short form

Send Blank Tape: Flyntz

short form

Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and

Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org

featured the individual or groups current base of

operations, the gear they were holding, and what
kind of work they were making.

Send Blank
Tape:
Radical Software and the
Advent of Media-Sharing
Networks

Revolutionary Engineering and the

Living Room

Portable video is a new, major medium.

It is a high access form of our culture's
dominant communications mode and
precisely the opposite of product television
which can accept only artificial behavior
because it is based on a scarcity of time and
equipment access.

by Liz Flyntz

Paul Ryan, InfomorphOne: Organization of

IgnoranceRadical Software 1(3)

Software to me, was always programming

what was on the tapes. Hardware was
the equipment. It was a radical break
with television, creating a new kind of
programming.
Beryl Korot, interview with the author
July 4, 2014

The first issue of Radical Software was published

in New York City in 1970 by two women:
Phyllis Gershuny and Beryl Korot. It was the very
first publication to deal with the then-new technology of video. The magazine was published
more or less quarterly until 1974, providing a

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growing video-maker community with a mix of

content that included reviews of new video technology and DIY guides to equipment, interviews
with makers, discussions of philosophy and
schematics for various video-based projects.
Activism Radical Software was the publishing
arm of the Raindance Corporationa collective think tank of media theorists and makers
coalesced by artists and activists Frank Gillette,
Michael Shamberg, Ira Schneider and Paul Ryan.
Participants included media/art collectives like
Videofreex and Ant Farm, representatives of institutions like Antioch and Goddard colleges, and
individual artists like Dan Graham and Woody
and Steina Vasulka. This network provided an
intimate one-to-one system of distribution.
Each of the nodes in the network structure
functioned as sites for archiving information,
disseminating content, and collecting hardware.
Participants were users and viewers rather
than audience members or mass producers.
The first issue of the magazine included a
questionnaire, intended by the editors to solicit
feedback from everyone then working in the
field. An afterwards in each issue included a
listing of participants in the video network, that

It was the very first publication to deal with the then-new technology of video

Intercourse 3

Since only the user is in

a position to know what
is relevant for him and how
he wants to access relevance
and information, exchange
must include the user from
the beginning.

This stacked delay/display

piece, entitled Track/
Trace has three television
cameras recording and
transmitting the activity
in the gallery space to the
stack of monitors. The top
monitor presents real-time
feedback of the viewer,
while each descending row
transmits with an increasing
delay. "The viewer becomes
the information, which
he receives both in real
time and in four layers of
delayed time, so that he
experiences "self" at five
different periods of time,
simultaneously."
(Frank Gillette, Volume 2,
Number 5, page 26.)
Frank Gillette is a founding
member of the video art
collective Raindance.

BLank VHS Tape

Raindance essay, Radical Software

Vol.1, No.3

In 1965, Sony introduced the very first portable

consumer video recording devicethe Portapak.
Nam June Paik, widely considered the first
video artist, and an early contributor to Radical
Software, was often credited with using the first
Portapak in the US. The Portapak consisted of
a camera attached by cable to a bulky reel-to-reel
recorder that could be slung over the shoulder.
Previous consumer 16mm and 8mm reels had
a maximum shooting time of approximately 10
minutes, but video made it possible and affordable to do long takes, allowing unscripted action
to unfold in real-time.
After the Portapak, the film camera became
reminiscent of a cash register, with every frame
of film clicking away like ringing up of endless
small purchases. Video, a medium that allowed
for immediate review and editing of footage,
extinguished the cost of film, processing, and
printing from the production budget.
In the loft where Radical Software was published,
new technology bred a new screening
modality. Instead of the projection-based, arthouse screening model that had been the
historical precedent for artist filmmakers from
Jean-Luc Godard to Jack Smith, the collective
presented videos on several television sets
distributed throughout the space. Audiences
gathered around several small screens in an
atmosphere that created an intimate counter-culture inversion of family home television viewing.
In those days it was hard to get your stuff
seen because there just werent that many
places to play tapes. Videofreex had an

Send Blank Tape: Flyntz

unpublicized screening on Friday nights

at our loft. Sometimes there would be five
people there and sometimes there would
be 150 people. So we would just rack up all
the tapes -sometimes wed have a passive
switcher and wed go back and forth - wed
have several black and white monitors on
the floor, stereo sound because we had big
speakers - and wed be behind in the control
room.

People would be sitting on

chairs and mattresses and
beanbag chairs. We would
put a camera on the floor
and people could see themselvesthat was amazing
because people hadnt seen
themselves on TV before. It
felt very powerful to hold
this potential mass medium
in your hands. The home
made video experience felt
powerful because it was
television.
Skip Blumberg, interview with the author
July 1, 2014

Early video also mirrored TV in the formatting of

the imageclose-ups and closely cropped heads
were favored, and subjects tended toward newsreel-style unscripted documentation, interviews,
and unrehearsed, impromptu performance.
Even the best exposed images on the early tapes
look vaguely as though they were shot with black
pantyhose stretched over the lens of the camera,
very different from the tonality of film.
Networks and Other Natural Systems

Radical Software was only published for five

years, but in that time video grew up as a
medium and greatly expanded its reach. More
individuals were using video technology for
various aims, and a greater number of universities and other institutions were investing in
equipment and video-specific programs. The
publishers began to farm out editorial control

Audiences gathered around several small screens in AN...inversion of family home television viewing

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short form

At Antioch College in Ohio, the Media and

Communication Center ran a free tape duplication program, collecting and archiving tapes
that they would then compile and mail out
to participants.

The exchange was simple: Find a title you

want in our catalogue, send us a program
of your own and postage. Antioch Video
would (a) incorporate the program sent
to us into our catalogue, and (b) send the
requester the program they desired. Our
catalogue had gone out to a number of
lists, through people we met on our various
excursions, through educational networks,
through alumni (a large number of whom
worked in media), through cable access
channels (some of which had been started
by Antiochians), and a variety of other lists.
We were copying tapes for Eldridge Cleaver
and the Black Panther Party, for the Brown
Berets in Texas, for senior citizen groups in
George Stoney's interactive network, from
environmental groups, and any number
of educational institutions. Its important
to remember that we had videos of some
of the most innovative dancers working at
the time, as well as poets and writers whose
work was not very accessible.
Bob Devine, interview with the author
July 4, 2014

Ant Farm, a California-based collective of

architects-cum-media-makers, devised their own
methods of radical decentralization and distribution. They created a Media Vana Chevy retrofitted with sleeping berths and a video-editing

Related reading

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Original music and the
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Pg. 50

desk that allowed for a fully mobile, on-the-road

production and presentation studio.

Intercourse 3

Readers could send blank tapes

and cash and have their tape
filled up with selected programming. Titles ranged from
interviews with Black Panther
Bobby Seale, to instructional
videos on canning and
geodesic dome making, or free
form experimentation with
editing techniques and analog
processing tools.

short form

Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and

Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org
This illustration, by Ann
Arlen,is from an article
entitled "Public Access:
The Second Coming of
Television?" about the
struggles of the early cable
access movement in NYC.

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Readers could send blank tapes and cash and have their tape filled up with selected programming

We spent three months building the Media

Van and the life support system, now we
have been on the road for two months. We
are on the road back. We have only one Portapak but it has been adequate. At first we
developed a style of editing-in-processthat
is, making judgment on tape we had already
shot and recording over slow parts. In the
south and Midwest there were no support
systems. Indeed the process was alien to
almost everyone.

This image is from a

1973 video per formance
by Juan Downey called
Plato Now, which was
presented for the first time
at the groundbreaking video
exhibition Circuit: A Video
Invitational at the Everson
Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY.
Plato Now was "Nine
performers in meditation
attempt to produce alphawaves. Their brain activity
controls the recurrence
of pre-recorded quotations
from Plato's dialogues.
9 per formers / 9 videochannels / alpha-wave
detectors / 9 audio recordings /
public's shadows."

Send Blank Tape: Flyntz

Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and

Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org

of subsequent issues to video-making compatriots all over the country, allowing for them to
focus on different aspects of media theory and
video making. Later issues of the magazine give
insight into what was going on at the time. In
different parts of the world and in various sectors
of the media environment people used video for
social documentary practice, cable access TV, institutional critique, radical pedagogical tool, and
as medium for formal artistic experimentation.

Send Blank Tape: Flyntz

Our tapes are a mix of our own bus trip;

weird shit along the side of the road;
survival mode stuff such as building Yurts,
unknown talent and rural American
commercial television. We are looking
for people who had taken control of their
immediate environment, especially older
enviro-weirdos.
The VideoFreex, a collective who started out in
NYC, moved upstate to an abandoned boarding
house in Lanesville, NY, where they created a
Media Bus, which they used to travel around
New York State, shooting video to broadcast
on their pirate TV station. Dean and Dudley
Evenson of Raindance travelled all over the

country in their own mobile video studio and living quarters, the Mobile Muck Truck.
Hardware meant nightmares and frequent
trips to Chicago to get stuff fixed. Software
was a term that Shamberg had borrowed
from Gene Youngblood and others, and
meant the dimension of human interaction.
Bob Devine, interview with the author
July 4, 2014

Radical Software and the network of communities and movements it represented laid
the groundwork for the movement away from
uni-directional broadcast media exemplified
by 1960s network television, and toward the
rhizomatic, decentralized communication model
presented by the early internet. Video itself as
a medium led the way to non-linear editing,
breaking away from the concept of time as
straightforward, directed, and progressive. The
early video movements saw decentralization of
means of production and decentralized distribution of content. Our current media ecology in
which media is produced for, and almost simultaneously consumed by, self-selecting social groups,
is the direct result.
Note: In the early 2000s, Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider,
members of Raindance, worked with the Daniel Langolois Inst.
in Montreal to create a history and searchable index of all of the
issues of Radical Software magazine, which can be found at:
http://www.radicalsoftware.org/

Ant Farm collective's mobile Media Van Allowed the artists to produce and present their Videos on-The-Road

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