Making A Technology Of Consciousness In The Long 1960s

361 Pages·2016·1.77 MB·English

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Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations
2015
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Peter Sachs Collopy
University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations
Part of the Communication Commons, and the United States History Commons
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Collopy, Peter Sachs, "The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the
Long 1960s" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1665.
https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1665
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1665
For more information, please contact [email protected].
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In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the art gallery, the
psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving images on magnetic tape,
previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for artistic expression, psychological
experimentation, and political revolution. Video became portable not only materially but also culturally; it
could be carried by an individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation
to the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ offices to art galleries, and from prisons to state-funded
media access centers. Between 1967 and 1973, American videographers across many of these
institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing not only practical knowledge about the
uses and maintenance of video equipment, but visions of its social significance, psychological effects,
and utopian future. For many, video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness,
the communal consiousness that—influenced by the evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global village.
Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced by the psychedelic research of the
1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as a science of both social systems and
interactions between humans and machines, by anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by
revolutionary political movements in the United States and around the world.
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Dissertation
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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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History and Sociology of Science
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John Tresch
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Consciousness, Media, Video
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Communication | United States History
This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1665
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE VIDEOTAPED:
MAKING A TECHNOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LONG 1960s
Peter Sachs Collopy
A DISSERTATION
in
History and Sociology of Science
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2015
Supervisor of Dissertation
————————————————————
John Tresch, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science
Graduate Group Chairperson
————————————————————
John Tresch, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science
Dissertation Committee
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Professor Emerita of History and Sociology of Science
Nathan Ensmenger, Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana
University
Fred Turner, Associate Professor of Communications, Stanford University
To my family: Marianne Sachs, Fred Collopy,
Andy Collopy, and Deanna Day
ii
Acknowledgements
The history of experimental video that I recount here is one of interactions between
participants in many fields, and the process of writing it has also required such
collaboration. Thanks first of all to the members of my dissertation committee, each of
whom has supported my research and career with great generosity. I began researching
experimental video in seminars taught by Nathan Ensmenger and Ruth Schwartz Cowan,
each of whom has shaped this work deeply through their advice and questions. John
Tresch has been an endlessly creative mentor, suggesting new disciplinary contexts and
historical continuities for my research. And Fred Turner has been an inspiration in
making technological countercultures a subject of historical research.
I also owe particular thanks to the experimental videographers who have supported me
with conversation, advice, and access to archives, especially Stephen Beck, Skip
Blumberg, Fred Collopy, Davidson Gigliotti, Andy Gurian, DeeDee Halleck, Ben Levine,
Richard Milone, Tom Nickel, Ira Schneider, Parry Teasdale, Ann Woodward, and the late
Paul Ryan. I have learned a great deal as well from other scholars, curators, and
documentarians who are persuing this history, including Deirdre Boyle, Beth Capper,
Sarah Chapman, Liz Flyntz, John Giancola, Andrew Ingall, Jon Nealon, Jenny Raskin,
Robin Simpson, and Ed Webb-Ingall, and from scholars of video history more generally,
including Zachery Campbell, Joshua Greenberg, Lucas Hilderbrand, Joshua Kitching,
Dylan Mulvin, and Michael Newman.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science has
been a wonderful place to persue this research. Every member of the faculty has
iii
supported my work, including Mark Adams, Robert Aronowitz, David Barnes, Etienne
Benson, Steven Feierman, Robert Kohler, Harun Küçük, Susan Lindee, Beth Linker,
Jonathan Moreno, Projit Mukharji, Adelheid Voskuhl, and the late Henrika Kuklick. The
community of graduate students has been my most stimulating intellectual home; thanks
for making it so to Eram Alam, Ekaterina Babintseva, Nadia Berenstein, Josh Berson,
Paul Burnett, Elise Carpenter, Jason Chernesky, Tabea Cornel, Meggie Crnic, Deanna
Day, Rosanna Dent, Heather Dill, Kate Dorsch, Erica Dwyer, Rachel Elder, Allegra
Giovine, Matthew Hersch, Eric Hintz, Matthew Hoffarth, Andrew Hogan, Christopher
Jones, Andi Johnson, Prashant Kumar, Whitney Laemmli, Elaine LaFay, Jessica
Martucci, Luke Messac, Marissa Mika, Jonathan Milde, Mary Mitchell, Rebecca Mueller,
Samantha Muka, Jeff Nagle, Tamar Novick, Jason Oakes, Emily Pawley, Joanna Radin,
Lisa Ruth Rand, Sara Ray, David Reinecke, Alexis Rider, Maxwell Rogoski, Corinna
Schlombs, Jason Schwartz, Perrin Selcer, Brit Shields, Jesse Smith, Nellwyn Thomas,
Roger Turner, Nicole Welk-Joerger, Kristoffer Whitney, and Damon Yarnell. Thanks also
to graduate student interlocutors outside my department, especially Neşe Devenot, Amy
Paeth, and Will Schmenner, and to other Penn faculty, particularly Michael Weisberg.
The first two chapters of this dissertation were shaped far more than I expected by the
workshop In-n-Out California: Circulating Things and the Globalization of the West
Coast; thanks to organizers Tiago Saraiva, Cathryn Carson, and Massimo Mazzotti and
participants Eric Avila, Soraya de Chadarevian, Mihir Pandya, Joshua Roebke, and
Robert Schraff. Thanks also to participants in the Working Group on the History of the
Human Sciences at the Center for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine,
iv
particularly Erika Milam and Babak Ashrafi, and to those in the First Annual Conference
on the History of Recent Social Science, particularly Jamie Cohen-Cole, Phillippe
Fontaine, Eric Hounshell, and Mark Solovey. And thanks for their comments on my
papers at conferences to Tom Haigh, Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Lisa Kannenberg, and Bruce
Schulman.
Other scholars who have contributed to this work through conversation and feedback
include Dan Berger, Geoffrey Bowker, Andrew Cornell, John Duda, Christina Dunbar-
Hester, Paul Edwards, Andrew Fearnley, Jacob Gaboury, Alexander Galloway, Bernard
Dionysius Geoghegan, Ben Gross, Lars Heide, Nicholas Knouf, Ronan Le Roux, Jennifer
Light, Patrick McCray, Eden Medina, Thomas Misa, Jan Müggenburg, Lisa Nakamura,
Laine Nooney, Andrew Pickering, Alicia Puglionesi, Jonathan Sterne, Siva
Vaidhyanathan, Kenneth White, and Audra Wolfe. I owe additional thanks to Mara Mills
for her careful reading of a draft of my first two chapters. I've also benefitted from
conversations with neighbors in West Philadelphia about experimental video, media
activism, and the histories of the counterculture and the New Left; thanks in particular to
Austin America, Steve Beuret, Daniel Flaumenhaft, Esteban Kelly, Joshua Marcus,
Alison Miner, Joseph Newland, Hannah Sassaman, and John Wenz.
Librarians, archivists, and other managers of repositories have helped me find and
access a wide variety of rare print, manuscript, and video sources for my research.
Thanks especially to David Azzolina, Lapis David Cohen, Ed Deegen, and William
Keller at the Univerity of Pennsylvania; Henry Lowood and Tom Noakes at Stanford
University; Luisa Haddad at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Sarah Romkey at
v
the University of British Columbia; Joy Weiner at the Smithsonian Institution Archives of
America Art; Claudia Gehrig and Christoph Blase at the Center for Art and Media
Karlsruhe; Tom Colley at Video Data Bank; Carolyn Lazard at Electronic Arts Intermix;
Allison Pekel at WGBH; and the staff of the Pacific Film Archive Library and New York
State Archives. Thanks to Phillip Guddemi for permission to photograph the Gregory
Bateson Papers.
Finally, I owe my greatest gratitude to my family, who have provided intellectual
companionship as well as love and support, and have taught me practices of cultural
politics and communal consciousness through their examples. Thanks to therapist and
gardener Marianne Sachs, systems theorist and experimental videographer Fred Collopy,
musician and composer Andy Collopy, and historian and media critic Deanna Day.
vi
ABSTRACT
THE REVOLUTION WILL BE VIDEOTAPED:
MAKING A TECHNOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LONG 1960s
Peter Sachs Collopy
John Tresch
In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the
art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving
images on magnetic tape, previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for
artistic expression, psychological experimentation, and political revolution. Video
became portable not only materially but also culturally; it could be carried by an
individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation to
the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ offices to art galleries, and from prisons to
state-funded media access centers. Between 1967 and 1973, American videographers
across many of these institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing
not only practical knowledge about the uses and maintenance of video equipment, but
visions of its social significance, psychological effects, and utopian future. For many,
video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness, the communal
consiousness that—influenced by the evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global
village. Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced by the
psychedelic research of the 1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as
vii
a science of both social systems and interactions between humans and machines, by
anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by revolutionary political movements in
the United States and around the world.
viii