The Standby Program is a non-profit, video post-production service organization in New York City. Since 1983, [1] Standby has provided editorial services to independent film and video producers on a wide range of projects, including documentaries, video art, installations, sound mixes, film-to-tape transfers and video preservation.
Alex Roshuk and Rick Feist, film students at Princeton University, started the program at Matrix, a large video studio on Eleventh Avenue and West 52nd Street. Feist began working there as a tape operator and suggested to the owners that they offer online editing to artists on the weekends and late at night at reduced rates on a standby basis (hence the name). Matrix had three large video studios with blue screen, three online video suites, a tape library and production office space. (Today it is home to Comedy Central's The Daily Show .)
Roshuk's 185 Corporation became the non-profit umbrella for Standby. The program became a model in the 1980s for the way artists could interface with corporations for effective use of technical and financial resources. Artists' using Standby paid upfront, which benefited two-fold. Such an arrangement ensured Matrix that they would be paid on time and that all the projects edited were vetted as bonafide, independent productions.
Juan Downey's Information Withheld was the first artist project to be edited at Standby. Downey began a long relationship with Feist and edited all his tapes from The Thinking Eye project there, as well as one of the first interactive art videos, BachDisk. In less than a year, demand for the program began to outpace its resources. It attracted interest from other artists, including Dara Birnbaum, Nam June Paik, Mary Lucier, Gary Hill, Gretchen Bender, Edin Velez, and Jem Cohen, among others.
Standby rapidly grew, adding new editors, tape operators, and administrators. Matrix donated the second floor of the tape library to house all the artists' master tapes. Standby started to receive funding as a media arts center from the New York State Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. By the end of the 1980s, the staff of the Standby program included Tom Crawford, Joe DePierro, Rick Feist, Nora Fisch, Eleanor Goldsmith, Lisa Guido, Steve Guiliano, and Kathy High. The Raindance Foundation served as its umbrella organization.
With the closing of Matrix in 1990, Standby relocated to a number of other post-production facilities, primarily working out of Editel NY, until that facility closed in 1995. Maria Venuto became executive director that same year, and integrated the operation of Media Alliance's Online Program, a similar post-production service that also started in 1983 with Standby's help. Under the leadership of Executive Director Maria Venuto, Standby's services have expanded to include a magnetic media preservation program. [2]
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.
Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.
Juan Downey was a Chilean artist who was a pioneer in the fields of video art and interactive art.
Alan Berliner is an American independent filmmaker. The New York Times has described Berliner's work as "powerful, compelling and bittersweet... full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures... Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life."
Raindance Foundation was founded in October 1969 by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg, Louis Jaffe, and Marco Vassi. Raindance was a self-described "alternate culture think-tank" that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.
Ali Hossaini is an American Artist, Philosopher, Theatrical producer, Television producer and businessperson. In 2010, The New York Times described him as a "biochemist turned philosopher turned television producer turned visual poet" . In 2017 Hossaini published the Manual of Digital Museum Planning and subsequently became co-director of National Gallery X, a King's College London partnership that explores the future of art and cultural institutions. Prior to National Gallery X Hossaini worked with King's College to develop Connected Culture, an action research programme that tested cultural applications for 5G supported by Ericsson. As a working artist and producer, Hossaini's genre-spanning career includes installations, performances and hundreds of media projects. Since 2018 Hossaini has worked with security think tank Royal United Services Institute and, in a 2019 special edition of its journal, he assessed the threat from AI from the perspective of biology.
Visual Communications –– is a community-based non-profit media arts organization based in Los Angeles. It was founded in 1970 by independent filmmakers Robert Nakamura, Alan Ohashi, Eddie Wong, and Duane Kubo, who were students of EthnoCommunications, an alternative film school at University of California, Los Angeles. The mission of VC is to "promote intercultural understanding through the creation, presentation, preservation and support of media works by and about Asian Pacific Americans." Visual Communications created learning kits, photographed community events, recorded oral histories, and collected historical images of Asian American life. Additionally, it created films, video productions, community media productions, screening activities, and photographic exhibits and publications.
Steina Vasulka and Woody Vasulka are early pioneers of video art, and have been producing work since the early 1960s. The couple met in the early 1960s and moved to New York City in 1965, where they began showing video art at the Whitney Museum and founded The Kitchen in 1971. Steina and Woody both became Guggenheim fellows: Steina in 1976, and Woody in 1979.
Craig B. Fisher was an American network and cable television producer. He spent more than 25 years with ABC, CBS, and NBC News Division in New York and Washington, D.C. and more than two decades as a freelance writer and producer. Fisher was responsible for over one thousand hours of live, film and videotape, studio and location television and corporate productions.
The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) is a nonprofit organization that works to connect independent producers and underrepresented communities to emerging media technologies. It was founded in 1976 in San Francisco.
Charles Atlas is a video artist and film director who also does lighting and set design.
Ardele Lister is an artist working in time-based media.
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EIDIA is the pseudonym under which the American transdisciplinary artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf have collaborated since 1986.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a resource for video and media art. An advocate of media art and artists since 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. EAI has supported the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.
TV Lab was a program founded at Thirteen/WNET public television station in 1972 by David Loxton with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts. The program provided artists with advanced video making equipment through an artist-in-residence program. Between 1975 and 1977, the Video Tape Review series was established and broadcast through TV Lab. David Loxton created TV Lab's Independent Documentary Fund in 1977, aiming to provide funding for the creation of independent documentaries. Unable to match funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the IDF and TV Lab lost support, eventually ending in 1984.
Kathryn High is an American interdisciplinary artist, curator, and scholar known for her work in BioArt, video art and performance art.
The Experimental Television Center (ETC) (1969–2011) was a nonprofit electronic and media art center located in upstate New York.
Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.
VIVO Media Arts Centre, run under the Satellite Video Exchange Society, (SVES) is an artist-run centre and video distribution library located in Vancouver, Canada. It was founded in 1973 to promote the non-commercial use of video technology by providing international and educational video exchange through a public video library. Its mission has then been expanded to provide equipment rentals, artist workshops, and provide information to the public about media arts.
"Standby Program": New York Media Arts Map
"Survey: Standby Program": Art Spaces Archive Project