Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." To do so, his music employs the technique of phase shifting, in which a phrase is slightly altered over time, in a flow that is clearly perceptible to the listener.
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying live or recorded images and sounds.
Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English artist, film maker, costume designer, stage designer, writer, gardener and gay rights activist.
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York.
Radical Software was an early journal on the use of video as an artistic and political medium, started in 1970 in New York City. At the time, the term radical software referred to the content of information rather than to a computer program.
A Portapak is a battery-powered, self-contained video tape analog recording system. Introduced to the market in 1967, it could be carried and operated by one person.
Michael Shamberg is an American film producer and former Time–Life correspondent.
Guerrilla television is a term coined in 1971 by Michael Shamberg, one of the founders of the Raindance Foundation; the Raindance Foundation has been one of the counter-culture video collectives that in the 1960s and 1970s extended the role of the underground press to new communication technologies.
Dean Evenson is a new-age musician, composer, producer and videographer. His hometown is Staten Island, New York. He has a master's degree in Molecular Biology. He worked in Manhattan as a recording engineer for Regent Sound with many Atlantic recording artists including Eric Clapton, Mose Allison, Roberta Flack. Dean plays several instruments including the Western concert flute, Native American flute, synthesizer, and keyboards. In the New Age genre, his music is generally sounds of nature combined with flute melodies and other instruments for ambient and meditative purposes. His music is often used for massage, meditation, yoga and relaxation.
Lord of the Universe is a 1974 American documentary film about Prem Rawat at an event in November 1973 at the Houston Astrodome called "Millennium '73". Lord of the Universe was first broadcast on PBS on February 2, 1974, and released in VHS format on November 1, 1991. The documentary chronicles Maharaj Ji, his followers and anti-Vietnam War activist Rennie Davis who was a spokesperson of the Divine Light Mission at the time. A counterpoint is presented by Davis' Chicago Seven co-defendant Abbie Hoffman, who appears as a commentator. It includes interviews with several individuals, including followers, ex-followers, a mahatma, a born-again Christian, and a follower of Hare Krishna.
TVTV was a San Francisco-based video collective that produced documentary video works using guerrilla art techniques.
Ira Schneider was an American video artist. He has been living and working in Berlin since 1993 until his return to the US in 2021.
Guerrilla theatre, generally rendered "guerrilla theater" in the US, is a form of guerrilla communication originated in 1965 by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who, in spirit of the Che Guevara writings from which the term guerrilla is taken, engaged in performances in public places committed to "revolutionary sociopolitical change." The group performances, aimed against the Vietnam war and capitalism, sometimes contained nudity, profanity and taboo subjects that were shocking to some members of the audiences of the time.
Beryl Korot is an American video artist.
Paul Louis Ryan (1943–2013) was an American video artist and communications theorist. His video art encompassed water studies and demonstrations of what Ryan called “a yoga of relationships” or Threeing, culminating in his theoretical development of the Peircean relational circuit and Earthscore notational system.
Four More Years is a 1972 documentary covering the 1972 Republican National Convention produced by Top Value Television. The title of the film refers to Richard Nixon's re-election slogan. The convention named Nixon as the Presidential nominee and Spiro Agnew as the nominee for Vice President. All filming takes place on the site of the convention center in Miami Beach, Florida. It was TVTV's second production, after The World's Largest TV Studio (1972), which covered the Democratic Convention one month prior.
Anda Korsts was a Chicago-based video artist and journalist. She was the founder of Videopolis, Chicago's first alternative video space, and worked with TVTV, a national video collective. She was one of the first of many new artists to use the portable camcorder as a tool for art making and radical journalism.
Frank Gillette is an American video and installation artist. Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments". His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art. In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.
Global Village Video was a pioneering Manhattan-based media center that operated from the late 1960s to the 1980s. It produced and showcased "Guerrilla TV" style video documentaries that featured subject matter and stylistic qualities not seen on mainstream television of the period. Using the battery-operated Sony CV video portapak introduced in 1968, Global Village also trained numerous artists and activists in the new technology, launched the first major video and film festival devoted solely to documentaries, as well as spearheaded a movement to get the work of independent producers on public television.
