Mobile Media & Cine Apps

The "We're All Videofreex" Symposium will take place November 1, 2012, at the School of Visual Arts SVA Theater, 4pm - 9:30pm.

We're All Videofreex
Changing Media & Social Change From Portapak to Smartphone

When: Thursday, November 1
Where: School of Visual Arts Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street

Since the first portable video camera, the Portapak, hit the market in 1967, video has radically changed the way stories are told and distributed. Its unique ability to capture life as it happens shaped the history of journalism and documentary filmmaking. Today, thanks to the ubiquity of video cameras and broadcasting platforms like YouTube, it is once again re-shaping the way we see the world. 

Co-chairs David A. Ross, Chair of the SVA graduate program in Art Practice and Ron Simon, Curator of Television and Radio at the Paley Center for Media reunite members of the Videofreex for a one-day symposium on the genealogy of portable video through the viewfinder of the pioneering collective. Among the first to use Sony Portapaks, the Freex shot hundreds of hours of real-time video documents that captured the pivotal events and figures of 1970s counterculture. Their archives include interviews with Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton and activist Abbie Hoffman as well as recordings of street demonstrations, rock music, erotica and performance art. They founded the first pirate TV station, Lanesville TV, in the eponymous upstate New York town and invited community members to participate in the creation of content for the world's smallest television station. 

Schedule of Events

4:00pm: Panel I: Videofreex and CBS: Challenging Media
Moderated by Ron Simon
Panelists include Don West, Ray Mungo, Nancy Cain and Parry Teasdale

In 1969 Don West, a ranking CBS Executive charged with finding a program that would capture the real world, engaged the newly-formed Videofreex in the creation of a pilot for the network. The result, "Subject to Change," never hit the airwaves. The Videofreex's ill-fated exchange with CBS—and subsequent founding of Lanesville TV, the first pirate TV station—will be discussed as a case study of contemporaneous changes to media and journalism spurred by the invention of portable video and challenges to mass media from a growing counter-culture.

5:45pm: Screening: Videofreex Pirate TV Show: Re-Writing History
Selections from the Videofreex, 1969 – 1978 edited by Skip Blumberg

6:45pm: Panel II: Real Time: Video After the Videofreex
Moderated by David A. Ross
Panelists include Deirdre Boyle, Elizabeth Coffman, Mark Tribe, Skip Blumberg and Davidson Gigliotti

How has portable video shaped the way we see and are seen?  Panelists will discuss the Videofreex's legacy in the history of video art and their renewed resonance in the context of contemporary social media and social change. 

8:15pm: Reception. Meet the Freex.

Presented by the MFA Art Practice department with support from the MFA Photography, Video & Related Media department, the BFA Fine Arts department and the Visual and Critical Studies department. 

Free and open to the public. Guests are welcome to attend all or any part of the symposium. Please visit www.videofreex.tumblr.com for continuing updates.

Resources:

http://www.videofreex.tumblr.com