A CYCLICAL MODEL OF HISTORY
LIBERTATIA was a (possibly fictional) pirate community formed in the late 1600s by a Captain Mission, in Madagascar. There the pirates constructed “a purely socialist society in which private property is abolished and all wealth held in a common treasury.” There was even a new language, “a mélange of French, English, Dutch, Portuguese.” This renegade culture, developed as a haven for “outlaws,” included a mix of races, both exiles and natives, creating a cross-cultural community that was non-hierarchical, egalitarian, and idealist—as Peter Lamborn Wilson described it, “a pirate utopia.”1
In introducing the texts of Hidden Histories, I would like to embrace this utopian idea of pirate renegades creating intentional communities and controlling the conditions by which they live and extend it to those revolutionary moments in our own media arts histories as models of what Hakim Bey has called “temporary autonomous zones”— places and moments in which radical actions and creation occur outside of the constrictions of societal norms and cultural controls.2
These are zones in which pirate media renegades can create, invent, and incubate in the space of a generative moment. I don’t think things happen by accident. I settled in New York State and have lived here for thirty-four years, since I was seventeen years old. I thought I was following the money—New York has been one of the only states that has actively funded the arts since the beginning of the sixties. In 1961, the New York state legislature created the New York State Council on the Arts. In 1969, the NYSCA Film Program became the Film and Television Program and began accepting applications for electronic media projects.
But there was something else that attracted me to the state: upstate New York has a rich history of intentional communities, utopian pursuits of collective effort that have risen and fallen over time and given birth to many remarkable instances of creativity. In the nineteenth century utopian moments occurred in Oneida with the Perfectionist community, in New Lebanon and Albany with the shakers, near Buffalo with the Lilydale Assembly Spiritualist community. There was also the first major women’s rights conference, held at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. There, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott presented the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (modeled after the American Declaration of Independence), proclaiming the need for the equality of women with men and calling for the first time for women’s right to vote.
Fast forward about one hundred years, where in upstate New York the first museum program of video art was established at the Everson Museum, in Syracuse (begun by David Ross in 1971 and continued by Richard Simmons), one of the first video synthesizer design sites was launched at the Experimental Television Center (run by Ralph Hocking with Dave Jones), the first university program devoted to combined practice and theory of media arts was initiated at the Center for Media Study and Media study/Buffalo, and radical video collectives began to operate in the state, like the Videofreex. These energetic, temporary autonomous zones also have been marked by a rich history and by the rise and fall of bursts of creative energy emerging from utopian ideals. The reader will forgive my musings and meanderings here, for I am sure similar historical tracings can be found in many other places throughout the country. But these New York communities serve as a useful example of the kinds of historical connections that exist among the various experimental utopian moments the united states has seen: during middle of the nineteenth century, during the great depression in the 1930s, and during the 1960s and 1970s. I am interested here in the generative moments that lie behind these communities, the similarities between “ mediums,” and their ultimate goals. I mention energy as one of the hallmarks of these moments since we are dealing with electronic media and sound waves, and with transmissions between periods in history and among generations.
Oneida ‘s Perfectionist community was founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. Noyes believed that “man [was] able to live without sin in his life if he [was] in the perfect environment,” and he tried to establish that perfect environment in one of the most successful utopian communes in history. For approximately thirty years, the Perfectionists lived in a gigantic group union—what Noyes called a “complex marriage”—in which all men were to be married to all women. This form of free love (which included more than two hundred people at the end) was intended to promote love and loyalty to the group and the sharing of property, exchanging the small home, nuclear family, and individual possessions in favor of the larger unit of group-family life.3 in 1879 the community abandoned its original ideals and Noyes fled to Canada.
It was in 1848 as well that the Spiritualism Movement was founded in Rochester, where the Fox Sisters were in communication with spirits. The Lilydale Assembly, a separatist spiritualist community, was founded in 1879 near Elmira, just south of Buffalo. This intentional community, formed as a radical branch of the Quakers, is known for communicating with the dead, acting as mediums, and channeling such things as medical diagnoses, political speeches, and diatribes against slavery while in a hypnotic trance. Spiritualists were often criticized for practicing “free love” and supporting both progressive women’s rights and abolitionist teachings. In the close connection between mysticism and social idealism, they explored radical religious and social reform.
The first woman who ran for u.s. President was in fact a spiritualist; Victoria Woodhull declared her candidacy in 1871, forming a new political party, the “People’s convention,” and was nominated in Troy, New York, by suffragists, socialists, and Spiritualists. (Many women at that time spoke publicly for the first time by channeling male historic figures.) 4 historian Robert Hine defined a utopian colony as consisting of: “ ... a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large to embody which vision in experimental form. The purpose is usually to create a model that other colonies and eventually mankind in general will follow.”5 from Perfectionist communities to video collectives, these groups emerge, as Hakim Bey wrote, as separated revolutionary clusters, which are temporary. That is to say, they come and go. There is a flaring of energy, a power surge, and then they fizzle out. During these revolutionary moments, when uprisings occur and new alliances are formed, new extended families are created. And when people come together because of similar psychic needs and interests there is also the creation of a place where productive learning occurs, invention is encouraged, and new languages arise.
Many such examples of media arts groups existed in this upstate area—perhaps feeding off the energies and histories of these radical intentional communities. Media Study/Buffalo was founded in 1972 by Gerald O’Grady, coexisting with its educational counterpart, the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Here, media artists practiced their art and theory together, sharing resources, crossing disciplines, trading media skills. O'Grady embraced the need for what he called “mediacy,” or a form of media literacy. “It’s a political issue: one cannot participate in society unless one can use the channels or codes of communication that are current in the time that one lives.”6 O’Grady brought together some of the leading media practitioners of his time, including filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, and James Blue, and video artists Woody and Steina Vasulka.
There were also various New York City video collectives that fled upstate in New York to create a more utopian situation. Paul Ryan of the Raindance Corporation moved to New Paltz in 1971, and in 1973 conceived of a utopian community of ecological videomakers called Earthscore: The idea was to configure an intentional community of thirty-six videomakers. Each videomaker was to be part of three different triads. The first triad was to care for its members, the second to take care of the business of supporting a community, and the third to produce video interpretations of ecological systems. My intuition was that if self-correcting teams of three people could be stabilized, a leaderless, thriving community could be stabilized. ...I wanted to start a non-celibate, aesthetic order capable of interpreting ecological systems with video that would be as sturdy and long lasting as the ascetic order of the monastic tradition I had experienced.7
The Videofreex likewise moved from New York city to Lanesville, New York, in the Catskills, to form a video community in 1971.8 This group was involved with shooting videotapes of countercultural events, teaching technology, and creating video tools. They published The Spaghetti City Video Manual, which served as a training guide and illustrated the workings of the guts of VCR equipment. They operated an editing room for the use of artists and video producers and founded a tiny pirate broadcast TV station, Lanesville TV. This group of radical activists, who documented events such as the antiwar movement, Woodstock, the Chicago 7, and the Black Panthers, worked together until the late 1970s, when they dispersed.
These “intentional media communities” formed in the 1960s and 1970s along with other media arts organizations across New York State. They involved media arts practices that were unstratified and non-hierarchical, and followed nineteenth-century utopian tenets regarding the egalitarian distribution of goods and conducting work one enjoys while contributing to the good of the community, emphasizing individualism and creativity and often practicing open sexual expression. All were examples of those synergistic moments that allow for the creation of small groups of people who want to work together to make new communities, new alliances. It is an impulse that has continued to transmute into new projects such as DIY, residency programs, communal laboratories, collectives, participatory Web networks, and other utopian media ventures.
It is important for us to explore and share these histories, in tandem with the people who lived them, so that we might understand a bit more about the contexts that give rise to these kinds of creative events. This project with NAMAC is only the beginning. There are histories and stories that need to be collected now that will help to define and diversify the history of media art. There are many more recent histories that also need to be mined.
At a recent conference held at BANFF, called Refresh!, it became obvious that the history of new media art has not been a common one: there is no one through-line, no single track. Because of the multiplicity of contributors and technologies (factors that continue to grow) and the broad definition of terms like “new media,” no summary has been made at this point. At the end of the 1980s, with the end of the cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bilinear Western history as we know it came crashing down as well. We need to create a new understanding of our histories with many entry points, and with an eye to the renegades and “ pirate utopias” that operated within them.
I thank Helen de Michiel for shepherding through this volume of Hidden Histories and for her vision in leading NAMAC, which I hope will continue to expand this kind of historical work in the future.
NOTES:
1. Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1995).
2. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The. Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2003).
3. See http://www.rouncefield.homestead.com/files/as_soc_family_27.htm.
4. See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
5. Robert V. Hine (1953), quoted in George L. Hicks, “Utopian Problems and Explanations,” http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/hicks/ch2.html.
6. O’Grady quoted in Karen Mooney, “Gerald O’Grady: The Perspective from Buffalo,” Videoscope 1, no. 2 (1977). http://www.experimentaltvcen- ter.org/history/people/ptext.php3?id=66.
7. Paul Ryan, Video Journey Through Utopia, http://208.55.137.252/videojourneythroughutopa.html
8. The Videofreex consisted of Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, David Cort, Bart Friedman, Davidson Gigliotti, Chuck Kennedy, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Parry Teasdale, Carol Vontobel, and Ann Woodward. See Davidson Gigliotti, “Video History Project,” http://208.55.137.252/index.html.
In introducing the texts of Hidden Histories, I would like to embrace this utopian idea of pirate renegades creating intentional communities and controlling the conditions by which they live and extend it to those revolutionary moments in our own media arts histories as models of what Hakim Bey has called “temporary autonomous zones”— places and moments in which radical actions and creation occur outside of the constrictions of societal norms and cultural controls.2
These are zones in which pirate media renegades can create, invent, and incubate in the space of a generative moment. I don’t think things happen by accident. I settled in New York State and have lived here for thirty-four years, since I was seventeen years old. I thought I was following the money—New York has been one of the only states that has actively funded the arts since the beginning of the sixties. In 1961, the New York state legislature created the New York State Council on the Arts. In 1969, the NYSCA Film Program became the Film and Television Program and began accepting applications for electronic media projects.
But there was something else that attracted me to the state: upstate New York has a rich history of intentional communities, utopian pursuits of collective effort that have risen and fallen over time and given birth to many remarkable instances of creativity. In the nineteenth century utopian moments occurred in Oneida with the Perfectionist community, in New Lebanon and Albany with the shakers, near Buffalo with the Lilydale Assembly Spiritualist community. There was also the first major women’s rights conference, held at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. There, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott presented the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (modeled after the American Declaration of Independence), proclaiming the need for the equality of women with men and calling for the first time for women’s right to vote.
Fast forward about one hundred years, where in upstate New York the first museum program of video art was established at the Everson Museum, in Syracuse (begun by David Ross in 1971 and continued by Richard Simmons), one of the first video synthesizer design sites was launched at the Experimental Television Center (run by Ralph Hocking with Dave Jones), the first university program devoted to combined practice and theory of media arts was initiated at the Center for Media Study and Media study/Buffalo, and radical video collectives began to operate in the state, like the Videofreex. These energetic, temporary autonomous zones also have been marked by a rich history and by the rise and fall of bursts of creative energy emerging from utopian ideals. The reader will forgive my musings and meanderings here, for I am sure similar historical tracings can be found in many other places throughout the country. But these New York communities serve as a useful example of the kinds of historical connections that exist among the various experimental utopian moments the united states has seen: during middle of the nineteenth century, during the great depression in the 1930s, and during the 1960s and 1970s. I am interested here in the generative moments that lie behind these communities, the similarities between “ mediums,” and their ultimate goals. I mention energy as one of the hallmarks of these moments since we are dealing with electronic media and sound waves, and with transmissions between periods in history and among generations.
Oneida ‘s Perfectionist community was founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. Noyes believed that “man [was] able to live without sin in his life if he [was] in the perfect environment,” and he tried to establish that perfect environment in one of the most successful utopian communes in history. For approximately thirty years, the Perfectionists lived in a gigantic group union—what Noyes called a “complex marriage”—in which all men were to be married to all women. This form of free love (which included more than two hundred people at the end) was intended to promote love and loyalty to the group and the sharing of property, exchanging the small home, nuclear family, and individual possessions in favor of the larger unit of group-family life.3 in 1879 the community abandoned its original ideals and Noyes fled to Canada.
It was in 1848 as well that the Spiritualism Movement was founded in Rochester, where the Fox Sisters were in communication with spirits. The Lilydale Assembly, a separatist spiritualist community, was founded in 1879 near Elmira, just south of Buffalo. This intentional community, formed as a radical branch of the Quakers, is known for communicating with the dead, acting as mediums, and channeling such things as medical diagnoses, political speeches, and diatribes against slavery while in a hypnotic trance. Spiritualists were often criticized for practicing “free love” and supporting both progressive women’s rights and abolitionist teachings. In the close connection between mysticism and social idealism, they explored radical religious and social reform.
The first woman who ran for u.s. President was in fact a spiritualist; Victoria Woodhull declared her candidacy in 1871, forming a new political party, the “People’s convention,” and was nominated in Troy, New York, by suffragists, socialists, and Spiritualists. (Many women at that time spoke publicly for the first time by channeling male historic figures.) 4 historian Robert Hine defined a utopian colony as consisting of: “ ... a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large to embody which vision in experimental form. The purpose is usually to create a model that other colonies and eventually mankind in general will follow.”5 from Perfectionist communities to video collectives, these groups emerge, as Hakim Bey wrote, as separated revolutionary clusters, which are temporary. That is to say, they come and go. There is a flaring of energy, a power surge, and then they fizzle out. During these revolutionary moments, when uprisings occur and new alliances are formed, new extended families are created. And when people come together because of similar psychic needs and interests there is also the creation of a place where productive learning occurs, invention is encouraged, and new languages arise.
Many such examples of media arts groups existed in this upstate area—perhaps feeding off the energies and histories of these radical intentional communities. Media Study/Buffalo was founded in 1972 by Gerald O’Grady, coexisting with its educational counterpart, the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Here, media artists practiced their art and theory together, sharing resources, crossing disciplines, trading media skills. O'Grady embraced the need for what he called “mediacy,” or a form of media literacy. “It’s a political issue: one cannot participate in society unless one can use the channels or codes of communication that are current in the time that one lives.”6 O’Grady brought together some of the leading media practitioners of his time, including filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, and James Blue, and video artists Woody and Steina Vasulka.
There were also various New York City video collectives that fled upstate in New York to create a more utopian situation. Paul Ryan of the Raindance Corporation moved to New Paltz in 1971, and in 1973 conceived of a utopian community of ecological videomakers called Earthscore: The idea was to configure an intentional community of thirty-six videomakers. Each videomaker was to be part of three different triads. The first triad was to care for its members, the second to take care of the business of supporting a community, and the third to produce video interpretations of ecological systems. My intuition was that if self-correcting teams of three people could be stabilized, a leaderless, thriving community could be stabilized. ...I wanted to start a non-celibate, aesthetic order capable of interpreting ecological systems with video that would be as sturdy and long lasting as the ascetic order of the monastic tradition I had experienced.7
The Videofreex likewise moved from New York city to Lanesville, New York, in the Catskills, to form a video community in 1971.8 This group was involved with shooting videotapes of countercultural events, teaching technology, and creating video tools. They published The Spaghetti City Video Manual, which served as a training guide and illustrated the workings of the guts of VCR equipment. They operated an editing room for the use of artists and video producers and founded a tiny pirate broadcast TV station, Lanesville TV. This group of radical activists, who documented events such as the antiwar movement, Woodstock, the Chicago 7, and the Black Panthers, worked together until the late 1970s, when they dispersed.
These “intentional media communities” formed in the 1960s and 1970s along with other media arts organizations across New York State. They involved media arts practices that were unstratified and non-hierarchical, and followed nineteenth-century utopian tenets regarding the egalitarian distribution of goods and conducting work one enjoys while contributing to the good of the community, emphasizing individualism and creativity and often practicing open sexual expression. All were examples of those synergistic moments that allow for the creation of small groups of people who want to work together to make new communities, new alliances. It is an impulse that has continued to transmute into new projects such as DIY, residency programs, communal laboratories, collectives, participatory Web networks, and other utopian media ventures.
It is important for us to explore and share these histories, in tandem with the people who lived them, so that we might understand a bit more about the contexts that give rise to these kinds of creative events. This project with NAMAC is only the beginning. There are histories and stories that need to be collected now that will help to define and diversify the history of media art. There are many more recent histories that also need to be mined.
At a recent conference held at BANFF, called Refresh!, it became obvious that the history of new media art has not been a common one: there is no one through-line, no single track. Because of the multiplicity of contributors and technologies (factors that continue to grow) and the broad definition of terms like “new media,” no summary has been made at this point. At the end of the 1980s, with the end of the cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bilinear Western history as we know it came crashing down as well. We need to create a new understanding of our histories with many entry points, and with an eye to the renegades and “ pirate utopias” that operated within them.
I thank Helen de Michiel for shepherding through this volume of Hidden Histories and for her vision in leading NAMAC, which I hope will continue to expand this kind of historical work in the future.
NOTES:
1. Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1995).
2. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The. Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2003).
3. See http://www.rouncefield.homestead.com/files/as_soc_family_27.htm.
4. See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
5. Robert V. Hine (1953), quoted in George L. Hicks, “Utopian Problems and Explanations,” http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/hicks/ch2.html.
6. O’Grady quoted in Karen Mooney, “Gerald O’Grady: The Perspective from Buffalo,” Videoscope 1, no. 2 (1977). http://www.experimentaltvcen- ter.org/history/people/ptext.php3?id=66.
7. Paul Ryan, Video Journey Through Utopia, http://208.55.137.252/videojourneythroughutopa.html
8. The Videofreex consisted of Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, David Cort, Bart Friedman, Davidson Gigliotti, Chuck Kennedy, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Parry Teasdale, Carol Vontobel, and Ann Woodward. See Davidson Gigliotti, “Video History Project,” http://208.55.137.252/index.html.
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