We’re All Videofreex: Changing Media & Social Change from Portapak to Smartphone

David A. Ross, chair, MFA Art Practice Department at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), and Ron Simon, curator of television and video at the Paley Center for Media, reunite members of the pioneering video collective Videofreex for a symposium. Between 1969 and 1978 the group produced hundreds of hours of real-time video documents shot with newly-invented portable cameras and founded Lanesville TV, the first pirate TV station. Simon leads a discussion about Subject to Change, the Videofreex production commissioned—and subsequently dropped—by CBS in the context of the challenges to traditional journalism spurred by the introduction of video and the impact of the emerging counterculture. Following a screening of the group’s work and Q&A, Ross moderates a panel–including Rhizome founder Mark Tribe–on the Videofreex’s contribution to the history of video art and their renewed significance at a moment in which unprecedented proliferation of personal recording devices and decentralized broadcasting platforms fuel uprisings worldwide.

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