How San Francisco Video Art Exploded in the 1970s | KQED Arts

In the #1970s, an artistic movement fueled by social revolution and ignited by a new technology - the first portable video cameras -- made San Francisco a center of media art experimentation and #protestart.
San Francisco had never experienced a Fourth of July quite like it did in 1975, when a custom Cadillac drove through a pyramid of 45 flaming televisions at the Cow Palace. “The Media Burn” was a carefully engineered publicity stunt, but it also represents a high point of a Bay Area artistic movement that was fueled by the social and cultural revolutions of the times and ignited by a new technology - the first portable video cameras.
Until the late 1960s, television equipment had been expensive and cumbersome, the exclusive domain of big media. In the 1970s, Bay Area video artists and activist laid claim to what they saw as an instrument of mass-media control, turning video into a tool for self-expression and liberation and making San Francisco a center of media art experimentation.
Inspired both by a communal instinct that was part of the times and the need to share scarce equipment, many of these artists formed collectives. One of the earliest, Electric Eye, experimented with abstract video imagery. Video Free America made a name in counter-culture reality television. TVTV (Top Value Television) aimed to provide a hippie alternative to network news, while Optic Nerve presented some of the first feminist documentaries. The T.R. Uthco team explored the narrative strategies of political speech
Ant Farm, the court jesters of the Bay Area video scene, often partnered with other groups and brought an antic good humor to projects involving video, architecture, sculpture, performance and other media. Their iconic works - “Cadillac Ranch,” “Media Burn” and “The Eternal Frame” (a collaboration with T.R. Uthco) - embody witty critiques of consumer culture and the mass media.
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[@davidpetri6876]

I am proud to my original song "Let's Have An Affair" used to underscore the beginning of this documentary.

[@modickens7154]

The Media Burn Cadillac lives on in Kansas City, MO, as part of the Belger Collection.

[@kitgalloway4400]

NOTES of THEN, and THE THEN FUTURE OF GETTING BEYOND TV: Sherrie Rabinowitz and Mya Shone from the video collective Optic Nerve are seen in the beginning shooting PortaPack video of the Media Burn event. Earlier, Sherrie and Optic Nerve's studio resided at the legendary warehouse community called Project One in S.F. Sherrie did a historic video interview there with another Project One resident named Pam Hardt who was with a computer access activist group named Resource One. Sherrie's two-part interview with Pam begins before Resource One took possession of a large Scientific Data Systems SDS-940 timesharing computer (an improbable story). There is video of the massive computer being delivered in two trucks. Then there is Sherrie's follow up interview after the arrival of the monstrosity in 1972. These interviews were before Lee Felsenstein, and with others, installed and got the computer operating. Eventually the obvious thing that you do with a giant timeshare computer that has magically fallen into the hand of We the People, is: Hook a terminal up to it and put that terminal, and others, out in public places and invoke for the first time: A public computer network, and then introduced it to the public through the Berkeley Barb, as like: “Welcome to Community Memory.” Sherrie went on to meet life-partner and collaborator Kit Galloway in Paris in 1975, and together they pioneered and awakened a new practice and movement in artistic inquiry and multimedia socieopolitical networking through their earliest sophisticated approximations of multimedia-immersive-telecollaborative-environments and prototype networks so that humans telecollaborating with other humans beyond just text might begin realizing what we are going to need as privacy and security for these new ways of being-in-the-world, as opposed to consuming what we GET through networks supported by targeted advertising. S&K's inquiry into all this began after years of planning for a year-long transcontinental performative and immersive virtual reality project with NASA between April and November 1977, that tested, among many untested things, the effects of network latency on long-distance telecollaborative performances that determines, by the immutable laws of physics, what can and can’t be done in cyberspace equal to actually being together in the same place. Still, being together in cyberspaces is the next best thing to "being there," when you can't "be there" at all. Kit Galloway (Sherrie Rabinowitz 1950-2013)