A Genealogy of Video
Author(s): Paul Ryan
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1988), pp. 39-44
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578414
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Aof

Genealogy

Video

Paul Ryan
Abstract-The authordiscusses the struggle that took place in New YorkCity between1968 and1971 over whether video would be considered a tool of social change or a medium of art. The
struggle is traced in terms of six dimensions:technological, theoretical, political, institutional,
economic and cultural. The author's position is that video mutated from a countercultural
gesture to an art genre. The question asked is how this genre will articulate its own genealogy.

Paul Ryan (artist, author), P.O. Box 306, High
Falls, NY 12440, U.S.A.
Received 13 December 1985.

? 1988 ISAST
Pergamon Journals Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain.
0024-094X/88$3.00+0.00

of possibility that early video held. The
following anecdote might be illustrative.
In the mid-1970s the author of
Independent

Video, Ken Marsh, ran aseries of video festivals in Woodstock,-I-....

,.

_New York. During the course of one
festival, in either 1974 or 1975, a plenary
session of over 100 people was stopped
cold by a resonant voice with an odd,
insistent quality: "I want to know what's

3

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I. INTRODUCTION
The term 'genealogy'
indicates a
sortof
concerned
withparticular
writing
rediscovering struggles without shrinking
from the rude memory of the conflict. It isan effort to establish knowledge, basedon local memories, that is of tactical use
to the reader. Whereas a history is
generally written as if a struggle had been
resolved, a genealogy assumes that thepresent resolution is subject to change.
The genealogies offered by Michel
Foucault of phenomena such as modern
prisons and medical clinics depend on
extensive library research by a nonparticipant [1]. By contrast, thisgenealogy is constructed primarily out of
the rude memory of the conflict itself by aparticipant in the struggle. Hence it is a
genealogy, not the genealogy of video.
Other participants would have otherversions. To go beyond the sketch I
provide here, a complete genealogy ofvideo would have to take account of otherversions and place early video within thecontext of the wider array of significant
social shifts going on at the same time.
What I believe saves this piece from beinga merely subjective memoir is that it isconstructed in terms of a fault line, adiscontinuity in video history that is indanger of being ignored. My contention isthat any serious account of video musttake account of that fault line.
Video itself mutated from a countercultural gesture to an art genre. Whenvideo was principally a countercultural
gesture, it held the promise of socialchange unmediated by the art world.
Now, whatever promise of social change
video holds is mediated by the art world.
This is a significant difference. People
unfamiliar with the mutation find it
difficult to appreciate the unlimited sense

Fig. 1. Coverof RadicalSoftware, No. 1: TheAlternativeTelevisionMovement(1970). Articlesin thefirst issue of Radical Software included Frank Gillette, "Is EVR a Good or Bad Thing?";Gene
Youngblood, Excerpts from The Videosphereand Video Cassette Image Publishing, a pirated
transcriptionof an interviewwith R. BuckminsterFullervideotapedby RaindanceCorp.; Nam June
Paik, "ExpandedEducationfor the Paperless Society"; and Paul Ryan, "Cable Television:The Raw
and the Overcooked".

LEONARDO, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 39-44,1988

going on with video. I just got $5,000
from the New York State Council on theArts to do video and I'm blind. I'm ablind man! What is going on?"
Literally translated from the Latin,'video' means 'I see'. That the Arts
Council would grant a blind man $5,000
to produce video demonstrates that partof what was going on was a powerful
belief system. Perhaps through thiswondrous new technology, the blindwould see. The story indicates the extent
to which the Arts Council, and manyothers, had willfully suspended disbelief
to allow a new fiction called 'video' to begenerated.
Today, critical discourse is replacing
suspended disbelief. The following
account of the preconditions that madevideo possible by someone who played arole in generating the original fiction isintended as a contribution to that critical
discourse.
II. TOWARD SOCIAL CHANGE ORART?
The genealogy of video is a history of
the struggle between the drive to use
video as a tool of social change and thedrive to use video as a medium of art.
Specifically, this version deals with New
York City video from 1968 to 1971. I
settle on the term 'drive' because duringthat period there were no clearly defined
factions of art versus social change. There
were videomakers who thought ofthemselves as artists and saw their work
as promulgating social change, and there
were videomakers working for socialchange who considered their work
artistic. Activity in the video field tended
toward one or the other of these diverging
poles. Choices could be made according
to an agenda of social change, andchoices could be made that individuatedoneself as an artist.
As a participant/observer, I entered
the fray with a bias toward using video asa tool of social change. This bias stemmed
primarily from my opposition to theVietnam War. I applied for and received a
conscientious objector draft status basedon the philosopher John Dewey's notionof God as the tension between the ideal
and the actual. The ideal put forth by
MarshallMcLuhan of a more harmonious
society based on electronic communications attracted me. In his introduction to
Understanding Media [2] McLuhanasserted that he wrote the book as an act
of faith in "the ultimate harmony of all
being", a faith activated by the newelectronic technology. Inspired by
McLuhan, I gave up my ambition to be a'writer' and determined to use electronic

40

technologies to work toward a societythat could avoid Vietnams. I convinced
the draft board to let me do myalternative to military service working
directly with McLuhan while he was avisiting professor at Fordham University,
1967-1968, the year he wrote War andPeace in the Global Village [3]. Duringthat year, I started exploring the new
portable video. My experimentation led
to a position as the New York Arts
Council's first video consultant in 1969,
to work with the alternative video group
Raindance and to a series of essays onvideo entitled Cybernetics of the Sacred[4]. In this report, I will trace thegenealogy of video's initial phase in termsof its technological, theoretical, political,
institutional, economic and culturaldimensions.

TechnologicalIn technological terms, the genealogyof video is best described by distinguishing between processing signals for thesurface of the screen and using video as asystem of communication [5]. The
distinction between surface and system
can be clarified by considering a man
cutting down a tree with an axe. A
systems understanding pays attention to
how the differences in what the man sees
make differences in how he swings theaxe. The differences in how he swings theaxe in turn make differences in the gashes
on the tree. These differences in turnmake differences in what the man sees,and so on, as the cycle repeats itself. A
surface understanding frames that part of
the tree where the axe repeatedly strikes
and concerns itself with the 'composition'
within that frame.
Prior to the arrivalof the Sony portablevideo system in 1968, 'video art' wasprimarily a matter of manipulating
signals within the frame of the televisionscreen. Magnets were applied to TV sets,internal circuitry was altered and blackboxes were attached. Inspired by themusic of John Cage, Nam June Paik used
these tactics to achieve a certain playful
iconoclasm. He broke down conventional
expectations about TV images andintroduced a sense of possibility for thescreen. Eric Siegel, who was more
knowledgeable about circuitry, colorized
the gray tone scale and processed images,
such as Albert Einstein's picture,synchronizing the processing to classicalmusic.
Public television saw potential in thissort of image processing. In 1968, WGBH
in Boston commissioned Alan Kaprow,
Otto Piene, Aldo Tambellini, James
Seawright, Nam June Paik and Thomas

Ryan, Genealogy of Video

Tadlock to produce 'broadcastable'
video works for a show called The
Medium is the Medium. With the
exception of Alan Kaprow's Hello, whichbroadcasted randomly switched signals
from a system of cameras and monitors
set up around Boston, all these works
relied heavily on processing the image on
the surface of the screen. Only Aldo
Tambellini's Black, about black life in
America, dealt with explicit social
content.
Processed imagery also dominatedmuch of the "TV As A Creative Medium"show assembled by art gallery owner
Howard Wise in the spring of 1969.
Tadlock, Siegel and Tambellini werejoined by Joe Wientraub and Earl
Reiback in presenting processed image
pieces. Paik's iconoclasm produced the
TVBra, an actual brassierewith monitors
wired to the cello of performer Charlotte
Moorman. Paik also showed Participation TV, which showed images of theviewer on separate monitors in different
colors. While it can be said that
Tambellini's Black and Paik's TV Bra
effected social change by producing
images that helped alter social mores
about race and sex, the route of reference
to social change was through symbol
manipulation, not the systemics ofcommunication.
Two works in the Wise show didconcern themselves with the systemics ofcommunication: Wipe Cycle and Everyman's Moebius Strip, which both grewout of experience with the Sony portablevideo system. Wipe Cycle by Frank
Gillette and Ira Schneider involved a gridof nine monitors displaying broadcast
images, prerecorded tapes and timed
tape-delay images of the audience infront of the monitors. Everyman's
MoebiusStrip, the piece I did for the Wiseshow, provided a private feedback booth,
where one could record oneself going
through a series of simple exercises andsee the playback in private before the tapewas erased.
Wipe Cycle and Everyman's Moebius
Strip were based on an appreciation of
the new portable Sony as a communications system, complete with record,storage and playback capacity. It allowed
the user to 'infold' information and set up
feedback circuits, not merely manipulate
the TV terminals of the broadcast system.
A generation whose childhood had been
dominated by broadcast television was
now able to get its hands on a means of
TV production. The machine wasrelatively inexpensive ($1,500), lightweight, easy to use and reliable, and it
produced a decent black-and-white
image with acceptable audio. Tape wasIn issue one, volume one of Radical
Software (Summer, 1970) we introducedthe hypothesisthatpeoplemust
assert control over the information
tools and processes that shape theirlives in orderto free themselvesfrom
the mass manipulationperpetratedby
commercialmediain this countryand
state controlledtelevisionabroad.By
accessinglow cost Y2"portablevideotapeequipmentto produceor createor
partakein the informationgathering
process, we suggested that people
wouldcontributegreatlyto restructuring their own informationenvironments:YOU ARE THE INFORMATION....

In particular we focused on

the increasingnumberof experiments
conductedbypeopleusingthis 2"video
tool: experimentsin producinglocallyoriginatedprogrammingfor closedcircuit and cable tv and for publicaccess cablevision; construction ofvideoinformationenvironments/structures/assemblages as related to
informationpresentationandaudience
explorations of theinvolvement;...

unique potentialities of feedback
throughvideoandaudioinfolding,and
feedbackas facilitatorin encouraging
play betweenpeoplein pursuitof newlifestylesand/or as examinationof thetransformationof the director/actor
relationshipimplicit in video. Long
theoretical discussions were printed
concerningsuchconceptsas cybernetic
guerilla warfare, triadic logic, biotopological resensitization,nutritive
contexts, electronic democracy ... [8].

Theoretical
By the time the portapak became
available, Marshall McLuhan's work was
being widely read. Other thinkers such as
Teilhard de Chardin, Norman O. Brown,
Buckminster Fuller and Herbert Marcuse
were also being read, but McLuhan'swork was particularly relevant to video.

The 'Oracle of the Electronic Age', as hewas called by many, had published
UnderstandingMedia in 1964. His versionof the complex process of media
history-from the oral to the literate to
the electric-was discussed in businesses,
universities, the media, art circles and thecounterculture. McLuhan's perceptions
and language provided an instantframework of understanding both for
those interested in processing imagery for
the TV screen and for those interested in
the social change possibilities of theportapak. McLuhan was quoting John
Cage; Cage was quoting McLuhan. Eric
Larabee, then head of the New York StateCouncil on the Arts, was on a panel
interviewing McLuhan on public television. Frank Gillette taught a course on
McLuhan at the Fourteenth Street Free
School in New York.
McLuhan himself offered no formal
theory of art and no agenda for socialchange. When pushed about what could

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reusable and inexpensive. The video
portapak helped trigger a range ofactivity linking video with social change.
These two 'communication' works in the
Wise show were only an indication of a
growing video movement.
George Stoney came from Challenge
for Change in Canada [6] to start theAlternative Media Center with Red Burns
at New York University, which used theportapak as a primary tool for social
communication. Among other projects,
the Media Center midwifed an effective
three-way communications system forsenior citizens in Reading, Pennsylvania,
using video and cable television.
Alain Fredrickson, a high-school
biology teacher from Pennsylvania, went
to Santa Cruz, California, to develop
community cable TV and published anewsletter for high-school students
under the alias of Johnny Videotape. Ken
Marsh and Howie Gutstadt, bothpainters, initiated People's Video Theatre
in New York City, trying to invent waysof using video to mediate social conflict.
Coming from a theatre background, withparticularreferenceto Pirandello, Artaud
and Grotowski, David Cort beganorganizing what became known as theVideofreex. Ira Schneider, Michael
Shamberg, Louis Jaffe, Marco Vassi andFrank Gillette founded Raindance, aproduction group which also published amagazine for the alternative community
called Radical Software (see Figs 1-3).
Started by Ira Schneider, Phyllis
Gershuny and Beryl Korot, with
Gershuny and Korot as the original
editors, Radical Software quickly rose toa circulation of 5,000 and became thevoice of the video movement. A sense ofwhat the video belief system was like canbe gleaned from reading Michael
Shamberg's book GuerrillaTelevision[7]and more succinctly from the following
editorial statement in Radical Software:$1.25

Fig. 2. Coverof RadicalSoftware,No. 2: TheElectromageticSpectrum(1970)includingTakis,
ElliotS. Glass,"VideoinElBarrioand
Anti-Tech;
Technology=
ExcerptsfromTechnologyAgainst
the Classroom";Ken Marsh, "Alternativesfor AlternateMedia-People's Video Theatre
IraEinhorn,"NohPlace".
Handbook";

Ryan, Genealogy of Video41

familiar with from Nelson Rockefeller's
famous patronage of the visual arts, soabundantly evident in the Museum of'_.I nI1- .
1Modern Art. The New York State Arts
3n.
Council could provide support forexperimental work in a new art mediumthat had not yet developed a market for
its products.
For those interested in social change,
this seemed the action of an extremely
wealthy man developing a state apparatus
to carry out a function analogous totraditional patronage of the arts. Moreover, it was a way for Rockefeller to winreelection support from his traditional,
wealthy supporters by giving state money
to major cultural institutions, such as
Lincoln Center, which were patronizedby the wealthier classes.
As the person who originally mediatedthe Rockefeller Arts Council money into
precedent-setting video grants, my glee at
getting the money allocated was balanced
by a nagging doubt that perhaps modern
art was merely a process whereby the painof the poor becomes the perceptions of
the rich. The rich need these perceptions
to maintain their power because they areout of touch with the shifting sentimentsof the majority of people. Artists, intouch with the alienating experience ofindustrialization suffered by most people,
translate that experience into an idiom orcode (modern art) useful to the few who
profit from that alienation. I was asking
myself if refusing to make art would
result in a more just society. Moreover,since art legitimizes wealth, it contributes
to a status quo that can effectively ignore
1.50
the pain of the poor. To contribute to thisFig.3. Coverof RadicalSoftware,No.3 (Spring1971),including
GregoryBateson,"Restructuring process is, in some sense, a betrayal. The
the Ecology of a Great City"; Videofreex, "Media Bus"; Ira Schneider, "Tentative Design for a
September 1971 killings at Attica State
Flexible Video Environment";Paul Ryan, "CyberneticGuerilla Warfare".
Prison did nothing to allay these doubts.
At the same time, it was an opportunity
be done in the electronic era, he would say
minorities-could gain social power.
tosecure money for social change
it
too
to
He
McLuhan
with
Ezra
that
was
tell.
also
only
early
proclaimed
poet
projects. Art, after all, was "anything you
Pound that artists were "the antennae ofinvested his energy in probing for new
could get away with". When a budget
and useful perceptions of the situation
the race". They could anticipate the blows
from 2 to 20 million dollars in one
jumps
to the human psyche wrought by the newcreated by electronic media. In conthere
is a lot of 'funny money', i.e.
year
of
on
McLuhanwasandperception,technologies
provide mappings
centratingwithno real specification as to its
money
from
the
art
how
to
these
blows.
Heastrategy
integrate
appropriatinguse.
world, a strategy only apparently radical: declared, to the consternation of many,"Art is anything you can get away with".
exploit new media for the novelty of theperceptions they yield; take no reInstitutionalsponsibility for acting on those percepPoliticalIn one year, 1969, the New York State
tions.
Arts Council went from a family style
For those interested in social change,
Prior to his reelection campaign inthe popularist McLuhan proclaimed-in
1970, the incumbent governor of the State
organization to an agency dispensing 20
million dollars. During that year, thethe tradition of Harold Innis-that theof New York, Nelson Rockefeller,
Council allocated over half a million
increased the State Council on the Arts
technologies of communication, notfor video. The handful of then2
dollarstomillionfrom20
dollars.
economics, were the real keys to social
budgetextant video groups-Videofreex, RainRockefeller had chartered the New Yorkchange. Marx had, in McLuhan'sState Arts Council, the first such council
dance, People's Video Theatre andprovocative phrase, "missed the comGlobal Village-competed for the money.
in the United States.
munications bus" [9]. By gaining accessA series of complicated machinations
to new communications systems, theFor those interested in the medium ofasvideo as art, i.e. career artists, this move
disenfranchised minorities-suchensued, which included a battle over a/4-million-dollar plan for a "Center for
was in keeping with a tradition they were
teenagers, the elderly and various ethnic
1. z -"_--T--T-_

Gh,hh~inl

42

Ryan, Genealogy of VideoDecentralized Television" to be administered through the Jewish Museum
under Carl Katz. The notion was todistribute portable production capacity
to 20 diverse groups in New York State,including upstate farmers and urban
ghetto dwellers. The center would thenfacilitate the exchange of tapes and public
showings. In the end, each of the fourgroups got $35,000. The balance went tomuseums and public television stations.
While the Arts Council is the only stateagency chartered to make discretionary
judgments, in the case of the original
funding of video groups it did not exercise
its discretion but gave equal money to allgroups. This was partly because video
was new, partly because of the growing
pains of the Council and partly because
the money was available. In effect, theCouncil followed the sort of hands-off
policy toward art funding that had been
instituted in England after World War IIwith Keynesian economics. As Peter
Fuller reports:
The Arts Council,establishedin 1945,
was one of the firstcomponentsof thewelfare state. Its architect,and firstchairperson, was Keynes himself.
Marriedto a ballerina,a Bloomsbury
habitue, he had spoken of theprostitutionof the arts for financial
gain as "one of worser crimes ofpresent-daycapitalism."In the welfare
state, all that was going to change.In
1945 Keyneswrote:"The purposeof
the Arts Council...

is to create anenvironment,to breed a spirit, tocultivatean opinion,to offera stimulus
to suchpurposethat the artistand the
publiccaneachsustainandliveon eachother in that union which has
occasionallyexistedin partat thegreatages of a communalcivilizedlife." Heclaimed:"The artist walks where his
spiritleadshim. He cannotbe told his
direction;hedoesnot knowit himself."
Butheexpectednewworkto "springup
more abundantly in unexpected
quartersandin unforeseenshapeswhen
there is a universalopportunityfor
contact with traditional and contemporaryarts in their noblestform"[10].
Mutatis mutandis, this is the manner inwhich the New York State Council on theArts first funded video. The half million
dollars allocated set a precedent andbecame a prime source of stable fundingfor video through the seventies and into
the eighties. As a state arts council, theinstitution developed an alliance networkthat included television stations,museums, universities, small experimental video groups and individual
artists working in video. Other funding
institutions also supported video. The
Rockefeller Foundation, with Nam June
Paik as a consultant, supported video art.

The Markle Foundation supported theAlternative Media Center in using video
as a tool of social change. Only the New
York State Council on the Arts has had
the courage to ride both horses.
For advocates of social change, theopportunism of going to the Arts Council
in the first place meant that eventually the
resulting compromises with the art world
would spell defeat. The context of a statebureaucracydefined in terms of art would
ultimately defuse and erode efforts atsocial change. Yet the imposed dialogue
with art forced a much deeper consideration both of the role of art in socialchange and of the whole relationshipbetween art and politics. For artists, theCouncil was a godsend in terms of acareer-support system, but a mixed
blessing in terms of being forced tocompete with social change advocates forfunds available through the paperwork
and panels of a state bureaucracy.
Because the grant money was available,
the spontaneous origins of the video
movement maintained some of thecharacterof a 'gift economy'. Equipment,
information, skills and tapes were freely
shared, often between social change
advocates and artists. There was an'information free' ethic not unlike theearly computer hacker culture [11]. The
marketplace was held at bay. Yet given
the absence of a clear pattern of
discretionary art judgments, the video/
New York State Council nexus appeared
at times to be a welfare system foreccentrics caught up in various video
solipsisms.
Of course, a gift economy could not belong sustained through state bureaucracy.
Over the years, the trust and faithnecessary for a gift economy yielded tothe mechanisms of mediation andregulation. Such benign regulation has
taken place over the years as the
movement failed to regulate itself. Like
many similar movements, it fell prey tothe internal dynamics that tend to split up
non-hierarchic small groups. As theoriginal groups tended to break up, so thefunds tended to go more toward
individual artists, media equipment
centers and large institutions. While thecontext was such that there wasdiscussion in Radical Software of an
information economy [12], that is, a nonmoney economy based on knowledge as
value, no viable realization of that notion
matured.
Cultural
In large part, the original video
movement can be seen as a transformation of the waning counterculture of theRyan, Genealogy of Video

sixties. Given the pervasive influence ofbroadcast television on the mass cultureof America, it is logical that video would
be appropriated as a tool of resistance,
protest and change by the counterculture.
The alternate video group Raindance wasconceived of as a countercultural thinktank-an alternate to the Rand Corporation. People's Video Theatre had apopularist stance associated with thecounterculture. Many of the Videofreex
were former teachers who involved
themselves in the counterculture. Two of
the principals, David Cort and Parry
Teasdale, met at the Woodstock Music
Festival. At Woodstock they wereintroduced to Don West, then assistant to
the president of Columbia Broadcast
System (CBS). With the assistance of
Don West, Cort and Teasdale, along with
Curtis Ratcliff, organized the Videofreex
to produce a portapak-style pilot tape forbroadcast on CBS. The program was torender the Woodstock experience and thevalues of the counterculture. The pilot
was played through Eric Siegel's color
synthesizer for a group of CBS executives
including Michael Dann and Fred
Silverman. At the end of the showing,
Michael Dann thanked the Videofreex for
their efforts and said it would be a longtime before such programming found its
way onto the air. The next day CBS
dismantled the project and fired Don
West [13]. The subtext for this meeting is
articulated by social scientist George
Gerbner: "If you can write a nation's
stories, you needn't worry about who
makes its laws. Today television tells
most of the stories to most of the people
most of the time" [14]. Such storytelling
configures a symbolic environment that
controls modern society the way religion
used to control society. Violence-laden
drama, for example, "shows who getsaway with what, when, why, how andagainst whom" [15].
Along with his associates at the
University of Pennsylvania, from 1967 to1982 Gerbner analyzed over 1,600 primetime programs and interviewed large
samples of both frequent and infrequent
television viewers in the U.S. They
documented very skewed perceptions ofreality on the part of frequent viewers in
relation to sex roles, jobs, races,
minorities and crime. For example, 55
percent of the characters shown on
prime-time television are involved inviolence once a week. In real life, thecomparable figure is less than 1 percent.
Frequent viewers grossly overestimatedthe chance of violence in their own lives
and had an exaggerated distrust of
strangers. Gerbner argues that such
distortion functions to maintain the43

status quo of the industrial state inAmerica:... televisionis thecentralculturalarmof Americansociety.It is an agencyof
the established order and serves
primarilyto extendandmaintainrather
than alter, threatenor weaken conventional conceptions, beliefs andbehaviors.Its chiefculturalfunctionis
to spreadand stabilizesocialpatterns,
to cultivatenotchangebutresistanceto
change.Televisionis a mediumof thesocialization of most people into
standardizedroles and behaviors.Its
function is, in a word, enculturation[16].
Gerbner's work on enculturation
allows us to see this entire genealogy ofvideo, with both its aesthetic and socialchange aspects, against the backgroundof the religion of broadcast television.
The values and beliefs associated withvideo have not supplanted the values andbeliefs associated with broadcast television. Video did not make the blind see.
III. CONCLUSION
In 1987, there is little willingness tosuspend disbelief. The fiction of video iscoming under increased scrutiny and areconsideration is in order. One wonders
how the art world with its tradition of the
new will deal with video as it grows old.
What of real value can be distilled fromwhat has happened under the cover ofvideo? Who will do the distilling? The
New York State Council on the Arts?The
museums? The American Film Institute?

44

Broadcast television? The academic
world? Private patrons? The Library ofCongress? What criteria will be applied?
The field of video is particularly
vulnerable to cannibalization because thestate of suspended disbelief has lasted
overlong and no critical discourse has
been cultivated that would justify to theworld at large the selection of certain
video works as having lasting value.
At the core of the difficulty is the factthat there has been no resolution of the
problematics underlying the industrial
culture promulgated by broadcast television. Video originally addressed those
problematics. For the most part, a senseof this context has eroded from the video
field. Moreover, the conditions that gave
rise to the genealogy of video haveshifted. Technological improvements invideo equipment have shifted theemphasis from process values to production values. Personal computers havedisplaced video as the electronic mediumof possibility in people's imaginations.
McLuhan's discourse is outdated, and nocomparable discourse has replaced it.
Ronald Reagan is dismantling the welfare
state, and the marketplace increasingly
determines video production. In New
York State, the Arts Council funding has
not kept pace with either inflation or thenumber of videomakers. The counterculture has long since lost power. Video
itself has mutated from a countercultural
gesture to an art genre. How this genre
articulates its genealogy remains to be
seen.

Ryan, Genealogy of Video

REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. MichelFoucault,

Power/Knowledge,

ColinGordon,ed.(NewYork:Pantheon,1980) pp. 78ff.
2. MarshallMcLuhan, UnderstandingMedia(New York:McGraw-Hill,1964)p. 21.

3. Marshall McLuhan, Warand Peace in the
Global Village (New York: Bantam,
1968).
4. Paul Ryan, Cybernetics of the Sacred(New York:DoubledayAnchor,1974).
5. David Gigliotti, "Video Art of the
Sixties",in "AbstractPainting:1960-69",
exh.cat.,P.S. 1(ProjectStudiesOne),The
Institutefor Art and UrbanResources,
Inc., Brooklyn,NY (January16-March
13, 1983),unpaginated.
6. AnorganizationfundedbytheCanadiangovernment to prod service bureaucracies.
7.
8.

9.

10.

11.
12.
13.
14.

Michael Shamberg, Guerrilla Television(New York: Holt, 1971).
Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider, eds.,
Radical Software 2, No. 1 (September1972), editorial page.
This quote and the two that follow aretaken from memory of lectures McLuhan
gave at Fordham University, 1967-1968.
Peter Fuller, "The Crisis of Professionalism in Art", International6, No.
2, 31 (July 1981).
Steven Levy, Hackers (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1984).
Ryan [4] pp. 59-64.
Gigliotti [5].
George Gerbner quoted by Harry F.
Waters in "Life According to TV",
Newsweek 100, No. 23, 136 (6 December1982).

15. G. Gerbner, "Living with Television:
The Violence Profile", Journal ofCommunication 26, No. 2, 370 (Spring1976).
16. Gerbner [15] p. 366.