Boddy, William. “Alternative Television in the United States”

In terms of alternative television in the United States, a sharpening debate has emerged around notions of alternative structures and modes of production for television, a debate which might usefully reflect on the history of independent television work in the U.S. The use of video in gallery installations, saw the introduction of half-inch portable video recording equipment in the U.S. which defined subsequent independent video production. This resulted in video makers from within and outside the art world created a growing production community which formed a bond which was greater than that between the contemporary Hollywood cinema and independent filmmakers in the U.S. Broadcast television rejected independent work on aesthetic, political and even technological grounds, creating a surprisingly close-knit community which took up the tasks not only of production, but also of distribution, exhibition, critical exegesis and publicity of the new work. As a result of this, an early video art show at a 57th Street gallery in New York City in 1969, led directly to the formation of Raindance Corporation. Raindance was a self- described "countercultural think-tank" that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication. The activities and discourses of the proclaimed 'video guerrillas' were initially visionary and at times grandiose, promoting storefront theatres, travelling video groups and schemes for electronic democracy via interactive cable, although some of the groups later became producers of video-verite documentaries for public television and of dramatic pilots for the commercial networks. A pronounced strain of technological euphoria and utopianism animated the early guerrilla television movement, and its rhetoric was at times more ecological than political. Most people think of something 'radical' as being political, but we they were not. At times the technological determinism of Guerrilla Television obliterates history and politics altogether in an inversion of social causality: 'Broadcast television is structurally unsound. Through this presentation, I plan to elaborate on the role of guerilla television, interactive television and cable and how they have become more influential over the years.