘feedback’, or abstract images created directly out of the TV signal, which means turning the video medium back on itself.

Today's situation is in many ways similar to the 1970s, however, I consider it much worse because the COVID-19 pandemic affected all the world economies and ignited a new round of geopolitical struggle. The artists of the 1970s put great hopes on materiality of a new technology and how it may change the world. However, the world stayed the same. 

Now when we are currently living in the Post-Internet age, video technology is no longer an advent. It is no longer the non-commercial artistic space either. Post-Internet age stands on the shoulders of the Net art and early video art experiments. As Mark Tribe stated, Post-Internet artists should “crush the past and reassemble the fragments in strange offline hybrid forms”.