Media Burn: 1970s EAI Video Experiments

 

About Media (1977)
Dir. Anthony Ramos
Digital, 25min

Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters, and his personal involvement with the issue. Ramos, who had served an eighteen-month prison sentence for draft resistance, was interviewed by New York news reporter Gabe Pressman. Using repetition and juxtaposition, he contrasts the unedited interview footage—and patronizing comments of the news crew—with Pressman's final televised news report. In his ironic manipulation of the material, Ramos exposes the illusion and artifice of television news.

 

 

Media Burn: Ant Farm (1975)
Dirs. Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schrier, Uncle Buddie.
Digital, 23min

Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collision of two of America's most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco's Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the "ultimate media event." In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a "Phantom Dream Car"—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets. Footage of the actual event, much of which was shot from a closed-circuit video camera mounted inside a customized tail-fin, is framed and juxtaposed with news coverage by the local television stations. The spectacle of the Cadillac crashing through the burning TV sets became a visual manifesto of the early alternative video movement, an emblem of an oppositional and irreverent stance against the political and cultural imperatives promoted by television, and the passivity of TV viewing. Examining the impact of mass media in American culture, Media Burn exemplifies Ant Farm's fascination with the automobile and television as cultural artifacts, and their approach to social critique through spectacle and humor

 

Underscan (1973—4)
Dir. Nancy Holt
Digital, 9min

Holt writes: "In Underscan, time and the visual image are compressed. A series of photographs of my Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, MA had been videotaped, and re-videotaped while being underscanned. (The underscanning device is a structural framework particular only to video; it compresses the picture so that the edges can be seen precisely; it does away with the variation that occurs between monitors in the amount of the image which is visible.) Because of this underscanning process, each static photo image, as it appears, changes from regular to elongated to compressed or vice versa. Excerpts from letters from my aunt spanning 10 years are condensed into 8 minutes of my voice-over audio. Certain yearly occurrences repeat in an auditory rhythm, coinciding with the cycle of yearly changes."

 

Concord Ultimatum (1977)
Dir. Tony Conrad
Digital, 11mins

"Originally intended as one scene in a larger work concerned with the metaphorical destruction of the viewer (through demolition of the camera), Concord Ultimatum unexpectedly became the occasion of the larger project’s demise. In addressing the camera mechanism itself as a subject, and even offering to exchange positions with it, this performance dismembered at one stroke most of the aporias of the materialist/structuralist position in film theory. On the other hand, this work revealed no point of access to the visual image; its situationist grounding in a particular structure of events, which placed voice and performance at stage center, simultaneously won me over to the video medium and stripped me of visual tools (until Combat Status Go)."—EIA

 

See Through (1970)
Dir. Vito Acconci
Digital, 5mins

Acconci spars with his close-up image in a mirror. He then breaks the mirror, destroying his image.