Calendars:XPUB/XPUB Calendar/03-11-2025 -Event 1

XPUB1: SI #28 – week 6 in the Aquarium WH.4.115✅

Roles

• Producer: Robin
• Hosts: Daan,Tommi, Luca, Lea, Ema

Monday 3 November

• 10:00 - 11:00: Radio Broadcast Those with assigned roles at Radio WORM Studio, the others at school (aquarium) to listen
• 11:15 - 13:00: Broadcast debrief / discussion
• 13:00 - 14:00: Lunch break
• 14:00 - 15:00: This afternoon we will look at some “open ended media systems” from the 1960s and early 1970s, including House of Dust; Ant Farm and Radical Software
  
  

We will be looking at:
Alison Knowles – House of Dust (1967) – on line version– https://nickm.com/memslam/the_house_of_dust.html
Intro to Alison Knowles' House of Dust (for context): https://fonderiedarling.org/depliant%20house%20of%20dust%20complet%20EN.pdf Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot – House of Dust Journal (2016)
https://monoskop.org/images/1/15/Knowles_Alison_The_House_of_Dust_Research_Journal_2016.pdf
Here is an example of output generated by Alison Knowles’ House of Dust (1967)

"A HOUSE OF WOOD
UNDER WATER
USING NATURAL LIGHT
INHABITED BY FRIENDS

A HOUSE OF LEAVES
IN A METROPOLIS
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHTING
INHABITED BY ALL RACES OF MAN REPRESENTED WEARING PREDOMINANTLY RED CLOTHING

A HOUSE OF ROOTS
IN AN OVERPOPULATED AREA
USING ELECTRICITY
INHABITED BY HORSES AND BIRDS…

A HOUSE OF WOOD
IN A METROPOLIS
USING ELECTRICITY
INHABITED BY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES"

Lejaren Hiller (pictured) and John Cage wrote their harpsichord, tape and computer work HPSCHD in 1967-69

Steve will talk briefly about the links between cybernetics, the Fluxus art movement and (media) ecology pioneers Ant Farm and Radical Software.

• 15:15-17:00 work on writing machines and/or annotations; preparation for the Worm event, A Mazing Machines.

Steve's Notes 3-11-25

Ant Farm's Media Van (c1971)

Steve's notes

Start with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z32JTnRrHc

https://monoskop.org/images/1/15/Knowles_Alison_The_House_of_Dust_Research_Journal_2016.pdf

This afternoon we will look at some “open ended media systems” from the 1960s and early 1970s, including House of Dust; Ant Farm and Radical Software

Show poem

Van Diagram: Fluxus, Antfarm, cybernetics, Radical Software

Performativity

Read highlighted section from HOD journal

Show score

Show HPSCHD score (performative)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv0VTEZalTc&list=PLZcXSTsdNl2pz_BagpXj1oAG_qV4ED5b9

Show Ant Farm Farm pages:

Ant Farm: architecture = interfaces for experience = what Antfarm called “open ended media systems: From By Tung-Hui Hu’s Truckstops on the Information highway: “Ant Farm’s “Truckstop Network” [a “service network for nomads”]was born of the idea that one might reverse the dreary flow of information (and, arguably, propaganda) pumped into peoples’ homes by ABC, NBC, and CBS by taking information into one’s own hands. Excited by the potential of the new Portapak handheld video camera, Ant Farm began to experiment with programming their own video feed. Enter the Media Van: on a yearlong tour through colleges and other points of interest, they shot video of “dancing chickens, an okra farmer, a ground-breaking in Scottsdale, aspiring pop singer Johnny Romeo belting out a ballad in the Yale School of Architecture…”, to quote curator Steve Seid. If commercial television refused to broadcast these images, their souped-up Media Van would bring the network directly to the audience’s door.”
[and, I would argue, producing a “performative” audience, they would be producers of the media output they “consume”.]

RADICAL SOFTWARE - (MEDIA) ECOLOGY
Show Radical Software cover Issue 1
https://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr1/pdf/VOLUME1NR1_0001.pdf
Phylis Gershuny Beryl Korot

https://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/index.html

https://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr1/pdf/VOLUME1NR1_art05.pdf

Beryl Korot and Phylis Gershuny developed Radical Software as a forum for the dissemination of information and discussion about the emerging medium of the video Portapac, as well as a platform for established writers and theorists to discuss the possibilities of a new media landscape emerging in the late 1960s in the US.
The founders and contributors to Radical Software were largely artists working with the new Portapak video system which had been accessible since the end of the 1960s. At the cost of $1495 it was not cheap, but it was in the range of many more users than had previously been the case, and could be easily acquired by collectives. Tapes were easy to distribute, and could be re-used and copied. The second technological revolution came in the form of cable (CATV - Community Access Television). Ralph Lee Smith’s article The Wired Nation (1970) heralded a new media revolution [in which] “every home and office will contain a communications centre of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.”[RS]

Show pages

The artists Frank Gillette and Ira Schnider, in the first issue of Radical Software (1970), recognised that the combination of cable hooked up to portable video equipment would break the ecology of the mass media, radically changing the subject positions of producers and consumers of media.[48] CATV, like CCTV (Closed-circuit television), was a closed circuit system extended to a very great extent allowing for a feedback loop of communication between participants over great distances.[49] The recursive structure of this system could take the form of shared communication and could equally create feedback loops between participants in the open system).

Raindance and Michael Shemberg’s publication Guerrilla Television (with graphics by architect-design collective Antfarm) (1971) would identify mainstream ‘Media America’ as designed to minimise such feedback, allowing only a one-way flow between sender and receiver. This resulted in an accumulation of cultural power into the hands of corporate America. Portable video systems, along with access to cable technology, would help redress this imbalance.

https://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr1/pdf/VOLUME1NR1_0001.pdf

A principle platform in the pages of Radical Software, therefore, was to lobby for the open uses of CATV (the appointment of licences began in 1970). Between 1968 and 1972 cable operators offered support to community based projects, this was exploited by a wave of artist-activist initiatives and underwritten by New York State Council for the Arts (which in 1970 increased its budget for the arts from $2m to $20m), and support from private foundations.

The emphasis and motivation of the community of video artists working for and around Radical Software was on community based media projects and ecological activist projects (the annual Earth Day began in 1970).[50] Paul Ryan had worked for Marshall McLuhan whilst McLuhan was visiting professor at Fordam University (1967-1968), where he gave Ryan and Gillette access to Sony Portapaks and tape he had received from Sony.[Floop]
Wipe cycle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOsDpg364_U

Ryan and Gillette, along with their colleague Roy Skodnick would become key architects in the discourse of video-art-activism as it emerged from the ecological movement. They produced seminal works, texts, and forums for theory and practice (often through the offices of Raindance and Radical Software). Radical software combined pragmatic advice of how to work the technology with an emergent theoretical framework which considered the implications of that technology on future culture and society.[RS]

Ryan was inspired by McLuhan at his most optimistic, who in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) had posited that electronic media could result in “the ultimate harmony of all being”,[53] this, in Radical Software was tempered with a politically critical approach which advocated “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare”[54] which challenged the “top down” monopolies of Media America.

Show Guerrilla TV image (demonstrates portapac)

https://mediaburn.org/digital-exhibitions/guerrilla-television-an-introduction/

If the Portapak as a piece of technology encouraged a radical new form of social-media and media collectivity, it also allowed for the creation of artworks which made the individual's place within a media circuitry visible.
Play Everyman’s Mobius strip (1969)
https://www.eai.org/supporting-documents/694/w.1009.0

Paul Ryan’s Everyman’s Mobius Strip (1969) was a video confessional, a private feedback booth, where one could record oneself going through a series of simple exercises and view the playback privately before the tape was erased

Play wipe cycle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOsDpg364_U

[image]; Frank Gillette and Ira Scheider’s Wipe Cycle (1968), displayed broadcast images, prerecorded tapes and timed tape-delay images of the audience on a grid of nine the monitors;

Contrast this with Nam June Paik. Beatles Electronique (1966-69, 3 min)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Wj8e0gAu8

which used video and TV as plastic media, they did not involve the audience performatively.
And, by contrast here is [Play] Dan Graham’s Time Delay Piece (c. 1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAY01JSfY-8
Frank Gillette’s, Video: Process and Meta-Process (1973)
Link to Gillette’s Process and meta process
https://www.frankgillette.com/process-and-meta-process-1
was an exhibition including nine separate but interactive "information environments". These included Tetragrammaton, including an arrangement of 30 TV monitors. Gillette: “The piece is designed to immerse the audience in the processes of nature and thus surrounds the viewer with a video ecology of oceans, forests, ponds, insect life, birds, clouds and lakes. A single audio track of natural sounds unifies the work.”
[…]
Back to – wipe cycle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOsDpg364_U
As Roy Skodnick was to reflect years later, social movements and media movements were converging.
“[…] with [Gregory] Bateson as principle guide to the complexities of nature and culture. [Frank] Gillette did it, Randy Sherman did it, and apparently [Dan] Graham did it too. Anyone who happened to get hold of a portable video system at the time immediately overloaded on circuits, playback, feedback and fabulous loop de loop.”[Floop]
The Portapak, Skodnick observed, was a “beautiful system” that not only allowed the user to “track social behaviour but also to see how social behaviour is framed […] TV dissolved into a more plastic language.” Skodnick continues, “[T]here was a full-bore media war of information then, and visual information was fully up for grabs. We could put ourselves in it, see ourselves seeing ourselves, and even enter the jouster with the ‘News cycle’ emptying out, as was demonstrated in [Gillette’s] Wipe Cycle.”
Such was the “radical ecology of Radical Software”. Paul Ryan: “Video itself mutated from a counter cultural gesture to an art genre. When video was principally a countercultural gesture, it held the promise of social change unmediated by the art world. Now, whatever promise of social change video holds is mediated by the art world. This is a significant difference. People unfamiliar with the mutation find it difficult to appreciate the unlimited sense of possibility that early video held.”[Floop] During the 1960s and 1970s, European media critique grounded in Marxism tended to emphasize the alienation engendered by the mass media (the distance between the viewer and the shining world of the commodity).[62] In the United States, by contrast, a network of activists, architects, artists, and critics experimented with a different understanding of the medium of TV. Freed from the stranglehold of the networks and accessed by the people, TV could become a technology that could ‘make’ reality. Groups like Ant Farm, Raindance, Radical Software and Videofreex (versed in the cybernetic lore of Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan) tested the possibilities of a medium that would indeed produce a participating network, which would collapse the difference between performer and producer.

CYBERNETICS- ECOLOGY-MEDIA
One could easily write this story in terms of technology- the Porta Pac arrived and this changed people’s relation to media.
BUT…
[Play cybernetic tortoise vid]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLULRlmXkKo
The conditions for a cybernetic understanding of media had been around for some time. Cybernetics, as a system of thought, began in earnest during WWII when scientists tried to anticipate the behavior of missiles and planes (fire power), which required servo-mechanisma, machines or components which incorporated feedback into their opperation. For instance, one needed to anticipate the trajectory of your opponent’s weapons.

https://ia801003.us.archive.org/9/items/cybernetics-or-communication-and-control-in-the-animal-and-the-machine-norbert-wiene-ocr/Cybernetics%20or%20Communication%20and%20Control%20in%20the%20Animal%20and%20the%20Machine%20-%20Norbert%20Wiene_OCR.pdf

Many of the founders of the Macy Conferences had been involved in this research (including Jon Von Neuman and Norbert Wiener). The emphasis on cybernetics as an instrument of war is often given when the story of cybernetics is told. Cybernetics is the science of control and communication, and for some cybernetics is at the heart of our current problems of control and communication.
See Peter Galison’s The Ontology of the Enemy, which charts the history of this cybernetic epistemology.

But at the same time (in the 1930s and 40s) cybernetic ideas were also being developed in the fields of experimental psychology and general psychology. These found a forum in The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-53). (See Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain)
The scientists who build the famous cybernetic devices were actually experimental psychologists and the Macy conferences were convened by scientists across a number of disciplines, including Anthropology (Gregory Bateson and Margret Mead) and psychoanalysts (Lawrence Kubie). Cybernetics - as well as being instrumentalized as a war machine - also proposed a way of understanding cultural and social organization and adaptation.
https://hub.xpub.nl/rushtonhosts/fabulousloopdeloop/index.php?title=Steps_Towards_a_(Media)_Ecology

[explain the homeostat – paras 1,2 and 4]

Cybernetics also offered a way of understanding human beings’ relation to nature (the ecological system could be understood as adaptive and performative, an environment or organism adapted to the information entering its (nervous) system.; and, as the Radical Software group and Antfarm had demonstrated, cybernetics offered a new relation to media and social relations.
Two of the key figures from an earlier generation that introduced cybernetics into art-activism of the 1960s were Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson
The literary critic turned media theorist McLuhan (who had coined the term “the global village”) provided porta pacs to members of the Radical Software group (Paul Ryan and Frank Gillette) to allow them to experiment. McLuhan believed that artists served as the antenna of society and would find uses for the technology which were not purely practical or instrumentalizing.

Gregory Bateson as an educator and writer had been an influential voice to the emerging counterculture for some years.
Bateson had been a prominent voice in debates about art and society throughout the 1950s[2] which shifted emphasis away from the artistic product (the painting or sculpture) and toward the context in which such an object is created. Central to Bateson's cybernetic aesthetics was self-reflexivity (by the artist and the audience of art) as a condition of artistic production. In 1957 Bateson and Marcel Duchamp joined Frank Lloyd Wright and Mayer Shapiro at the American Federation of Arts Conference. It was here that Bateson outlined a (media) ecological understanding of art. Schipiro represented the old-guard, regarding painting's foremost virtue to be its fundamental opposition to mass media, a view which was opposed by Bateson and Duchamp.[3] Duchamp delivered his now famous paper The Creative Act[4] with Bateson presenting a text entitled Creative Imagination which was later published in the anthology of Bateson’s essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
The 1957 conference was noteworthy because it attracted a much larger audience than expected and because there was an insistence from those presenting and the audience to discuss communication systems in relation to the arts. This was in the wake of an increased mass media presence and the discourse on cybernetics becoming widely accessible through (for instance) Norbert Wiener's books, a popularisation of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, and as Bateson's own writing, including Communication and the Social Matrix of Psychiatry (with Jurgen Ruesch). Duchamp's paper sidesteps Schipiro's conservative position and holds the communicative and medial nature of art to be beyond the intention of the artist. The public decodes or “deciphers” the intentions of the artist and in so doing become creators of it.[Floop]
Bateson's paper is more assuredly cybernetic in nature. The Creative Imagination addresses the particular nature of artistic communication, which, as opposed to everyday communication, is a means of meta-level communication, art for Bateson is inherently self-reflexive, it communicates about communication. If Schipiro was interested in art as a form of resistance, or bulwark, to communication, a space immune from the perennial effects of [mass] communication, Bateson sees art as a play between different levels of communication, a play which makes those different levels visible.[Bateson, The Creative Imagination].
This position would be the central tenet of early video art and the media theory discussed in Radical Software and would be a formative influence on artists such as Dan Graham (profoundly influenced by Bateson and Radical Software). For Bateson, aesthetic awareness allows for an understanding of the process by which it is possible to acquire knowledge. This produces the grounds on which a communications system is framed to be made visible, which for a generation of artists in the 1960s and 70s situated art as an inherently self-reflexive, self-critical, and context-critical endeavour. For Bateson communication produces context and further reflection on the production of that context.[Bateson, The Creative Imagination]

[…]

BATESON – MEDIA ECOLOGY
If the cybernetic tortoise provided the model for the construction of the self within the environment, Ashby's homeostat provided the model for the organisation of organic and ecological systems. This is apparent in two texts Gregory Bateson published in the video journal Radical Software at the beginning of the 1970s:

Restructuring the Ecology of a Great City and the ecological polemic Awake!
Go to:
https://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr3/pdf/VOLUME1NR3_art02.pdf

In Ashby's model [of the Homeostat], and Bateson's city, flexibility operates within set parameters, the upper and lower limits of which are strained when tested. The ideal environment, for Bateson, would be one which affords the maximum flexibility, which in turn affords adaptation. Less flexibility will result in less sustainability as the system is tested beyond its limits. Humans routinely find themselves in an ecological pickle when a sub-system seeks to preserve aspects within itself which run contrary to the order of the greater system. In such circumstances, the task for humans is to operate on a deutero [self reflexive] level and control ecological resources, correcting the human pathologies which routinely inflict modern modes of organisation. [23] It is at this point where conscious purpose loops into a broader ecological system.

https://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr5/pdf/VOLUME1NR5_0035.pdf

Gregory Bateson's text Awake (1971) appeared in the fifth issue of Radical Software. It clearly annotates the errors in epistemology that threaten the future of spaceship earth in the second half of the twentieth century.

“[T]he ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form [are] from the Industrial Revolution.

a) It's us against the environment.
b) It's us against other men.
c) It's the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.
d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.
e) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”
f) Economic determinism is common sense.
g) Technology will do it for us.

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievement of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself...”[ Bateson in RS]
So, this is why in 1971 there was nothing unusual about an ecological polemic appearing in a magazine devoted to the uses and maintenance of portable video systems (the Portapak, the next machine on our loop de loop). There was already an abiding connection between the notion of an ecological system regulated by feedback and a technological system regulated by the same principle. And the parallel notions of “ecology” were not simply analogous, they are systematically and structurally bound together.