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

ArtForum, May, 2002 by David Joselit

In the first volume, printed as a large-format tabloid, funky illustrations recalling underground comics rub shoulders with technical charts, and dynamic compositions of text boxes are linked by vectors, transforming pages into flowcharts recalling early computer code. The journal's freewheeling editorial policy is epitomized by the section titled "Feedback" at the end of each issue of the first volume, where blurbs from various video groups or individuals are crudely pasted together on a skewed grid. Equally unconventional were the juxtapositions of feature articles. In the first number, for instance, texts ranged from Thea Sklover's highly technical account of a cable operators' conference in Chicago to Marco Vassi's "Zen Tubes," which opens with the declaration:

To write about... to write... about... Tape is explaining a trip to someone who's never dropped acid. You have to say, it's like this.

This wild veering from the intricacies of CATV to Acid Video captures the flavor of Radical Software. But underwriting such exuberant heterogeneity is a consistent and reasoned advocacy of feedback as a means of redressing media inequities. As a model of activism, feedback is a particularly nuanced approach, connoting both meaningful communication and the willful jamming of communication through feedback noise. On the most basic level, video feedback is established in closed-circuit installations where viewers are recorded live and their images played back in real time on matrices of monitors. Gillette and Schneider explored this form in Wipe Cycle, a work included in the pioneering video exhibition "TV as a Creative Medium," at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1969. Wipe Cycle consisted of a bank of nine monitors and a closed-circuit video camera that recorded live images of viewers as they approached. These fragments of footage were played on eight-and sixteen-second delays, jumping from monitor to mo nitor and interspersed with periods of live-broadcast TV and prerecorded segments. Periodically the screens would be wiped clean. Gillette's description of the work in the exhibition brochure explicitly links it to an ethics of televisual communication: "The intent of this [image] overloading... is to escape the automatic 'information' experience of commercial television without totally divesting it of the usual content." In other words, Wipe Cycle was meant to break apart commercial television's accumulation of "information" by giving the spectator a role in generating content. If the networks established a catastrophic centralization of video production, closed-circuit video installation compensated for this disparity symbolically by introducing the viewer into the image.

What distinguished the editorial policy of Radical Software from other accounts of video in the '70s-- whose positions have been progressively balkanized by art and media historians alike--was its demonstration that works of video art like Wipe Cycle are structurally identical to video activism as practiced by Raindance and other community video collectives like Videofreex or Global Village. In Radical Software art and activism were shown to be formally equivalent on account of their shared practice of feedback. The symmetrical relationship between closed-circuit installations and cable TV that underlies this homology was addressed in a 1969 interview with Gillette and Schneider reprinted in the first issue of the magazine: