Playback: Broadcast Experiments 1970 and Now

In the 1970s, broadcast television, cable, and even satellite transmissions were considered viable outlets for visual artists to experiment, tamper, and often times, spectacularly fail with, all the while engaging in a generative model of art production. This talk focuses on the institutionalization of media art with a particular emphasis on the Long Beach Museum of Art’s prescient move to set up a media art center and commission artists to create a broadcast channel to distribute their works in the early 1970s. The museum was one of the first to consider video as a collecting category, managed a thriving residency program, operated a public editing facility, and launched the “museum channel.” Gloria Sutton is a contemporary art historian and a curator. She received the Emily Hall Tremaine Award as a co-curator of How Many Billboards in 2008. 

Speaker: Gloria Sutton, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University, Boston.