When, in 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the FCC, declared television to be a “vast wasteland,” one might have imagined an arid tract of skittering tumbleweed, buildings in ruin, and perhaps a once gallant bronze statue lying face down in the dust-the end of civilization as we know it tersely summarized by the green glow of excited phosphors. Had this metaphor held true, though, television would have long ago lost its sway over the populace. A more apt metaphor might be that television is a “vast cornucopia,” containing suburbs lush unto distraction, social travails transmuted into pleasant genres, and countless items for consumer redemption: the days of our lives with just the right measure of commercial interruption.
Of course, something else lurked just beneath the luxuriant surface of the televised image, concealed within the magnetic pulses, faint within the fields and frames. You could call it, as video engineers would, the control track. Intractable and stodgy, television arose as a system of social discipline, not so much by determining behavior as by discouraging it through its uncanny promotion of passivity. Unresponsive, monolithic, unidirectional: was this an appliance or a parent?
Keen to maintain its primacy as both mesmer and mall, the institution of TV held little discussion with its audience outside the mute numerics of viewership. But where was the popular recourse? TV’s obtuse resistance to sharing ideas, much less power, was aided by an absolute technological advantage: the tools of transmission were cumbersome, finicky, regulated, and costly beyond consideration. Make some of your own? Ha! All this was to change with the introduction of the Sony Portapak, a twenty-five-pound studio-in-a-box. Now access and portability were available at a reasonable buy-in, about $1,500. What wasn’t included in the package were the rigid, shopworn conventions that typified television. Rather, the Portapak represented a kind of zero-degree technology, a starting point for new models, new vocabularies, new interventions.
Ant Farm, Dirty Dishes, Part 1 (1968-1978)
Text and Video taken directly from UBUWeb.
