Celebrating a Half Century of Electronic Art and Media History

Professor Susan Murray delivers the opening keynote at Open Circuits Revisited.

Open Circuits Revisited, sponsored by NYU Media, Culture, and Communication, Electronic Arts Intermix, and the NYU Center for Disability Studies, explored accessibility and video art on the 50 year anniversary of the groundbreaking Open Circuits conference.

In 1974, Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television gathered dozens of prominent artists, curators, academics, writers and television producers to discuss conflicting perspectives on the medium of artists’ video and its cultural impacts. Held at MoMA and sponsored by the Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), the event was considered a watershed moment in media theory and electronic arts.

50 years later, Open Circuits Revisited, a collaborative multi-day event, shared the same spirit and ethos of its predecessor. Sponsored by EAI, a nonprofit resource that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of media art, it was produced in conjunction with the NYU Department of Media, Culture, Communication and the NYU Center for Disability Studies.

The event also served as a dual 50th anniversary celebration for MCC and EAI, both founded in 1971 and now powerhouses in media studies.

Reprising the format of the original Open Circuits conference, Revisited, held October 17-19 at various locations throughout New York City, included several closed panels, a book launch as well as public events. The themes of discussion throughout were preservation, distribution and accessibility, specifically looking at how video art does, and does not, live up to these ideals.

Audience members face Whit Pow and Alexander Galloway as both scholars wait to begin their talks.

At Error, Noise & Randomness, MCC professors Whit Pow and Alexander Galloway examined artwork that embraced momentary technological malfunctions.

front page of the original open circuits conference program

The original conference proceedings were published in 1977 as The New Television: A Public/Private Art.

The closed-panel discussion on accessibility was a fitting start to the conference. Mara Mills, associate professor for MCC who co-founded and helms the Center for Disability Studies, guided a conversation with a diverse cohort of artists, distributors, and archivists of electronic art. Participants included notable disability artists like Carolyn Lazard, Constantina Zavitsanos, Darrin Martin, Jordan Lord, and Andy Slater.

Mills, whose own work on disability and media spans disciplines, says that the Center began working with EAI after artist and EAI collaborator Carolyn Lazard produced the important pamphlet Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice in 2019.

Accessibility was an apt cornerstone of the new conference, as video art, Mills says, plays a key role in disability studies. She says,

“Electronic art might seem like an unexpected site for a disability studies intervention. After all, media art is notoriously complex to preserve, and sometimes unorthodox to exhibit, much less to make accessible to broad audiences. At the same time, strategies for media access—like captions for deaf viewers—are now widely incorporated into media art (and social media) as text on screen for innumerable ends. And digital accessibility tools—captioning, alt text, embedded video description—are often primary media of composition in contemporary disability arts."

The first public event included keynotes by media historians Susan Murray (NYU MCC), historian of color television, closed circuit television systems and more, and Fred Turner (Stanford) prolific historian of new media technologies and Silicon Valley. Each scholar referenced the historic nature of the original conference and placed it as a key player within the past 50 years of media studies history. They touched on topics that concerned the original conference, such as the uniquely optimistic view of video at the time, and interrogated the work of early media scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.

Their talks distinguished between the belief in the utopian potential of video art and personal television and/or documentary of the 1960s and early 1970s and the way that video, and video art, have assumed more complicated roles today – for example, the impact of surveillance and closed circuit television on our everyday lives.

placeholder image — A sample glitch produced by Whit Pow using the Bally Astrocade.

The book The New Television: Video After Television, edited by Rachel Churner, Rebecca Cleman, Tyler Maxin was feted with a public book launch the following day. It examines the history of video art and the enduring relevance of the original Open Circuits conference.

Sessions looking specifically at preservation and distribution of electronic art led up to an event with Whit Pow and Alexander Galloway, both MCC professors whose work engages art, games, and programming, called “Error, Noise & Randomness” at the EAI location on Canal Street.

Galloway, who has work archived at EAI Intermix, and Pow, who showed their own art, discussed how the “glitch,” a momentary technological malfunction, is used by artists to reveal the chaos latent in technologies’ structures. They began by screening Digital TV Dinner, video glitch art from 1979 created by Raul Zaritsky, Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth using the Bally Astrocade console game to generate unusual patterns. Pow, who has written about Fenton's work for Feminist Media Histories, then screened their 2019 response piece Digital TV Breakfast, before turning attention to the work of several artists in the EAI's archive.