SWITCHED ON
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Switched On
Jesse Cumming
The videos in this program offer a small cross-section of the diverse explorations of form and content that took place in the early days of consumer-grade video, as seen in Canada and Japan. Divided into two thematic screenings that explore cross-disciplinary experiments as well as the relationship of video to citizen journalism and community media, this online screening is admittedly limited in scope, failing to adequately incorporate several lines of inquiry that were of equal importance. A number of these topics, including environmentalism, feminism(s), counter-culture, body art, and more, will be more deeply examined in future screenings, lectures, and exhibitions.
The majority of the titles in the programs were drawn from VIVO’s collection, an organization which not only serves as a contemporary archivist and distributor for video art, but since its 1971 founding as Video Inn has played an important role of facilitator for video production and exchange on Canada’s west coast[i]. The organization’s print archive and video collection dates from its early days, and several of the first works by Japanese practitioners entered the collection in 1973, when Video Inn hosted the MATRIX International Video Exchange Conference, co-organized by Michael Goldberg and Trish Hardman. In lieu of an admission fee the conveners asked for the donation of a video tape by the participants, which entered into the burgeoning library. In addition to Canadian and American artists, the attendees included Japanese guests like Fujiko Nakaya, Gann Matsushita, and more, whose deposited work has been stewarded by the organization ever since.
The aforementioned Goldberg has been instrumental in facilitating the exposure and awareness of Canadian video in Japan, beginning with a 1971 trip to Tokyo supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, followed by the 1972 exhibition Video Communication: DO-IT-YOURSELF KIT, hosted in the Sony Showroom in Ginza and considered the first exhibition of video art in Japan. In addition to experiments with live video and workshops the exhibition included some of the first works by Japanese practitioners that utilized a form of community and activism-minded video that had seen considerable developments in Canada and the United States since the mid 1960s, but with few comparable explorations in the Japanese context.
While unique and largely discreet artistic ecosystems, there is a rich tradition of mutual exchange between both Canada and Japan that this project intends to explore. Even if not an explicit goal of all artists or collectives on display here, it’s worthwhile to note the goal of video as a means of communication in a number of the projects produced in Canada, Japan, and internationally at the time. In almost all contexts goals of traditional distribution remained farfetched, due both to the noncommercial content of the tapes as well as the technical requirements of broadcast that for many years remained beyond the reach of the small-scale enthusiasts. Nevertheless, in part bolstered by the eight issues of the Video Exchange Directory distributed by Video Inn between 1971 and 1981 there existed an international exchange network for amateur video.
In many of these works, and as can be seen in various curatorial projects organized between the two countries in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, there is an emphasis on purely visual productions unhindered by language and the need for subtitles, something particularly evident in Program One: Intermedia.
INTERMEDIA: THE SPACE BETWEEN
In an interesting bit of transnational kismet “Intermedia” emerged as the name of both a concept and an art project in the late 1960s in Japan and Vancouver, respectively. As the word suggests, strict definitions are challenging as “intermedia” and the work produced under its name tends to blend and blur without adhering to any strict principles, yet scholar Yuriko Furuhata offers a valuable encapsulation of the term in the Japanese context, noting,
“[I]ntermedia came to refer more broadly to various kinds of artistic experiments that aim to facilitate mutual transformations of the multiple media involved in a single work, a process through which generic expectations and aesthetic conventions accompanying a particular medium are overturned or challenged”[ii].
More easily traceable is the Vancouver context of Intermedia, with the term referring to an artists’ association founded in 1967 by Jack Shadbolt and Glenn Lewis. Under the banner of Intermedia and supported by a sizable grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, a constellation of interdisciplinary artists formed and contributed greatly to the artistic advancement of Vancouver in the late 1960s and early 70s, among them Michael Goldberg and future members of Metro Media. Buoyed by the financial support–and the access it permitted to new technologies–the group oversaw festivals, exhibitions, workshops, and experiments in process-based collaboration.
Describing the goals of the project Shadbolt declared, “we plan electronic exploration in sound and light and the whole area of sensory experiences”[iii]. As the quote suggests, rather than traditional arts like painting, drawing, or sculpture, the group’s output was frequently centred on participatory installations and media environments[iv]. The group’s interest in new technology and electronic explorations perhaps obviously extended to video, and chief among their tools was Sony Portapak Video Tape Recorder (VTR), donated by Sony Canada[v], which was used for formal experiments as well as the documentation of the group’s immersive environments.
As might be expected given the newness of video technology, very few practitioners immediately or entirely embraced the role of video artist or any other comparable title. Instead, video typically formed a part of an expanded, interdisciplinary practice, with frequent exchange between video and the work of the practitioners or peers in dance, performance, music, painting, and much more.
Documentation is the most straightforward and unobtrusive means by which video technology reflect the arts taking place alongside it, something seen in the two pieces which bookend the program. In Michael Goldberg’s Visite au Japon a behind-the-scenes tour of NHK studios in Tokyo permits the documentation of a television period drama production (“Jidai geki”), with Goldberg’s camera equally interested in the performers on set as the television showing live playback and an approximation of its future dissemination.
The program ends with a sampler compilation produced by Tokyo’s Video Information Center (VIC). Initially formed in 1972 as a university club at the International Christian University (ICU) and led by Ichiro Tezuka, the group was primarily interested in using video as a means of performance documentation. Video Tape File not only offers a cross-section of the various artistic activities in Tokyo in the early 1970s–including music, dance, experimental theatre, and more–the video is also indicative of a particular formal approach. While the occasional proximity of the camera to the performers and the access granted to the events shows the integration of VIC to the scene, the videos are more often marked by an approach closer to journalism, with the ephemerality of the performances met by VIC’s observational eye, suggesting a commitment to documentation for posterity.
Unlike film, which had to be developed after exposure, one of the key qualities of video technology was (and remains) its instantinaity, and its capacity for instant playback. As such, it’s unsurprising that artists were invested in the display monitor–and its immediate cousin the television set–for a number of experiments. Such is the case in Image of Image Making, a collaborative piece by artists Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Saburo Muraoka, and Keiji Uematsu. One of the rare early video pieces to have been broadcast on television (public broadcaster NHK Kobe in the Kansai Region in particular)[vi], the meta project records the hands of the artists as they use tape and other art supplies to cover a television monitor and reimagine its frame in a comment on spectatorship and mass media.
A more contained and more psychedelic case study in the use of the monitor as not simply an end point for video material but a key tool in its creative use is Video Inn Feedback, an unauthored piece produced by members of the organization in Vancouver. Using rudimentary but dynamic techniques the participants identify the assumed limitations of the form (blurred motion, flattened contrast, and low resolution), as elements rich for exploitation in a piece that turns the raw realism of VTR into an abstract bloom.
In the earliest piece in the program–Computer Movie #2 by Computer Technique Group, a collective of Tokyo students and engineers–intermedia takes the form of migration across formats. Like Image of Image-Making and Video Inn Feedback the camera is turned to a monitor, but instead of a Portapak and video monitor the group uses a 16mm film camera to capture an IBM screen and animate their mix of figurative and abstract engineered images in an early landmark of computer art.
Moving beyond the documentation of works like Video Tape File, the use of the camera as a means to more actively engage with and manipulate the material it captures can be seen in Goldberg’s Tokyo Kid Brothers in Rehearsal. In the excerpt shown here the action of a performer’s pantomime is doubled by way of the camera’s recording capabilities, producing what appears akin to a one-person punch-and-judy show.
In each of the selected works the new capabilities of the technology appear at the fore. Whether connected by shared conceptual grounding, by subject matter, or by physical travel and exchange, through the examination of explorations in Intermedia between Japan and Canada what emerges is a shared sense of exploration and excitement. Building upon theoretical concepts like “Guerilla Television”, put forth by Michael Shamberg in his his 1971 book of the same name (later translated into Japanese by artist Fujiko Nakaya in 1974), several of the works in each program places an emphasis on process as much as–if not more than–product.
VOX POPULI: STREET TAPES
“Are you happy?” asks Marceline Loridan-Ivens in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1960 Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été), produced with support of Quebecois director Michel Brault. Shot on the streets of Paris using newly mobile film cameras and audio equipment, the classic of cinéma vérité shares many of the foundational interests and approaches that would inform practices of alternative video in North America and later Japan in the late 1960s and 1970s: an interest in everyday people, a vested concern for social issues, and a forgiveness around a formal lack of polish.
In terms of mapping influence, however, one may do even better to point first to “Street Tapes” produced with the first wave of Sony Portapak technology in the United States. A direct antecedent to a number of the works in this program is Bum (1965), shot by the Canadian Les Levine in New York City, which primarily consists of interviews with vagrant men living on the fringes of society.
Also valuable in locating the artistic and political tradition of the works in this program is the Challenge for Change/Societé Nouvelle, program first introduced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1967 as a means to redistribute means of production to communities in an exercise of self representation. While the first projects produced under the banner were made using 16mm film before long video technology, with its immediacy of form and its ease of playback, was quickly embraced by project supervisors.
While the NFB established a west coast supervisor for the project (Chris Pinney, who appears in Richard Ward’s Portable Video in Vancouver), and the project bore fruit later in the 1970s, the project is better known for projects undertaken in Montreal, Toronto, and the Maritimes[vii]. Nonetheless, one notes a shared ethos between the early Challenge for Change projects, the films produced by Western Canadian practitioners (including here Diane Lemire’s Transient Men, shot in Edmonton), and several works by contemporary Japanese artists. Chief among them is a concern around homelessness and general social marginalization, something that was explicit in case of CFC/SN and its direct connections to the federal government’s complimentary anti-poverty initiatives, but not any sort of explicit guiding principle in the works on display here.
Despite a stark difference in approach and content between something like Video Inn Feedback in Program One: Intermedia and the pathos-driven video of Transient Men, which centres on discussions with homeless men out of work, the two video styles retain a faith in the video camera to not simply capture reality but to reveal something that had remained unseen. While typically reserved for the most salacious of stories, in the context of the videos in Program Two the term exposé feels appropriate, with the video makers invested in making visible those topics and individuals that society and mainstream media has chosen to ignore. This includes images of destitution, but even more importantly it means giving voice to the voiceless and permitting them to tell their own story.
In a direct connection between the interdisciplinary art practices of Program One, it’s worth noting that as the Intermedia project in Vancouver faded the association’s video equipment was bestowed upon the group that became Metro Media, and permitted their explorations into community produced and community-minded videotapes. Some of the projects, like Skid Row, produced by Terry Kelter of Metro Media, utilize an approach akin to traditional television documentaries of the period: voice-over, interviews, and relatively swift editing. The alternative nature of the piece, however, is in terms of content and its progressive-minded political bias, with its emphasis on the plight of residents living on the margins of society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. As the title for the other Metro Media piece in the program suggests, The Action Committee for Unemployed Youth Demonstration 1970 captures on-the-ground footage of a protest and an impulse by the video users to capture a movement that was rarely seen or accurately represented in popular media.
Of course, at times the early and overall raw nature of the videos on display makes visible the implications and operations of a first-person approach. Such is the case in Graveyard and a Beggar[viii] produced by Mihato Taura under the guidance of video artist Ko Nakajima of the collective Video Earth Tokyo, in which she approaches and attempts to interview a homeless woman living on the street near Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo. Met–at least initially–by extreme resistance and an upbraiding by the woman for what she sees as Taura’s inappropriate and presumptive act, the video not only represents an emergent form of video documentary in Japan, but also the emergence of an ethics of the new media.
The development of the form and approach can be seen in the final video in the program, The Face of Kamagasaki, produced five years after Graveyard by Osaka-based artists Jun Okazaki and Emi Segawa as Video Communication System: TV MOI. Guided by a voice-over courtesy of Canadian Byron Black, who had been teaching video in Osaka at the time, the dynamic project offers a multi-faceted examination of the rarely seen or considered Osakan slum of Kamagasaki. At points utilizing more formal documentary techniques like voice-over, the project also features first-person interviews with the day-labourers and vendors who populate the area. Shot in colour and more refined in its use of editing, the piece is evidence of the advancement of video technology and style from earlier work like The Action Committee for Unemployed Youth Demonstration 1970, even if the issues of unemployment and lack of opportunity remains starkly relevant, serving as a final reminder of the shared social issues between Canada and Japan and the urgency to confront them, camera in hand.
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