MICROCINEMA SOLIDARITY: Video Revelations from Visual Studies Workshop
dir. various, 1971-1975
United States. 75 min.
In English.

Presented by Tara Merenda Nelson, VSW Curator.

Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is a non-profit artist space, audiovisual archive, and microcinema founded in 1969 in Rochester, NY with a mission to support the makers and interpreters of images. Critically interested in the role that images play in society, VSW became a repository for discarded media that had been deemed unusable or obsolete by larger institutions, while providing unrestricted access to artists interested in creative re-use of archives.

The majority of the tapes in the video collection originate from artists, activists, citizen journalists and public access programming from the greater Central and Western New York regions, as well as significant early experimental artists’ video productions.

VSW has been preserving the most unique—and endangered —videotapes in their collection. This screening will highlight a selection of recently preserved videotapes that highlight the vibrant, and largely unseen, history of video art and activism in New York State.

Selections—pulling from the archive of video collective Portable Channel, which operated between 1971-1986—include homemade experiments with the electronic image (by artists Steina and Woody Vasulkas), a party at the Videofreex place (where everyone is using a Portapack), coverage of the 1971 Attica Uprising, and much more.