Raindance’s Media Primer (Shamberg) (1971)
In the second response to Howard Wise’s prospectus At the Leading Edge of Art, critic Emily Watlington considers the implications of Wise’s call for artists to “seek truth and make it visible regardless of the consequences” in our contemporary, polarized moment. At the time of Wise’s writing, a panoply of artists, thinkers, and collectives were inspired by video’s ability to disseminate information in a largely unidirectional media landscape.
Raindance, an early media group, exerted a significant influence on the gallerist’s artistic philosophy. Three of the collective’s foundational members, Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Paul Ryan, participated in Wise’s 1969 exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, contributing a pair of experimental video installations that remediated the image of the viewer to draw attention to the dynamics of transmission. Among Raindance’s myriad activities, including research, artmaking, and publications, the collective was an important advocate of “guerrilla television,” a term coined by member Michael Shamberg to describe an emerging democratized, grassroots media.
Through April 26th, EAI presents a “media primer” by Shamberg which serves as both a document of the group’s travels and a demonstration of the capabilities of consumer video and rudimentary editing. Raindance hoped to encourage audiences to pay attention to the syntax of television, and thereby the medium’s commercial and political interests, as well as galvanize viewers to produce their own content—an ambition still relevant, even in today’s hyper-participatory media environment.
Raindance, Media Primers (Shamberg)
1971, black and white, sound
The viewing period has ended.
Raindance was an influential early media collective founded in 1969 by artists Frank Gilette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg, and Ira Schneider, among others. Conceived of as an alternative media think tank, the group’s name beckoned to the steely Southern Californian research and development firm the RAND Corporation. Inspired by figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson, the collective aimed to reclaim emerging communications technology from exclusive control by corporate and military interests in a project that took many forms: the publication of the historic video culture periodical Radical Software (1970-74), advocacy for decentralized media such as public access cable, and the production of their own ad hoc tapes.
In the early ‘70s, Raindance distributed a series of Media Primers, described by the group as “basic exercize[s] [sic] in the grammar of video.” These tapes would interpose television snippets and guerilla footage taken by the group on Portapaks reassembled in free-flowing “information collages,” exuberant displays of the capabilities of a vernacular video editing style freed from television broadcast’s unidirectional structure. Acting as demonstration tapes and often shown by the group at talks and conferences, these videos were invitations to envision a more collaborative, dispersed media ecology.
The above primer, a characteristic example assembled by Shamberg, collects a series of dispatches from the cultural battlefield of TV semiology. A group of men analyze the facial expressions of television newscasters, debating on the sincerity of Nelson Rockefeller’s delivery. Supporters of conservative senatorial candidate James L. Buckley clown around for the camera and opine on the coming political “pendulum swing.” Central to the video are several scenes from the National Citizen Committee on Broadcasting, a conference assembled by Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving to critique commercial television, including a demonstration of the Portapak by video enthusiast Ken Marsh and a talk by Nicholas Johnson, commissioner of the FCC and author of How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (1970). Intercut throughout, acting almost as a Greek chorus, is a shirtless, long-haired ‘hippie’ performing a song on acoustic guitar, his lyrics—“all these words are going through my head, now”—serving as potential antidote to the heady debate over the politics of information.
2021-2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.