Tale of the tape: David Joselit on Radical Software - periodical of media criticism

ArtForum, May, 2002 by David Joselit

THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO Ralph Lee Smith published an influential appeal concerning the future of cable access television (CATV) in the pages of The Nation. "The Wired Nation" heralded nothing short of a revolution:

As cable systems are installed in major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, the stage is being set for a communications revolution--a revolution that some experts call "The Wired Nation." In addition to the telephone and to the radio and television programs now available, there can come into homes and into business places audio, video and facsimile transmissions that will provide newspapers, mail service, banking and shipping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centers, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify. In short, every home and office will contain a communications center of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.

Sound familiar? Substitute the word Internet for cable, and this passage could pass for a blurb from Wired magazine circa 1993 (though the difference between the simple adjective wired, which may modify any place--or no place--and Smith's phrase wired nation indicates a growing consciousness and celebration of globalization in the intervening years). It is well known that new media are habitually modeled on obsolescent networks of the recent past, but the amnesia surrounding the once great hopes for cable TV as a democratic force at the dawn of the '70s is breathtaking. In books like Lev Manovich's influential The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), for instance, the rhetoric of the Internet is analyzed through an extended comparison with cinema, while cable television, a far more pertinent and historically correct precursor, is all but ignored. There are good reasons for this: Despite its status as big business, cinema retains vestiges of revolutionary heroism, whereas what counts for revolution in cabl e TV is the introduction of the History Channel into the menu. What's more, the thoroughgoing commercialization of cable--its rapid devolution from an open form of communication to a highly standardized array of entertainment products--is perhaps too painful a reminder for Internet boosters that commerce and radical democracy are rarely if ever compatible.

Three decades ago things were different. In order to garner the support of the Federal Communications Commission in the face of network opposition, cable operators professed a commitment to community programming in the years between 1966 and 1972 (the FCC had frozen cable expansion during this period in the one hundred largest television markets). Community access channels seemed an effective means of legitimizing cable and probably helped persuade the FCC to lift its ban. This openness to unconventional television was seized upon by a raucous community of video artists and activists equipped with a new technology--the Porta-Pak--and underwritten by funding from the New York State Council on the Arts as well as private foundations. Radical Software, a publication launched in 1970, served as a forum for this emerging movement. Its great virtue--and charm--was its wildly eclectic mix of discourses, including practical production advice, New Age prognostication, and applied cybernetics. Radical Software was publ ished from 1970 to 1974 by the Raindance Corporation, a video collective conceived by the artist Frank Gillette as a countercultural response to the RAND Corporation, which was conducting studies of the emerging cable industry in the early '70s. Raindance's activities proceeded on two tracks--videomaking and publishing--but all of its work came out of a fascination with media ecology. Influenced by the thought of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the group asserted that social and psychic life are deeply intertwined with information technologies. Consequently, the artificial and oppressive structure of network TV, in which the capacity to produce programming is centralized like a massive accumulation of capital, constituted a major ecological disaster for the United States. Raindance believed that television could be democratized through the deployment of video--on the street, on cable television, and in exhibition venues--and that this informational liberation could le ad to political democratization. To this purpose, its affiliates executed a number of informal videotapes allowing ordinary people on the street to address the camera. The group proposed and almost succeeded in funding a Center of Decentralized Television that would have been housed at the Jewish Museum, where the exhibition "Software," a survey of artists engaged with information technologies, took place in 1970. But the lasting legacy of Raindance was Radical Software.

Radical Software was founded, edited, and in its early issues primarily shaped by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny (now Phyllis Segura) with the assistance of several others, including Ira Schneider and Michael Shamberg, author of the important Raindance publication Guerrilla Television (1971).