Members List
All members names are listed alphabetically. To learn more about each member click on their name below. Please scroll down.
Bami Adedoyin, Brooklyn, NY
Mohd Fuad Arif, Malaysia
Megan Bisbee, Alfred, NY
Missy Carr, Washington, DC
Kristin Carroll, Boston, MA
Tony Conrad, Buffalo, NY
Kristin Carroll, Boston, MA
Tony Conrad, Buffalo, NY
Lara Davis, Providence, RI
Cindy DeFelice, Brockport, NY
Ghen Dennis, Buffalo, NY
Leigh Ann Francis, New Brunswick, NJ
Chifumi Fujisawa, Mosumoto, Japan
Amy Goldberg, Rochester, NY
Bethany Goldpaugh Brown, Kingston, NY
Virva Hepolampi, Helsinki, Finland
James Holland, Southbury, CT and Rochester, NY
Kelly Jacobson, Kansas City, MO
Akil Kirlew, Brooklyn, NY
Caroline Koebel, Buffalo, NY
Jennifer Little, Rochester, NY
Edna Madera, Rochester, NY
Darin Martin, Oakland, CA
Tammy McGovern, Buffalo, NY
Colleen Vera Melisz, Buffalo/Rochester, NY
Toni Mosley, Auckland, New Zealand
Tomoya Murazumi, Kanazawa City, Japan
Akane Nakamori, Kanazawa City, Japan
Stephanie Nolasco, New York, NY
Natasha Pachano, Costa Rica
Warren Peace, Jersey City, NJ
Anjanel Dawn Pinet, Rochester, NY
Mima Simic, Croatia
Joan E. Stoltman, Buffalo, NY
Diane Teramana, Kingston, NY
Angela Tessier Kanazawa City, Japan
Andy Tetzlaff, Kanazawa City, Japan
Matthew Underwood, Boston, MA
Adam Weekley, Buffalo, NY
wolfgrrrl sometimes billijo, Rochester, NY
Walter Wright, Lowell, MA
Ami Yamasaki, Kanazawa City, Japan
Ojima Yukari, Kanazawa City, Japan
Karen Y. Zhang, Beijing, China |
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Members List
Sherry Miller Hocking
To imagine the future of the media arts, we need to understand its past. How do the history and tradition of an earlier technological art inform the development of new media? The early history of video has much in common with the origins and applications of new media today by artists and social activists. What are these ancestors shared by old and new media - which concepts and practices, motivations, desires and dreams?
Arts practice changes as the tool set changes. Once a technology is introduced into a culture it cannot be withdrawn. Technological innovations and the speed of their introduction force us to make choices about how we apply these new tools, how and where the devices and their products are placed within the culture and what values we ascribe to the things created.
In the late 1960s video began to evolve, in part, as a reaction to the one-way delivery system of broadcast television - video’s "frightful parent" - controlled by corporations and the profit motive, and as a reaction to an art world many felt to be exclusive, dominated by precious objects, and restrictive in terms of the definition of art, and its audiences.
Early video work was as varied as its practitioners. The work took many paths, from documentaries promoting social actions, to ecological works which explored media environments and communications delivery systems structures, and formalist investigations of the essential properties of the medium.
The emergence of the media arts movement in the 1960s and the subsequent development of regional training and access centers produced a generation of film and video artists, including large numbers of minorities and women, who saw these tools as means and opportunity for telling their stories.
From the early days - Women media makers and critical thinkers - Beryl Korot, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Steina Vasulka, Red Burns, Keiko Tsuno, Dee Dee Halleck, Joan Jonas, Rita Myers, Barbara Buckner, Martha Rosler, Carlota Schoolman, Deirdre Boyle, Marita Sturken, Sara Hornbacher, Ann-Sargent Wooster, Pat Anderson. Video groups and collectives engaged in important cultural and social works - documenting the anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1970s; TVTV’s coverage of the national political conventions with Four More Years (1972); DCTV’s documentaries Cuba The People (1974) and Chinatown - Immigrants in America (1976); Ant Farm’s spectacular denunciation of the apparatus of television; the regional portraits by the Videofreex; Queer Blue Light Gay Video Revolution Workshop held at Experimental Television Center (1972) for gay men and women from organizations all over the State, focusing on minority uses of the public access television; Susan and Alan Rayomnd’s The Police Tapes (1976), Peoples Video Theater’s work with the Young Lords in the production of early Hispanic videotapes, Susan Milano’s founding of the first Women’s Video Festival (1972). Black video pioneers - Philip Mallory Jones, founder of Ithaca Video Project and the IVP Video Festival, and Bill Stephens, founder of the Revolutionary People’s Communication Network (1971).
And so many more…
To understand the past we must have access to the works and the instruments of creation, and to the stories of the practitioners. Preservation of early media is critical and serves the public interest as it transmits culture.
Early media art work was iconoclastic. Work which is designed to challenge established notions — whether politics, aesthetics, social order — has limited appeal, and will never find a place in mass marketed culture with broad-based audience appeal. Risk-taking is essential for innovation, but antithetical to traditions of mass marketing.
Perhaps we can sell our contemporary popular culture on the idea that the preservation of older work and its history supplies content to media-hungry transmitters such as cable and the Web. But really we need to save what we ourselves value, what speaks to our evolution and our history as we write it together.
Ferris Wheel, 8th Annual Avant Garde Festival at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory, November 19, 1971. Sherry Miller Hocking, with Ken Dominick.
The Avant Garde Festival was organized by Charlotte Moorman. Included were premieres of the Paik/Abe and Siegel synthesizers, Experimental Television Center’s "The Living Room" installation with continuous videotape screening, "Video Ferris Wheel", by Shirley Clarke, "Video Kinetic Environment" by the Vasulkas, and videotapes by Douglas Davis, Ken Dominick, Ralph Hocking, Tambellini, and the Videofreex. The Avant Garde Festival was a project of Electronic Arts Intermix.
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