A mediados del siglo XX, la invención y disponibilidad de nuevas drogas psicodélicas, y el creciente discurso cultural en torno a ellas, coincidieron con los de la televisión, las cintas de vídeo y la informática. Las tecnologías psicodélicas y la electrónica crecieron juntas, y quienes usaban o pensaban en una a menudo implicaban a la otra. Cuando Sony y otros fabricantes japoneses desarrollaron nuevos magnetoscopios portátiles a finales de los años sesenta, por ejemplo, surgieron nuevas comunidades de artistas a su alrededor, primero en Estados Unidos y Canadá, y después en Europa, Asia, el norte de África y América Latina. Por primera vez, declararon estos entusiastas, mucha gente podía hacer su propia televisión, rompiendo el oligopolio de la radiodifusión. Al describir las implicaciones psicológicas y sociológicas de esta nueva tecnología, muchos la compararon con las drogas psicodélicas.
]]>Our current association of the digital with progress can distract us from the historical fact that the most sophisticated electronic technologies have often been analog ones, processing information as continuous variations in voltage or current and recording it as continuous variations in magnetic fields. The discourse of the digital can also obscure continuities between electronic media, preventing us from seeing how much analog and digital modes of representing information have in common. Rather than thinking of the recent decline of film as a process of digitization, we might just as productively see it as a culmination of the rise of electronic photography, a phenomenon that has introduced into our visual experience not only the digital but also the analog.
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As Zippay writes, “performance and visual artists, political activists, cybernetic theorists, filmmakers, Fluxus provocateurs, and self-described video freaks and electronic geeks all contributed to the fluid mix—and creative friction—of the emergent video art scene.” She portrays this diversity of early video by bringing together 15 video productions and eight related films from 1970, 1971, and 1972. This tight periodization means the show, like an archaeological dig site, reveals a single stratum of video’s early history rather than a chronology of video art.
The most fascinating works are those sometimes described as video verité, which provide glimpses into an unrehearsed past. In Mayday Realtime, for example, David Cort walks and drives around Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971, documenting antiwar demonstrations and the police response. Cort, founder of a video collective called the Videofreex who lived in a communal house in the Catskills, consistently turned up with a camera at countercultural events like the Woodstock Festival and the Chicago Seven trial.
Shirley Clarke’s The Tee Pee Video Space Troupe: The First Years portrays cultural moments both more mundane and more glamorous than Cort’s May Day. In one segment, Clarke carouses with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol. “Video gives me something to do at parties,” Clarke tells the audience with an intertitle. Like many other videographers, Clarke—already an Academy Award winning filmmaker—was fascinated by the unique features of the video medium. As she tells a silent, posing Ono, her camera recorded sound, as film cameras could not. (Recording sound for film requires separate recording equipment.)
In the second segment of The Tee Pee Video Space Troupe, Shirley Clarke and Arthur C. Clarke—no relation—experiment with the interactions between two new gadgets. The science fiction writer points a laser at the filmmaker’s video camera, producing beautiful “sunbursts” and kaleidoscopic images. She has set up monitors displaying the video being recorded, so he watches himself and the abstractions he produces in real time, a mirroring practice characteristic of experimental video.
Indeed, many of the more explicitly artistic videos in Circa 1971 are subversive self-portraits. Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll consists of sensual explorations of the artist’s body interrupted by the vertical rolling characteristic of a poorly calibrated CRT television in time to a violent clanging sound. This disruption of the viewing experience challenges viewers to question the routine objectification of women’s bodies. Similarly, in I Am Making Art John Baldessari challenges the category of art itself by incessantly repeating the titular phrase while moving through the video frame.
As Zippay notes in her essay, these pieces convey “an analog—that is, slowed-down—experience of time” compared to that of 2012. The sparse arrangement of the self portraits—displayed on large video monitors set along the wall of the gallery like paintings, with no seating—compounds this sense of slowness. Since each of six is around 20 minutes long, I found myself circulating among them, returning to those I’d already watched for a few minutes to see how the artists were doing.
Experimental videographers generally embraced the ability to record continuously afforded by cheap tape—which, if you ran out, could also be recorded over. The ideal of cinema without editing pioneered by Warhol on film (and at least once on video) became common among videographers, and is evidenced here both by documentary works like Mayday Realtime and consciously artistic ones like I Am Making Art. It was often in editing, though, that experimental video most effectively demonstrated its emotional range.
In a series of Media Primers, three members of the video collective Raindance edited together segments from their diverse tape collection. I was particularly struck by Ira Schneider’s contribution, perhaps the least cerebral of the three, in which a hippie playing guitar and singing euphorically is intercut with footage of a campaign event for Richard Nixon and scuffles in the audience at Altamont.
Circa 1971 also includes a handful of short films from the era, which are projected rather than displayed on CRTs. TV Cello Premiere by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, shown at the exhibit’s entrance, depicts one of Paik’s collaborations with Charlotte Moorman. The cellist played a one-stringed cello constructed by Paik, TV Cello, which displayed the performance, other cellists, and broadcast television on its three TV screens.
Many of the works in Circa 1971, most notably TV Cello Premiere and Vertical Roll, reveal particular technical features of the video technology used to create them. This is not the technology on which they’re displayed, however; despite being about analog media, Circa 1971 is an exhibit of digital reproductions. Given the fragility and glitchiness of analog video, such concessions to practicality are necessary to display this work, but they leave the analog video medium itself absent from the gallery. An exhibit which more fully portrayed analog video as both a technology and an artistic medium might feature a portapak on a pedestal in the center of the gallery, surrounded by the art it helped create.
]]>Intriguingly, Morozov traces cyber-utopianism to “former hippies’” attempts “to prove that the Internet could deliver what the 1960s couldn’t: boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, strengthen associational life, and serve as a bridge from bowling alone to blogging together.” Morozov is right that the counterculture had some influence on the cyber-utopianism of today, but it’s perhaps deeper than he acknowledges. Hippies did not wait for the emergence of the internet to embrace the vision of a networked society; rather, the countercultural politics of the 1960s already incorporated a belief in the democratizing power of decentralized, electronic media. Indeed, despite Sullivan’s suggestion that the people’s power is unprecedented, one can find rhetoric virtually identical to his decades earlier.
The focus of this earlier cyber-utopianism was on breaking the oligopoly of broadcast television with cable television, satellites, and other new electronic technologies. Central to this vision was a portable device designed, like the cell phone, for an individual user: Sony’s VideoRover II, released in 1968. This portapak, as users called it, was much lighter and less imposing than traditional television cameras. From the beginning, users interpreted it as a new medium for artistic and political expression. In his 1972 memoir The Stoned Apocalypse, spiritual seeker and prolific erotica writer Marco Vassi anticipated Sullivan by 37 years: “The enthusiasm for videotape,” he wrote, “came from the evenings we spent using the equipment with each other, to create portraits, and modes of psychological insight, and sheer technological art. I suppose we all had our first flashes of power through those sessions, the realization that if one had access to the technology, he had as strong a voice in shaping the destiny of the world as the politicians and generals.” Many also saw video as an inherently democratic technology that would distribute this power to be heard more equitably.
This ideology was most fully elaborated by the video collective Raindance, particularly in Michael Shamberg’s 1971 book Guerrilla Television. Shamberg, who went on to become a Hollywood producer, presented television itself as a revolutionary technology which had already created a new “electronic environment,” “Media-America.” He was a technological determinist who believed that society was structured by its media; politics was mere superstructure which would follow automatically. “It’s nostalgia,” he wrote, “to think that… balance can be restored politically when politics are a function of Media-America, not vice-versa. Only through a radical re-design of its information structures to incorporate two-way, decentralized inputs can Media-America optimize the feedback it needs to come back to its senses.”
Shamberg’s influences are evident even in this short quotation. Foremost among them was media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who proposed that electronic media were creating a new social environment for humanity, a highly participatory “global village.” McLuhan’s research assistant Paul Ryan (no relation to the politician) was an experimental videographer who associated with Raindance; it was Ryan who developed the metaphor Shamberg employed of videography as guerrilla warfare in an article in Raindance’s magazine Radical Software. Both McLuhan and Ryan were in turn deeply influenced by the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, particularly his interpretation of human communication as constituting a global mind or “noosphere.” A more effective noosphere—a “videophere,” in art critic Gene Youngblood’s terminology—became the political ideal of experimental videography.
More concretely, Shamberg believed that video would revolutionize particular social relations. “Going out to the suburbs with video cameras and taping commuters,” for example, could show them “how wasted they look from buying the suburban myth.” Being videotaped could sensitize police and prevent brutality. Shamberg’s technological optimism focused specifically on communication technology, as he saw new forms of television and other media as both the sources of social change and the proper replacements for an obsolete political sphere.
There were also those who warned against seeing video as a source of social change, though. Among them was Vassi, himself a founding member of Raindance. “There is some talk, and there will be more, in so-called underground tape circles about the revolutionary impact of tape,” wrote Vassi in Radical Software. “I think it’s too late for all that. Every innovation in technology brought about by heads will be used by the power-trip neanderthals to furnish a more sophisticated 1984.… I think the thing to watch out for is this: That there be as little talking about all this as possible, not to keep the enemy from overhearing or any of that nonsense, but to guard against coming to believe one’s own rhetoric.”
All of which brings us back to the recent past. In January 2010, a few months after the Iranian uprising, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech, “Remarks on Internet Freedom,” at the Newseum in Washington. “The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet,” she told her audience. “When something happens in Haiti or Hunan, the rest of us learn about it in real time—from real people.” Clinton invoked the same emphasis on direct communication—media without mediation—which Shamberg celebrated in video and Sullivan in Twitter, and the same notion of a global mind which McLuhan and Ryan found in Teilhard. ”Now, in many respects, information has never been so free,” Clinton continued, agreeing with countercultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand, who declared in 1984 that “information wants to be free.”
Clinton’s optimism was tempered, though. “We must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing,” she continued. “These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights.” Beyond that, we should heed Vassi’s warning and recognize the threat that we will be seduced by our tools and their false but persistent promise of revolutionary change without our active political effort. These information technologies can contribute to the success of political movements, but not if their users see them as replacements for political life.
]]>If you’ve come here after asking yourself (or Google) what cybernetics is, I recommend starting with Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin Peters’ entry “Cybernetics,” from the International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, and Geoffrey Bowker’s “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70.” Ronald Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment is the synthetic history the field has been waiting for. William Aspray’s “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey” places cybernetics in the context of developments in computing and information theory, while Peter Galison’s “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” is a classic account of the field’s military origins. The texts listed below survey the many forms cybernetics took in the decades that followed.
This bibliography is limited in three ways: It includes only books and articles which focus on cybernetics rather than the related histories of cyborgs and information theory; it includes only texts in English, though there are also substantial literatures on the subject in other languages; and it excludes articles and dissertations that have been superseded by books by the same authors. Within these limitations, I welcome references to additional books and articles. I last updated this list in April 2026.