I finally had time to sit down with this frankly wonderful video documentary about the history of early home video.
I've been meaning to watch it for a while, and I expected it to be excellent. It's even better than I anticipated.
Alright, first things first, I live in this space. It's where I spend my time. Old technology, video cameras, and DIY media are my passions.
(thread)
You're following me, you know this.
Obligatory link to my DIY media piece: http://ajroach42.com/diy-media/ a while ago.
It's My Thing.
This taught me a bunch about My Thing.
Basically, the early history of "citizen media" as wikipedia calls it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_media) is pretty dang obscure.
Not only do we, culturally, not talk about it existing, we also don't talk about the technology that *allowed it to exist*.
Comcast (through merger with GE/NBC/Universal), Viacom, Disney (who now controls most of Newscorp/Fox’s media), CBS, and Time Warner currently control 90% of American media. This media oligopoly is more dangerous than we often give it credit for. These five companies exert incredible power over our modern political landscape. (They are responsible for things like the DMCA, and the TPP, EME, and today’s Net Neutrality decision, in addition to our ever increasing copyright terms.)
I never went looking for DIY TV from the 70s, because I assumed that such a thing could not exist outside of a few very rare instances. I was super wrong.
(I shouldn't be surprised, We Are Terrible Stewards of History http://ajroach42.com/we-are-terrible-stewards-of-history/ )
I knew about the counter culture music scene. I knew about home taped music, and garage rock, and I've even managed to track down some stuff that could have made it but never did.
(I talk about that journey here: http://ajroach42.com/document-your-art-archive-your-art/ )
But even as I was immersed in independent film, and pouring over independent audio, I never looked at video.
It never occurred to me that Home Video was possible in the 70s, much less that there was a DIYMedia movement (supported by Abbie Hoffman, no less) making TV in 74.
This documentary, which is about the technology that enabled the creation of DIY Media, brought it to my attention in a really unexpected way.
So I guess I need to learn everything about The Video Freex. I need to learn what they did, and where they failed, and I need to learn from what they were doing and let their choices inform how I approach this subject moving forward.
The Video Freex on youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCMEWNu8jH0zDqNhROV1xDPAh
More Videofreex online: https://videofreex.com/
The Video Freex at the Video Data Bank: https://vdb.org/artists/videofreex
Radical Software Archive (also mentioned in the doc): https://radicalsoftware.org/e/
And I want to highlight this video specifically: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MbN__IkWbO4
this is a live recording, multi-camera, of a Mountain concert in 1970 done entirely by the videofreex. The audio clips a bit, occasionally, but it's otherwise Really Good.
It's mind blowing that this exists, and that I'm finding it *now*.
It confirms my long held personal belief that Mountain would have been absolutely Wonderful to See live, instead of just to hear.
So shoutout again to
@[email protected]
for making this video about EIAJ cameras, and for mentioning citizen media, and for getting my mind all aflutter with the possibilities of the future.
Expect a blog post about all this soon, probably.
Expect me to pull out my EIAJ cameras and shoot a weird, bad scifi sitcom too.
It absolutely blows my mind that I'm learning about this *today* when I've been so focused on this space for the last 6 years.
Indexes and content discovery are still the defining problems facing us.
(and in case you were concerned that it was all rock and roll and bread and circuses, here's the #videoFreex interviewing Fred Hampton of the black panthers in 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIbeTS8G5co
Imagine what else is sitting in their vaults.)
From the Video Databank: "During the decade that the Freex were together, this pioneer video group amassed an archive of 1,500+ raw tapes and edits."
1500+ video tapes amassed over 10 years, all before the advent of the Camcorder.
And now, the vast majority of them are locked up behind a $100+ paywall.
The Radical Software website is neat, but kind of hard to navigate. It looks like there are several issues up on Archive.org though: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Radical+Software%22
I'm going to read through these and see if there's anything of value in them.
Well, we have that transnational interplanetary video consciousness now
and it's filled with viral conspiracy theory influencers who, among other things, caused a murderous riot trying to overthrow an election.
The citizen media being nonsense is not an accident, it's a direct *result* of being 'liberated'.
I noticed this problem back in the days of Indymedia in the early 2000s. An unfiltered rumour mill with huge quality problems, made vastly worse by an anti-moderation policy.
I don't know the solution, but I guess everyone being able to be their own filter/editor as well as content provider is part of it. There is plenty of gold in, eg, the Internet Archive and Youtube as long as you don't under any circumstances trust the algorithm to show you anything.
@natecull You aren't wrong, but I think it's an overbroad interpretation of things.
The current state of the world is partially a result of algorithmic promotion of content in the name of engagement.
I dunno the solution, but I know that I should make more stuff.
Yeah. I think having at least the content layer free probably helps and then the rest is building sane and filterable discovery systems on top of that.
Of course, that part's probably non-trivial because Google made it almost their entire business, and somehow managed to reduce that whole space to a duopoly with Microsoft.
I was certainly not expecting that result in 1999; I thought a free(ish) Web would mean a million search engines would bloom. They didn't.
I mean at least I can still blog and be my own search engine and knowledge engineer *, so the old free/open Web isn't entirely gone; it's just subsumed under a layer of commercial hype exploitation that relentlessly focuses on the big discovery engines.
* though I'd still love to have much better protocols for doing so than we have today, and that's something we can fix
capitalism also is an issue here. Many of those making hard right wing (or even just centrist or religious content) have done well in corporate business and have time and money to do this as a hobby and/or are bankrolled by those who agree with their views.
Religious orgs have a head start of "being the media" and owning their resources, I worked as a broadcast engineer and was supporting HD video kit for Mother Angelica and the nuns at EWTN in Alabama as early as 2000 >
this was state of the art equipment that many regions of the BBC and most smaller broadcasters in UK and Europe would struggle to afford; and the biggest configurations of it too (to be fair I was impressed by how all the sisters often did their own tech work as unchaperoned men were banned from the convent where the control room was located, and they were very pleasant people to deal with compared to a lot of my then employers clients..)
This also is true.
One of the things about capitalism and the right wing though is that their ideology is very "freedom" focused: they assume that the normal operations of a decentralised market will just naturally produce a good result, and if we don't like the result, well, natural law has already decided, we're wrong.
This is very much on the same page as an anarchist perspective.
And it's kind of why I don't entirely agree with anarchists.
I still remember how a lot of ravers walked away from a carefully curated rave forum simply because it *had* moderators who tried to stop people from incriminating themselves, drawing too much negative attention to the subculture, or getting too deep into drugs, within a year or two many of those who choose the "free/anarchic" path had either fucked up their lives or were in jail or both...
(That is, I don't agree with the naive forms of anarchism that don't understand that democratic / just / fair / free outcomes require constant moderation and the application of rules and enforcement of those rules. If you go completely hands-off, foom, within seconds your free unfiltered citizen anarchist space becomes immediately dominated by the loudest bullies. There are no doubt many forms of anarchism that have a much more subtle understanding of group dynamics.)
most the anarchists on the Fediverse are the first lot I've seen to properly understand this since the community associated with the anarchist bookshop I often visited in my teenage years (I suspect the comparatively wide age range of people involved might be a factor)
This is of course good, but that means there is 35 years of lost ground to be regained.
@vfrmedia
The anarchist bookshop generation never went away. We just got out-promoted by a new generation using social media datafarms. They seem to consist of an ancap right wing who value (individual) freedom over all other concerns, and a left wing that have dispensed with freedom altogether - along with class analysis - in favour of groupthink. As you might guess, I think both lots are missing the point.
LB (for those who are younger and/or not from USA or Japan - EIAJ was a common standard for video tape recording, on spools of tape, cassettes weren't invented then and connectors for equipment (a bit like SCART/Péritel) from the Electronics Industries Association of Japan.
This equipment did exist in PAL format but wasn't as common in Europe outside of schools and colleges as it cost as much as a small car (like most video equipment until the 1980s)
@grumpy @vfrmedia if it was actually portapack, truck sized and extra expensive equipment is not necessarily true, from what I've seen today.
Fragile definitely is if it's been poorly stored, and there were so many different incompatible open reel video formats that I don't know how you'd verify that it was portapack and not one of the other, harder to deal with formats.
it may have cost as much as a used truck back in the day but was only slightly bigger and heavier than a reel to reel audio tape recorder (and would fit easily in a saloon car/sedan) and by the late 1970s was pretty much an obsolete format (especially as colour TV became popular).
We also had this machine in Europe, Philips LDL 1002, incompatible with the Japanese models..
A studio 1" VTR, however, *would* take up some space in a truck - was reading about some "scanners" (outside broadcast vehicles) used by Thames TV in London that contained such VTRs, they were constantly getting trouble from the Police and Council for being over the weight limit, but paying the fines may have been cheaper than 16mm film processing..
There were also portable 1" VTRs to go with the ENG cameras. Those were heavy and expensive (but still just about portable)..
This is a 1" portable VTR from the late 1970s, PAL version used by the BBC (Betacam only got deployed in mid to late 1980s and carried on in use in various forms into the 21st century until ENG started going tapeless from around mid 2000s onwards). The whole site contains other PAL VTRs including non broadcast ones and some audio equipment..
a further confusion is caused by the term portapak being often being used for any portable video recording setup (broadcast or domestic) that isn't a camcorder, its also mentioned in the context of the later setups with video cassettes such as U-Matic and Betacam.
Hopefully a University should have archivists who know how to correctly deal with the videotape for transfer to a more modern format (as well as any copyright issues..)
Andrew (Television Executive)
Sydney “The Word” Falk 
Nate Cull (.social)
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
Strypey
Michael Wolf