Open Circuits Revisited: Susan Murray and Fred Turner in Conversation
On October 17, 2024, EAI and NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) opened our event series, Open Circuits Revisited, with a public presentation by scholars Susan Murray (NYU) and Fred Turner (Stanford) on television utopias of the 1970s and their continued relevance to our current political, cultural, and technological landscape. Murray’s presentation, “TV Utopias and Media Ecologies,” outlines the discourses on television and video that were circulating around Open Circuits, highlighting the issues and events that animate the conference’s call to action. Turner’s presentation, “New Television, New Democracy,” narrates the development from cybernetic utopianism to the pluralist visions of video art and American democracy that followed.
Allan Kaprow, Hello, from The Medium is the Medium, WGBH, 1969.
Rebecca Cleman: Welcome, everyone. I'm Rebecca Cleman, the Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix. I'm very much looking forward to this evening, which launches a series of events honoring and considering the 50th, or 50th-ish, anniversary of a catalytic moment in art history and media studies.
I'm deeply honored to be a part of this program and very excited to be joined tonight by Marita Sturkin, once an EAI staff member. Thank you to Fred Turner and Susan Murray for their insights into a subject that has been so central to this history from the start.
Some of you will know that Sony released its Portapak, the first consumer grade portable video camera, in the mid 1960s, and it was soon taken up as a new tool by artists, activists, documentarians and communication theorists, among others. In today’s dollars, the camera would cost as much as a car, and it was very heavy. Footage could only be edited on professional equipment in a technical facility. In other words, this new consumer technology required support systems to provide access to it. In the early 1970s, New York City and New York State were important centers of support for artists working with video and its parent technology, television, and were central in the growth of this kind of experimentation. This was due to a concentration of funding and institutional support for experimentation with this technology. The New York State Council on the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation were offering new avenues of funding for artists working with media, and individual patrons were establishing other models of support. This led to an especially fertile and fervent period of exploration, and it is no coincidence that NYU's Department of Media, Culture and Communication was founded at this time as well by Neil Postman at the encouragement of Marshall McLuhan. Happy 50th anniversary to NYU's MCC.
EAI was founded a bit earlier, in 1971, by the gallerist Howard Wise, a retired corporate executive who turned his attention late in life to supporting artists working with technology and political activism. He had been the president of an industrial coatings company in Ohio, and I wonder if his company’s contracts with the government for military use might have inspired his deeply held beliefs in technology being used for the good of humanity rather than harm—something that he wrote and spoke about a lot. Wise was a visionary and an enthusiastic supporter of experimental art. After retiring from the coatings company, he relocated to New York City and opened a gallery that held some of the most important exhibitions focused on artists working within the light and kinetic art movements. And in 1969, he hosted one of the very first exhibitions in the world dedicated to artists working with video and television.
Promotional Brochure for TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery, 1969.
Flyers for TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery, 1969.
TV as a Creative Medium was held just a few months before and a few blocks away from the CBS studio where Walter Cronkite narrated the Apollo 11 moon landing. This event was television’s apotheosis. It was then the largest audience TV had ever garnered, broadcasting images of astronauts touching the lunar surface into living rooms and bars. It is no small accomplishment that Wise mounted his show in such close proximity to this event. Visitors to TV as a Creative Medium would find eleven creative interventions into television, including Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider's Wipe Cycle (1969), which I believe Fred will be mentioning later, demonstrating how artists and individuals might retool the then-almost magical, even frighteningly opaque, device of television to their own personal expression. The excitement that surrounded this show and its catalyst encouraged Wise to take another leap in his career. He decided to close his gallery and build a new paradigm to support a new art form. So in 1971 he founded EAI. And then in 1973, EAI launched its distribution program, which continues to be its core activity, providing global access to a collection of nearly 5,000 media artworks for educational and cultural use. EAI was also a key sponsor of “Open Circuits: The Future of Television,” a conference held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974. We’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of Open Circuits with the release of The New Television: Video After Television, a publication from no place press that includes a full facsimile reprint of The New Television: A Public/Private Art (1977), a compendium of papers delivered at the conference and reflections after the fact.
Obviously, television was a central concern during Open Circuits, and at this time there were several camps of thought related to its potential as a creative arena in the conference. On the one hand, there were the contrarians in the figure of art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, for example, or those who had grown skeptical of the utopianism of the early video movement, in the figure of John Baldessari, who likened the fervor of the self-described Videofreex to “Jesus Freaks.” For him, video was simply another tool for artists to work with, and it was due to become as commonplace as an ordinary pencil. Baldessari was prescient in anticipating a time when video would become as ubiquitous as it is now. But it's important not to overlook what made the interest in video and television so exciting and full of potential.
In an excellent introduction to The New Television, Allison Simmons, now Allison Prouty, an EAI staffer at the time, synthesizes a connection to the avant garde movements of the early 20th century, highlighting the interest in using television—the then-dominant communication platform—to circumvent and undermine the hegemony of commercial and political structures. That connection to early avant garde-ism is incredibly important and not often made. The link between video and television was intrinsic then in a way that it no longer is. We might be in a post-television paradigm—taking for granted how easily we can now transmit our own video content from our personal devices—but much of the thinking regarding the once-new information technology of television has carried forward into the age of the internet and social media. We would do well to look to how individuals and collectives sought to intervene in an industry that was tightly regulated, while also offering the potential to reach broad publics in novel ways. It is in that spirit of the visionaries who saw this potential that we embark on our tribute to that moment.
I would like to offer a very special and heartfelt thanks to Mara Mills and the entire team here at NYU. We are especially grateful for the support of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication (MCC) and also to the Center for Disability Studies (CDS), without whom we could not have had this series of events and also, of course, the Center for Ballet and the Arts for hosting us tonight. Thanks also to my incredible and beloved colleagues at EAI, Karl McCool, Jooyoung Park, Charlotte Strange, Caroline Gil, Draye Wilson and Kelly Filreis. And I'd like to acknowledge support from the Terra Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in helping to fund this series of events. And finally, we're very grateful to the Artists in Resistance group for providing the HEPA air filters that are probably going unnoticed because they’re so quiet.
So without further ado, I'm going to turn the platform over to Marita Sturken, who's going to introduce Fred and Susan. After they both speak, the three of us will come back together and be in dialogue, and then we'll open it up for some questions. Thank you again.
Marita Sturken: It's lovely to see you all. Thank you Rebecca, that was a terrific introduction. I'm honored to be here to introduce this evening’s speakers and to share in reflections about the Open Circuits moment of technological and media optimism, and the beginning of NYU MCC. Looking at the founding of each 50 years later, one cannot help being struck above all about the intensity of the discussions that took place in that moment. Even in a world of crude analog technology that could not come close to imagining the world of the digital, the web, and the smartphone that we live in today, there was a sense of promise and endless possibilities that were invested in alternative electronic media at that time, seemingly devoid of the cynicism and despair with which we now inhabit that world.
So I'm here not only as a faculty member of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, but as a little bit of a relic of that time period. Ten years after the Open Circuits conference, I was a low level worker at MoMA, writing for the publication Afterimages, and I got a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to write a series of articles and interviews with the people who were making the worlds of video art and alternative media happening. And actually, I found out afterwards that there was a little bit of a controversy at NYSCA to award money, not to artists, not to someone writing about artists, but to someone writing about the sort of apparatus that made the work happen. So I wrote about curators Jonathan Hart and David Ross, community video pioneer George Stoney, and Howard Klein of the Rockefeller Foundation. And one of the first essays, as Rebecca noted, was my portrait of Howard Wise, the unlikely visionary first of Howard Wise Gallery and then of EAI. So, like so many in the room, I'm curious to reflect on the tensions of what seemed possible then and where we find ourselves now.
We have two exceptional speakers to address these issues with us this evening. Susan Murray is Professor and former chair in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication. She is one of the preeminent scholars of the history of television and media studies whose work is engaged with the transition from radio to television and the history of reality television. And her 2018 award winning book, Bright Signals: A History of Color Television is a tour de force that, for the first time, undertook a comprehensive history of the industrial, technological, and cultural elements that led to the development of color television in the 1960s. As she makes clear, the engagement with the prospect of color television inspired compelling, popular scientific and industry conversations about color itself and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. The book is a model of media studies scholarship, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. Susan is currently at work on a project on the history of closed circuit television entitled Closed Circuits, Distant Bodies. This project examines the history of closed circuit TV in medicine, education, business and industrial science and government and the military, and promises to add an important history to the canon of television studies.
Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and one of the most important historians of cyber culture, media, and technology. His book From Counterculture to CyberCulture, Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism is a remarkable history of the unique alliance of the counterculturalists of the Bay Area and the emerging technologists who, from the late 1960s through the 1990s, imagined the personal computer and the digital revolution within a framework of personal liberation and utopian social worlds. He followed this with another astonishing cultural history of the democratic multimedia and American liberalism from World War Two to the psychedelic ‘60s, which explores how American intellectuals, artists, and designers from the 1930s through the 1960s imagined new kinds of collective events as a kind of alternative propaganda about American democracy in action. For MoMA's Road to Victory and Family of Man shows, to expanded cinema and psychedelic bends, the book shows the way that the social radicalism and democratic cultural forces of the 1960s emerged out of Cold War culture. Fred recently published a book with photographer Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside the Fraying America about the workers supporting the infrastructures of Northern California's tech industry. And just in case his Renaissance man bonafides are not yet clear, he has also just published a short book in French, L’usage de L’art, that meditates on the co-optation of art by management culture from Burning Man to Facebook.
Please join me in welcoming Susan Murray and Fred Turner.
Susan Murray: Thanks, Marita. That was a wonderful introduction. And Rebecca, that was a great introduction and setup for what I hope to discuss today. Hearing about your background with EAI also reminds me that in the nineties I had a connection to this world as well, when I was a grad student, an MA student at The New School, and I was working as an editorial assistant for The Independent, and also the research assistant for Deirdre Boyle, who wrote the seminal book on Guerilla Television, Subject to Change.
So I'm back into this material now, and it's been great to revisit it from a different perspective. I wasn't exactly sure how to approach this talk today because I wasn't sure who would be in the audience. Maybe some of you know this history so deeply, maybe even better than I do, and some might be new to it. I decided to take kind of a middle tack and approach it from the way that I know best—as a television historian. I sort of see this as an invitation to revisit this moment and what undergirds it. What I want to do tonight is place Open Circuits in the context of the discourses on television and video that were circulating in the late sixties and early seventies in order to better understand the issues and events that animate its call to action.
I also want to briefly connect EAI to the history of MCC, which both Rebecca and Marita have already done to some degree, because I think there's some important strands of connection there. As we know, EAI and MCC were both founded in 1971 in New York City. I know Fred is going to talk about the importance of New York to this moment in a bit. This is occurring both at a time of intense engagement, critique, and creativity. Neil Postman originally named our program Media Ecology, as he was building on the work of scholars such as McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Harold Innis. These thinkers also inspired and challenged the video artist and Howard Wise, an activist in the early seventies, and did so in the following ways: They stressed the importance of the medium itself over content, gauging how media actively engages its audience, and what specific sensory organ it activates the most. I think about McLuhan's famous phrase, of course, “the medium is the message.” They inject ideas about the global village and critiques about television's impact on the quality of political discourse, which resonates with this contemporary moment very much. They posit that the media environment is intertwined with the human environment. And here we can also see a resonance with Frank Gillette’s exploration of the ecological and technological systems in his work. So in 1979, Postman wrote:
Inside covers from The New Television: A Public/Private Art (1977).
The printing press, the computer and television are not simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or the other. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it's like. Through these media metaphors we do not see the world ‘as it is,’ we see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information.
So I'll return to the question of medium and media theory in a bit, but I first want to return to Open Circuits from 1974. As many of you know, Open Circuits was the first major museum conference on video art. This was the early stages of TV/video moving into museum spaces, and in general moving out of the network box and into alternative streams of production, distribution, and exhibition. What's behind this gathering is a shift in the understanding of the possibilities of television, related to the realities of the network broadcast industry, new technologies, and reconsiderations of the aesthetics of television. It’s often been framed as a utopian moment, but we can see from the conference records and The New Television book that followed that it was far more complicated than that. What was being referred to as personal television, decentralized television, was considered as the answer to the corporate, one-way, top-down television. But I’ll also say that creators and thinkers seemed pretty clear eyed about its limitations and the reality on the ground. The conference organizers’ goals were to explore the history of television as an artistic medium in its own right, to bring together the best video works that had been done so far, and to consider the future of television. It was a really ambitious idea.
And what's interesting is that the conference organizers originally wanted this to be a conversation that included delegates from the networks. So they invited foundational figures like William Paley from CBS, who basically founded it, and David Sarnoff. These are enormous figures, of course, as well as some of the media and technology theorists like McLuhan and Lewis Mumford. While they didn't succeed in getting those folks, they did get an executive from PBS, the former CBS president Frank Stanton, who was already doing media and communication research, along with a stellar list of artists, critics, and curators.
So the original introduction to The New Television identified three distinct approaches to re-envisioning video and television that were discussed at the conference, and that all worked to shift where television resided—who could make it, and what it could look like. There was political, documentary, conceptual, and imagist video. I know they’ve gone on to be categorized in different ways since then. The authors note that these approaches are often in contradiction to one another and that none were entrenched in an absolute naive optimism about the democratization of the medium or its potential to be part of a global village, but that was certainly there. It was a complex television utopia. They considered Open Circuits to be an opportunity to talk back to corporate television to highlight its failures, while also playing with and expanding on the potential of the medium, both in terms of its aesthetics and what it chose to represent.
Political documentary was of course addressing the issues and viewpoints not covered by traditional networks anywhere really. These works would go on to air on cable, public access, some museums, PBS, and sometimes even traditional networks. Some of the early filmmakers brought their work to traditional networks. But this was an activist political and cultural intervention as well as a distribution that eventually led towards media literacy—teaching the public the tools of production to help them make their own representation. So we can think of organizations and collectives like TVTV, Raindance, Videofreex, and later, Guerrilla TV, which grew in the early eighties with Paper Tiger TV, Deep Dish, Downtown Community Television (DCTV), etc…. And this approach seemed to have less of a presence at Open Circuits than the others. And that might have had to do with the venue in particular.
[Murray changes slides on the projector to show a clip of John Baldessari’s I Am Making Art (1971).]
John Baldessari, I Am Making Art (1971).
The second approach to video represented at the conference is conceptual, which is really foregrounding the idea of the art over the form or medium, and might include taped performance pieces, live performance including closed circuit, and the use of television as a performance object. Here John Baldessari is literally saying “I am making art” and doing these particular movements. They were called imagists or technologists. The exploration of a medium is central, and there is a focus on the look and feel of the image. Video as an artistic medium or a canvas. Artists working with engineers and technicians, or learning the engineering themselves to better know and alter their tool and technique. They played with the image, expanding its possibilities through distortion, feedback, and reversal by using video synthesizers as well.
[Murray shows clips from Nam June Paik’s and John Godfrey’s Global Groove (1973).]
It was radical to think of television in terms of the look of the image at all, and also, as Nam June Paik did, to open up the box, disassemble it, reassemble it, and to explore the quirks of the technology itself. Paik, too, was critical of the one-way nature of television, referring to it as a dictatorial medium at times. Like Postman, he, at times, said that it led to a dumbing down of culture and led to constraints on public political discourse.
Speaking of traditional television, there were some conceptualist critiques of political video, perhaps most strikingly expressed by John Baldessari. Rebecca already mentioned this quote in brief, but I'll read it in full where he says:
The use of TV today is in crisis. I think it becomes clear at the Open Circuits conference. Running throughout seems to be the idea that TV could or would save the world in some fashion. The title “Video Freak” is well-chosen [in the sense that it is] akin to “Jesus Freak.” [...] What troubled me about the conference is that I felt like an outsider at a religious convention. [...] So the point I want to make is this: to have a three day conference on video is akin to having a conference on The Pencil. That is, I think, for there to be progress in TV, the medium must be as neutral as a pencil. Just one more tool in the artist's toolbox. To have a conference on any device implies that it has much importance and implies that we are serving it. The case should not be, “I'm going to make a video piece,” but, “What I want to do can be best done with video.”
We can also see here a critique of artists as technological determinists. This will also be the critique, eventually, of Postman and McLuhan. But we see that these early video makers engage with the question of “what exactly is the medium of television?” In some provocative ways, they reveal the tension between medium as a relatively static technological channel of information, understood to have inherent immovable qualities and limitations, and medium as a malleable artistic tool. If one could learn the engineering principles behind it you could use many of its idiosyncrasies and failures to your advantage.
So what type of medium or metaphor was television in relation to what technology was understood to be at that time? McLuhan had a playful and often experimental approach to his claims about this. I was just listening, revisiting some videos of Neil Postman, and he was saying he was close to McLuhan. He was saying, “I would go to listen to him, and I realized he didn't believe most of what he was saying. He was just sort of riffing and trying to see how it sounded.” And so I think that's an important context as well. McLuhan famously claimed that television was a “cool medium” because a viewer had to actively participate in filling in its tactile or textured, pixilated, low-definition image. And that's, of course, in comparison to what film is. And he also points out that the context it produced often lacks intelligent programming. So here I just want to play a short clip of McLuhan so you get a sense of his style and approach.
[Murray puts a 1965 clip of McLuhan on the BBC television program, Monitor, on the screen. McLuhan says the following:]
The medium of television has many characteristics which have been unheeded and mostly seen under the aspect of movie form. The TV camera does not have a shutter, does not take pictures. The TV camera picks up its environment, handles it, scans it. And the effect of the TV image is iconic in the sense that it shapes things by contours rather than by little snapshots.
So you just get a taste of that. It's an awesome riff. So Postman, who always took a more grounded tack than McLuhan, argued that the television medium was entertainment. The medium itself was entertainment. So even the news [and] political issues broadcast from it could only be processed as entertainment. And this, I think, is where he's had sort of a renaissance lately. And you know he hired me back in 2001 and at the time my fellow grad students were like, oh, Neil Postman, you know, how boring and curmudgeonly, right? And now I see, like, Ezra Klein is always quoting him. He was so smart. It's important to see him in this context and in this time period. And so for the critics and much of the general public, by the 1960s, commercial television was a debased or low form of culture that had failed at its pretensions to be more, in a time that there was a golden age television, of course, where it tried to synthesize be a synthesis of film and theater, etc… But it started to be referred to as the “boob tube.” In the parlance of the time, boob refers to someone who is stupid, a simpleton. But also the term even then reflects an evocative idea of a viewer positioned as a vulnerable, suckling, dependent.
Richard Serra and Carlota Schoolman, Television Delivers People (1973).
Critiques similar to Postman's undergirded much of the guerilla television and media literacy collectives that formed in the seventies and eighties, as well as some of the artists. The documentary form had a similar role in Open Circuits, but its implicit critique is present. Here we see Richard Serra make an argument about commercial television that resonates with Postman's thinking.
[Murray shows clips of Richard Serra’s Television Delivers People (1973).]
And as I reread the introduction of many of the essays in the original The New Television anthology, I was not only struck by the resonance with the discussion about media in our contemporary moment, but the ways in which it differed. I would argue that some of the differences are related to the sense of untapped potential in artist and activist interventions in the late sixties and seventies, paired with living in the immediate aftermath of the failed public interest promises of broadcast networks. And I think it's safe to say, in our contemporary moment, we've probably given up on the sense of television playing much of a public interest role at all.
I'm going to briefly touch on what “public interest” meant in the American postwar context. But before, I want to take a moment to explore the state of the electronic image and the beliefs about its limits, failures, and possibilities in the 1960s. Considerations of what the electronic image is and how it could be stabilized, standardized, or improved upon are central to what video was as an artistic medium or tool during the development of television in general. During the development of television as a technology, the quality of the image and the economies of transmission related to compression were always at play. In contrast to film and in large parts to the limits of broadcast transmission, television engineers developed a service that would meet the basic requirements of a clear close-up image, but that would not require too much bandwidth.
So what was the result? It was really a “good enough” image. This became more complicated with color systems, as color required larger packets of information to be transmitted, and because of the complexity of color electronic transmission and reception. In reception, there existed far more opportunities for glitches and failures. Ultimately in setting standards for color television engineers, advisors, and regulators sought an approximation of verisimilitude in the image, and yet in the end, did not prioritize maximum levels of picture detail rate. And this is what McLuhan's talking about, that kind of pixelated roughness. Which might have constructed a richer and more complex image, but would have put limits on how many channels could exist on the dial. So in doing this, engineers considered the limitations of human vision, the limitations of the screen, the limitations of the home as a viewing space, and the fact that the reception of RGB color signals was device dependent, meaning it had to go through transmitters to be shown on actual TV sets. If you're old enough to remember what it was like to tune in a television, I have to say it was incredibly complex. So this along with the many and varied potential problems, bandwidth or spectrum limitations, and other disruptions and interference that could distort a color electronic image.
So while network television worked endlessly to calibrate, stabilize, and standardize the video image to rest it under its control, video artists got under the hood to unleash it, to encourage and explore its garish, janky, surreal, and imperfect elements, to supercharge what the broadcast industry considered its vulnerabilities and failures. But there's another type of failure lurking in the background here, too. The failure of commercial TV to serve the public interest more broadly and to experiment with its form and content more specifically.
So the public interest responsibilities of broadcasters go all the way back to the establishment of commercial radio in 1927, which allowed for commercial broadcasters to use the public airwaves as long as they served the public interest. That was the contract, the social contract. Broadcasters who didn't abide by this contract would lose their licenses, at least in theory, or have problems renewing them. So the FCC outlined the public interest responsibility in more detail in 1946, making it clear it was intended to sustain experimental programs. That was one piece of it. That meant that networks had to pay for television shows that otherwise would not be sponsored (where sponsors would not like their product associated with the broadcast in one way or the other), to set aside time for discussion of public local issues to do live programing—live is really as better than recorded, and this is part of the history, even back to radio—and to limit commercial access, which was much very much a part of a public discourse about television, hating to hear commercials and loud commercials and offensive commercials. So in 1960, the FCC adopted a report and statement of policy, which listed the major elements usually necessary to meet the public interest. You could see there's a whole bunch of them, right?
[Murray shows the 1960 FCC Programming Policy Statement on the board.]
Over time, there were all these various ways in which they were trying to define, redefine, and specify what public interest was. It was very difficult to pin down as a concept. It was deeply subjective and problematic. But it was often held up as a goal or a responsibility. But by the mid-sixties, the public came to understand that networks were not living up to their obligations and that the FCC had weakened its mandate. So, of course, if you know this history, there's the famous “Vast Wasteland” speech by FCC Chair Newton Minow in 1963. And in response to a series of scandals that beset the broadcast industry in the late fifties, there's a rise in documentary and news as a sort of way to to make up for that for the lack of trust in viewers.
WGBH, The Medium is the Medium (1969).
But for the most part, in the fifties and the sixties, much of entertainment programming was criticized as escapist, violent, vacuous and appealing to the lowest common denominator. There was little sustained programming outside of news and documentary, and attempts to even preserve segments of the primetime schedule for local programming failed. And by the late seventies, the FCC was more interested in taking a “marketplace” approach to public interest, which was really asking, “what does the public want?” Or, “what do we want them to want?” Only wishing to step in at exceptional moments of going against the public interest. So what resulted was Republican educational initiatives taking up the mantle of public interest, and that moved outside of networks and into other spaces. One area in which there was some possibility was in UHF.
[Murray shows an image of a television dial in line with the 1962 All-Channel receiver act.]
I show this image because when I talk about UHF to my students, they have no idea. But if you're old enough, you will remember the visceral memory of tuning. The top dial would be VHF. At the bottom is UHF. UHF never had very many channels on it, and it was often thought of as a way for color television to be broadcast. They thought, maybe we could put it on UHF because it required a larger bandwidth. “Oh, educational television could reside in UHF.” There was always this possibility of another space for television on the dial. So UHF is a second-tier band of stations that was always consistently underutilized. But in ‘62, Congress passed the All Channel Receiver Act, giving the FCC the authority to require manufacturers to make television receivers capable of receiving both UHF—and those channels go from 14-36—and VHF. And so there were hopes for these to be local and experimental spaces as well.
By the seventies, cable was moving from a distribution technology for broadcast TV. For a long time it was seen as a way to get broadcast television into remote or rugged areas to improve its transmission, but not much more. The FCC really tried to keep out competition from it being used in other ways. But now we start to see, in the early seventies, the promise of a multitude of channels and the hope for niche audiences. And the Cable Act of 1972 required public access stations. This is also somewhat hard to imagine now. We still have public access, but this required cable systems to carry at least three public access channels. It varied over time, it was modified over time, but also they were required to provide free access to equipment and studios. Right. So we can see this connection, of course, to guerrilla television and political documentary. And of course this coincided with the availability of portable and affordable camera and recording equipment, a portable studio, the Portapak. Rebecca already described some of its complications and issues. This device was seen as the opportunity to explore not just work in the public interest, but a model of decentralization and a move towards personal TV.
This, of course, is dovetailing with the participatory democracy movement and alternative media movements and stronger critiques of the passivity and “moral numbness” of the network system. And so this is where the utopian visions enter. PBS is also understood or envisioned as another site for public interest programming. It's not woven into all networks’ and stations’ responsibilities, but that it's actually put to another space. And this is a complicated history, there's taste issues at play, class issues at play. It was seen as a cultural corrective to sort of a negative assessment of what was going on with popular culture in general, but what was what television was doing. It was intended to perhaps be more high-minded, experimental, more informative, and did not need to serve the interests of a sponsor. Here we see the kind of siloing of public interest initiatives. And so even more importantly, perhaps for video, the video arts PBS stations were investing in experimental labs for video art and documentary in an effort to offer up their equipment to those who needed to work beyond the limits of the Portapack. Some important stations in this history are WGBH in Boston, The Rockefeller Artists in Television program started in ‘67 and gave grants to WGBH and KQED in San Francisco for experiments in form and aesthetics. Also, WBH allows Nam June Paik to use color cameras, which he didn't have access to—only stations had. And we also get The Medium is the Medium, a show on WGBH which is “exploring” television as a personal means of expression. Another station that stands out is WNET, which is the home of an experimental TV laboratory.
I wanted to sort of provide this as the context in which we're going to also explore this moment more, and then Fred is going to bring in more granular detail about this period of time and its politics and culture. To make that transition, I just want to show two relatively short clips to get us in the moment. And so the first is from The Medium is the Medium from 1969, WGBH in Boston.
[Clip from The Medium is the Medium plays.]
[The following script plays above video synthesized imagery:]
What happens when artists take control of television? PBL invited six artists to collaborate with television technicians in a search for new ways to use the tools of television as an electronic art form. Each artist has experimented with sophisticated technology in his own work, mechanical and electronic devices, optic machines, kinetics and multimedia. They all see in television an immediate way of reaching a vast audience and creating a museum for millions. Here they use the medium as their medium. Aldo Tambellini, born Syracuse, New York, 1930, mixed media pioneer and co-founder of New York's Black Gate Theater, his work explores the philosophy and social concept of blackness. He uses 1000 slides, 16 films, TV monitors and 30 children in his piece titled Black.
And this next clip is a documentary on the TV lab. So we get a sort of more direct address here.
[On-screen voiceovers from recorded interviews play over found footage, presented in the style of a documentary.]
Interviewee 1: If you're lucky in life, you will encounter some magic moments in time when you know what you're doing is exciting, and to some degree is needed. That's what the TV lab let us all do.Appropriated voiceover: You and I are about to embark upon a magnificent collaboration. We are going to make history today.
Interviewee 2: The TV lab was an environment conducive to creativity. It's literally one where an artist could put their hands on the camera.
Interviewee 3: We were going to show everything innovative that was happening with the media.
Interviewee 4: We were just in control of the frame and very soon in computerized control of the video frame. So we were able to cut much faster.
Interviewee 5: We knew that you could take this equipment and apply it to journalism and therefore kind of you to do your own mainstream television. So that was the radical idea.
Interviewee 6: We were certainly quite naive. We had no formal training as reporters and our knowledge was based on talking to the people.
So between these two clips you get to see the way that political documentary stands out somewhat, and the moment of difference. So I just want to end there. I’ll hand it over to Fred to continue the conversation and then we're going to talk together. Thank you.
Stephen Beck, Illuminated Music III (1972-3).
Fred Turner: Good stuff. Hi, I'm Fred Turner, and I am absolutely thrilled to be here. Thank you, Mara. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Sue. I am just thrilled. It's wonderful to be in a place where 50 years ago, the world that I work in and that Marita and Sue work in were really, really brought into being.
I'm going to make a case tonight that the conference that took place in 1974 occurred at a fulcrum moment. And I'm going to make that case in three parts. I’ll take us back first, yes, [to] Marshall McLuhan for a little bit, to talk about the dream of the global village. And I'm going to make a case that that dream is attached to a particular politics, a particular Cold War utopian politics that emerges not from the counterculture, but from the absolute epicenter of the military industrial technocracy, and that's a cybernetic vision. That cybernetic vision arrives at Open Circuits in the optimism of a whole series of the participants in the event, and I'll talk a little bit about that, but it arrives at a moment in 1974 when America is becoming very different. We're losing the Vietnam War. We're about to enter stagflation. The dream of a Cold War world united as a village under the egis of the American eagle…not looking so good.
At the same time, I want to argue in the mid seventies and the late seventies, at this conference you could see the very beginnings, just the early rivulets of what was going to become a stream of a new kind of video, a new kind of television, and with it a reimagining of democracy that I think has traveled down to our own time and certainly was around when the Internet hit hard. I'm going to make a case for the emergence of a new kind of democracy, and I'm going to make the case that that new kind of democracy is imagined alongside and in part because of the ubiquitous distribution of new video technology. So that's where we're headed. All right. Let's go to the dream of a global village and to our man, Marshall.
You really it was quite a wonder, you know. Oh, completely charming. Here he is with multiple images. [Turner shows an iconic image of Marshall McLuhan alongside multiple images of himself televised on CRT monitors.] And when you read Marshall McLuhan from our time, at least when I read him, I see two elements. I see a deep Catholicism. He was deeply Catholic. And secondly I see a deep faith in what was at the time a kind of cybernetic vision. He said things like this, “the aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy, and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electronic technology.” I bet you feel that way about your cell phones [laughs]. Here's another thing. This is about 1969 that he’s saying these things. Maybe a little earlier. “In this electric age, we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.” Okay. That is straight cybernetic hippie talk from the mid 1960s. It's a very powerful vision.
In order to understand what this sort of new democracy and new TV are going to do, we need to spend a minute in that moment. And I want to return to the period during World War Two, because this is a period in which the fear of the masses acquires a deeper political element. And we often talk about the fear of mass culture, mass media and some of the ways that Sue recalled for us as, you know, sort of a fear of the hoi polloi. But the fear of mass media is anchored in an experience during World War Two of a slew of intellectuals and artists. It was the fear that mass media—literally radio, one to many media, cinema—gave voice to and made possible fascism. There was a terrible fear that Hitler had triumphed in large part because he had the ability to put his voice out simultaneously to the masses. There was even the belief among a number of journalists and some politicians that simply by going to the movies, you were sitting in rows being hammered into the fascist position. You were being made to be an automaton in the face of a single message coming at you from the screen. That fear was robust and lasted for decades. During the war and immediately after, there was a large, widespread intellectual effort to find an alternative way of doing media and with it doing polity. Polity, not policy. Community. If the fascist world was organized like mass media, one too many top down, hierarchical, American democratic worlds had to be organized differently. They had to be organized in a way that respected the individuality of their members and yet let them do things together in an organized fashion.
The first thing they had to do together was resist the Germans. That's World War Two. And in the wake of that period, they needed to resist communists overseas. The Russians, the Soviets. But they mostly needed to find a different way of doing democracy. And for that they turned to a different media technology. They turned to early visions of information, information technology, and particularly cybernetics. So I'm not going to go too deep on this. I’m happy to, I've gone very deep on a couple of books. Won’t take you down that road tonight, but I just want to note.
[Turner shows a slide of Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)] This is a cover from Norbert Wiener's book. Norbert Wiener is largely credited as the spokesman for cybernetics in this period, and this cover features two machines interacting. The essence of cybernetics was a notion that the world itself was an information system. You are an information system. I'm an information system. The world as a whole is an information system. Order emerges as different information providers signal one another. So my fashion choices, which I'm very pleased with tonight, are a signal to you. I was told that my purple repped NYU, that felt kind of cool. All right, so I'm signaling, and you're signaling back with your laughter. You know, in Wiener's view, the chair signaled my position. His view was a world in which everything is information, everything is signaling back and forth. In contrast to the top down hierarchical model of ostensibly fascist mass media. This world, the cybernetic world, is a leveled world, an equal world in which all kinds of information are circulating at all times in every direction and order is not being imposed, but rather is emerging from below. I've got a bunch of notes here with some good quotes, I’ll pull them out as we need them.
Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, Wipe Cycle (1970).
So Norbert Wiener's vision animated all kinds of multimedia from the fifties forward, but especially in the sixties and seventies leading up to Open Circuits. [Turner shows Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome (1964-5).] This is a piece that Stan VanDerBeek developed. It's called his Movie-Drome. [Approaches audience.] Guess what that dome is made of, any ideas? Plywood. Excellent. Yes, but no. Keep going. Canvas, another excellent guess. I bet he wishes he’d used canvas. No, Keep going. Silk? Nope. You know, it's the chopped off top of a grain silo. He actually went around buying up these chopped off green salt silo tops because he believed that he could create a global network of, essentially, news stations in which viewers would go lie on the ground, have images of news and information from around the world projected over their heads, and then process them according to their own individual needs. And this is cybernetic media in action. We will all be different, but we will all be equal and we will all be together. There will be many things to choose from. We shall choose among them, and we will form organized polity out of that. All right.
That vision came to the conference in the hands of a number of people, not least Nam June Paik. And, you know, he believed that cybernetics was a way to an almost Buddhist utopian vision—at least in the late sixties, he did. And he saw television as a kind of sculptural form that could be used to both make visible and encourage the experience of a cybernated landscape. All right. These folks are utopians, and they see themselves pushing hard against authoritarian styles. One of the peaks of this sort of trend, I think, is Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette's Wipe Cycle. And I'm just going to show you it's a two minute clip. I'm going to show you a two minute clip of the Wipe Cycle installation as reconstructed in Germany. This is not the original, but it looks an awful lot like it. I won’t play it with sound. In the original, it had music in the background. I’m just going to play it plain because I want you to see it and I want to talk about it.
[Turner shows a clip from Wipe Cycle (1969) on the screen.]
Design plans for Wipe Cycle.
So nine video monitors, some playing news clips from television, others working with a camera above the monitors, taking the image of the person, walking up to the screens and integrating it with the images. This is precisely an anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist mode of media making. This is a cybernetic mode of media making, a mode of media making in which the goal is to show how you too are part of the information system. You are not its obedient servant, you're not its victim. You are part of the information system and it gives you, or is meant to give you, literally the experience of living inside a media environment as a participant rather than a passive audience member. Very powerful piece. Members of the Raindance Collective were very active, you know, in an explicitly cybernetic vision of media making.
All right. So the dream coming out of the World War Two era running up through the Cold War is the dream of a leveled America, an egalitarian America in which we signal one another and order emerges. The trouble is, America in 1974 wasn't like that. The fifties were no more. The dream of a globe in which benevolent American technocrats might supply communication technologies that would make order out of systems that were presumptively disordered, particularly dark-skinned systems that were disordered, that had just crashed. It had collapsed in Vietnam. The Vietnam War saw the best and the brightest take us into, essentially, a national atrocity. American troops went home from Vietnam in 1973. The actual fighting ended in 1975 when the North took Saigon. But American troops were headed home in 1973. Something else was happening in 1973/’74, and that was the end of one of the longest industrial booms in American history. Between 1947 and 1973, 28 million jobs were created and American society was rendered very much more egalitarian from an economic perspective than it had been before. But starting about ‘73, ‘74, that changed. Financialization began to take hold, offshoring took hold, industries were changing and information technologies were actually doing a lot of the changing to industries. And by the late seventies, we were experiencing stagflation, the closing of factories and the birth of what we now call the Rust Belt. Here in New York, the Bronx was burning. Just uptown from where Open Circuits took place, landlords were burning down their own buildings to get the insurance money.
So the America that the utopian media makers either were hoping to produce, or to bring to the conference, really no longer existed. And this kind of thing, this kind of image, really undercut the hope for a utopian media driven world—at least a universal one. And some of the folks at the conference actually spoke to that directly.
Here comes the tricky part. I'm going to make an argument that at the very moment the conference was trying to be utopian, other threads were coming through. And this argument is part of the larger project that I'm working on. I'm lost in the seventies and eighties, and so I'm going to share some of the ideas from that project and I'll look forward to the questions and answers. I haven't talked much about this work, so it's a little scary, but I'll go there. And I'm going to use the notes while I do.
Remember that in the mid 1970s, the left, alongside the cybernetic vision of hopefulness, has failed. The New Left failed to end the Vietnam War. We've got Carter sort of thrashing in office. Very shortly we're going to have Reagan in 1980. And at that moment, there's a turning away from the politics of the street and a turning toward the politics of representation. And it happens all across the American left and the British left. [Shows an image of Laura Mulvey.] I really enjoy this picture. That's Laura Mulvey. How many of you are undergraduates? Raise your hands. Some of you will have had Laura Mulvey's famous article on “the male gaze” in class. Not anymore? Oh, okay. Well, I'll have to give a little background.
So in the mid seventies, a slew of Marxist-Freudian thinkers began to argue that the engine of political oppression was in fact media. And that in order to end political oppression, you needed not necessarily to march in the street—that hadn't worked very well for about a decade—what you needed to do instead was take apart the media, take apart television, take apart film, analyze its structures and analyze in particular the way those structures produced the categories in which you lived. And that's the work that Mulvey did. Mulvey did a very famous paper in which she argued that cinema tended to be structured around what she called the male gaze. She used images from Hitchcock and other films to show that some mainstream cinema was organized around providing what is, in essence, heterosexual male pleasure. Teaching everyone to look at women the way that men do.
And she wasn't the only one. There are other folks in England, she worked with Mary Kelly, an artist who did a project called The Postpartum Document, about her own child and collected everything the child did, in the way of scrawls. This movement, this moment, was driven by a collision between a whole slew of new media technologies, video in particular, as well as French theory. This is the moment when Roland Barthes is coming into fashion. Jacques Derrida. Jacques Lacan, Foucault. Together, the French theorists, I would argue, provided a language and a set of frames through which a frustrated generation out of the New Left could reimagine the world as a text and intervene in that world by managing symbols. Coming out of the sixties, if the New Left, the anti-war new left, had largely failed, other social movements were very active—particularly feminism. And here in New York, feminist artists took up video technology with a vengeance. Literally. [Shows an image of Shigeko Kubota holding a Portapak.] This is Shigeko Kubota, who also happens to be the wife of June Paik, she was at the conference and this is a quotation from an article that she contributed to the volume. This is exactly how she wrote it.
Men shoot me every night. I can't resist. I shoot in back in broad daylight with VidCon or TVcon, taping an overexposure. Video is vengeance and victory of vagina.
Arguably this is in some ways as utopian as is the cybernetic vision. But in a way it's not. In a way it's saying I can claim the look, I can claim the technology that has made me this category called “Woman” that oppresses me. I can shoot you back with the same machine that you shoot me with.
Lots of other people are making video in this period. Martha Rosler is doing Semiotics of the Kitchen. There's a whole slew of artists working in this period, and I could have chosen a whole lot. But I want to just bear down on one for a minute because I think it will make the case. The one I want to just think about for a minute is Dara Birnbaum. I just need a room check. Many of you have seen or heard of the artist before. [Lots of hands raise.] It's that room. Okay, great. When I do this talk about Dara Birnbaum in California, it's like, “huh?” Okay, so great. All right. So this may go very quickly. So some of you may know Dara Birnbaum’s 1975 piece, Mirroring. And in this piece, she's actually looking at a mirror, looking at herself in a mirror. The camera is filming her. She looks back and forth and her image goes in and out of focus until the viewer gradually realizes that the camera is focused not on Dara Birnbaum and her face, but rather on the mirror behind Dara Birnbaum.
Dara Birnbaum, Mirroring (1975).
This has two sets of significance at the moment. One is, it's revealing in Birnbaum's hopes the mechanisms by which media make you see yourself. So it's sort of unpacking those mechanisms that are thought to be oppressive. But secondly, it's also literalizing Lacan's mirror stage. It's literalizing the process by which a person is made through processes of mirroring, of learning from people around them. You know, Lacan argued that the subconscious works like a language. But language is learned, by interactions with mirrors, and those mirrors, in the mid seventies, are on television. Television is a mirror. And so to do this kind of work is to undercut the mechanism of television, reveal it is a mechanical process, but also to help people come to understand themselves as products of a particular kind of textuality, of the circulation of signs and symbols. Birnbaum took this a little bit farther in Technology Transformation/Wonder Woman. [Turner screens a clip from the aforementioned video by Dara Birnbaum.] Once again, the Lacanian mirrors….
So here Birnbaum has taken a very popular television show, Wonder Woman, and cut it up and edited it in ways that she hopes will reveal the process by which it was made to the men and women who are watching, and thereby teach, especially young women, the notion that you are in some sense a product of the media. And if you could just see through it, if you could just see its processes, you could free yourself and become a different kind of person. If you could just see that it's just an image and that the image, the language, the play of signs on television is taking place inside you and is forming you and is becoming your Lacanian and unconscious. You are trapped now in a language spoken by others that has become your own. If you could just see that you could be free.
That notion travels. And here I'm going to leave television a little bit behind, but I'm going to try to argue that the turn to video inside feminism in the 1970s and very shortly thereafter, inside anti-AIDS activism, particularly by folks associated with ACT UP, Gran Fury and the like, opens the door to really different way of understanding what a person is and what the possibilities for people are in the world. And with that comes a new vision of what American democracy looks like. [Shows image by Cindy Sherman from Untitled Film Stills.] So this is Cindy Sherman in an Untitled Film Still in 1980. Starting in the 1970s, she made film stills from movies that didn't exist. These are self-portraits that refer to nothing real. They are just a sign, a sign cut out of experience and circulated. And they allow people to imagine in this time that a portrait has no referent.
Now we've entered a world like the world of Dara Birnbaum, in which the categories are disappearing and the medium is what we need to pay attention to. It's the circulation of signs that makes the world, that makes us who we are. Barbara Kruger made this point loudly and visibly in her mirror-shattering image YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF from 1981. I'm going to telescope here. So over the years I've become a historian and I get very nervous saying anything without a citation. It's a funny thing. I'm just going to say stuff and we can call it later. But by the mid 1980s, this separation of sign from signified, the image of the person from the body of the person, this anti-essentialist vision of postmodern semiotics has become the foundation of a new way to imagine politics—to imagine politics as the politics of images, as the circulation of signs, as the essential management of difference.
The management of difference, by the mid 1980s, is a different way to imagine what it means to be American. Now, the category of difference—ported in from Jacques Derrida, ported in from French theory—made real by experiments in television, artistic work with television, done by social movements devoted to making room for new kinds of identity in American public life, has brought us the first glimpses of a society in which we can take images off of television, out of magazines, out of the world around us, play with them, use them to signify our mutual differences, and organize ourselves in accord with the worlds that we feel similar to. This is radically different from the midcentury world. In the mid-century world, you were, who you were, who you were. You were born into a body and that body carried you through life. It was who you were. That's not the world we're in anymore with the politics of difference.
To follow that forward a little bit in time, I'll just take you to 1993 and the Benetton campaign, one of the Benetton campaigns. Benetton, you'll remember, is an Italian sweater maker. And they're interesting because in addition to their strong fashion sense, they were an early example of distributed manufacturing. So they had a design headquarters in Milan, and then they would outsource the manufacturing of the knitwear around the globe looking for the cheapest factories. And that outsourcing was facilitated by the arrival of information technology. You can't run an outsourced factory like that without machines to keep everything interlinked in real time. Okay. So while they're doing that, they're working with an image that I think really sums up the kind of politics of difference model that I was trying to capture. [Shows an image from a 1993 Benetton ad campaign.] You can see here that you have to kind of originary bodies, human bodies. And then layered over them are a series of signs of difference. Race attitudes, verité, power, truth lies, some in French, some in English. These are human bodies living in a system of signs. They are living in colors and now, of course, the pitch for Benetton is, “buy the right colors and you'll be able to signal correctly.”
So I'm stumped by this question. On the one hand, I recognize that the politics of difference that have emerged by the mid 1980s are themselves really not like the imagining of democracy in the middle of the 20th century. 1950s America and 1980s, 1990s America are fundamentally different. The Benetton catalog, as goofy as it might be, is part of a much wider range of efforts to make visible, possible, and acceptable sexual and racial differences that were held as marginal in previous decades. So it's a very liberating force in that sense. And yet I can't help but wonder if this new way of seeing the world, a world in which our signs and ourselves are somewhat separate—a world in which, as Judith Butler liked to point out, in the 1990s, we perform ourselves. We perform our categories. If that's the world we inhabit, in a weird way, it’s also a kind of funhouse mirror of the cybernetic dream. We now live in a world in which we signal to one another constantly and hope that order emerges. Trouble is, like cybernetics, if we think that’s the way the world works, we neglect a couple of categories of really important actors. And we need to start with corporations.
If we imagine that we are finally free—if we imagine that we can fly by the balloons of our collars, if we imagine that we can take the categories, the signs that circulate around us and repurpose them in an egalitarian manner, as Norbert Wiener proposed, then we are forgetting, as Norbert Wiener himself did at the time, that our world is still governed by PepsiCola. By the American government. By the military forces of the world. And we are left in a very peculiar and precarious position.
I got asked one time whether I thought that we were finally reaching, thanks to the suffusion of information technologies in our lives, the sort of egalitarian, multi-vocal society that Norbert Wiener predicted. And I said, no, I thought we were entering an era of new and renewed feudalism.
I’ll end on that very depressing note in the hope of inviting questions. Thank you very much.
Original documentation of this talk, including a Q&A, is available by request. Please email cstrange@eai.org. This event was co-sponsored with NYU’s Department for Media, Culture, and Communication, and held at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU and supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art as a part of Video After Television: Open Circuits Revisited.