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

ArtForum, May, 2002 by David Joselit

Members of the Raindance Corporation dwelled on the therapeutic potential of video rather than its pathological dimension. As they saw it, one aspect of the ecological crisis occasioned by the centralization of network television was a psychic blockage--a kind of media tumor--in which information flowed in one direction only, from TV to viewer, leaving the spectator little if any means of responding in kind. In Shamberg's Guerrilla Television, the situation was assessed in the following terms:

In Media-America, our information structures are so designed as to minimize feedback.... This makes for incredible cultural tension because on the one hand people cannot ignore media evolution, while on the other they require feedback for psychological balance. The result was the 1960s. Every conceivable special interest group, which was informationally disenfranchised, indulged in a sort of "mass media therapy" where they created events to get coverage, and then rushed home to see the verification of their experience on TV.

Here, Shamberg identifies the psyche of the viewer as a site for media activism. The "mass media therapy" he recommends was enthusiastically embraced by several figures associated with Radical Software. Paul Ryan, for instance, advocated a process of "infolding" by which one could see and incorporate one's behavior objectively by watching it on videotape. In "Cable Television: The Raw and the Overcooked," an essay published in the first issue of Radical Software, Ryan explained his technique:

Working with encounter group leader Dennis Walsh, I videotaped while a girl stood in the middle of the group with her eyes closed and described how she thought people were reacting to her then and there. The contrast between her negative description and the positive responses to her that the playback revealed were both illuminating and encouraging for her. This was information infold. What she and the group put out was taken by the tape and given back to them.

While a videotaped encounter group is far from a work of art, Ryan's notion of infolding is useful as an alternative model of the relation between video and narcissism. Here the videotape releases a subject from the closed-circuit of herself rather than causing her to collapse into it. Ryan's notion of infolding helps to explain Vassi's analogy between video and LSD: Like Ryan's therapeutic videotape, an acid trip both dissolves the boundaries of the self and offers it back as an object. Many of the writers who published in Radical Software saw video's capacity to mirror and therefore objectify experience as a prelude to political action. Community video was praised as an organizing tool in Dorothy Henaut and Bonnie Kline's "In the Hands of Citizens: A Video Report," in the first issue. Recounting the collaboration between the video group Challenge for Change and the Comite des Citoyens de Saint-Jacques in downtown Montreal, the authors declared, "Having seen people like themselves on the familiar TV screen, discussing their problems with utter frankness, removed much of the reticence and timidity people have in a group of strangers. They simply said, 'I guess this is the place where I can talk freely,' and talked at length of problems shared and possible collective solutions."