Peter Sachs Collopy

“The Revolution Will Be Videotaped” is a network history of the experimental videographers who collaborated across the fields of art, psychiatry, and politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also a history of the resources videographers drew on, both material and intellectual, including the technology of electromagnetic recording, the practice of mediated self-observation, the metaphysics of collective consciousness, and the discourse of ethereality.

“Video and the Origins of Electronic Photography“: In our historical imagination, the recent digital revolution in photography can obscure an earlier revolution which was less total but more profound. This was the analogue revolution, the translation of images into continuously varying electrical signals and magnetic fields. Electronic analogue photography manifested as television and video, as well as technologies for recording still images like the Ampex Videofile of the 1960s and the Sony Mavica of the 1980s. Key components of these new technologies systems, including techniques for high-fidelity recording and vacuum tubes for video cameras, were first developed for military ends. Analogue electronics had this and much else in common with digital technologies, including the physical media on which they recorded. The deep transformation of photography in the last century, then, was not digitization but the replacement of photochemistry with electromagnetic media, analogue and digital alike.