Guerrilla Television in the Digital Archive

The late 1960s saw the birth of a revolutionary new tool of communication: portable half-inch videotape. The Sony portapak CV camera offered creative people around the world the chance to experiment with, and shape the future of, an entirely new medium of expression. Not since the invention of television had American society seen this dramatic a change in the tools of communication.

Until this point, video technology had been used only for live broadcast television, in the form of bulky, immobile studio cameras. This meant that the hardware of the most powerful medium of large-scale social interaction in the United States—television—was available to only a few major broadcasters, operating from centralized studios. At the same time, the first TV generation was coming of age amid the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. Dissatisfied with the one-way information flow of existing broadcast television, many of the first portapak adopters were stimulated by the possibility that portable video could be the first step toward a new kind of democratized television.

This video movement came to be known as "guerrilla television," after the genre-defining book of the same title written by Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation in 1971. Its practitioners claimed that television was structured as an opposition between the people with transmitters, who disseminated information, and the people with receivers, who could only watch. The content that came out of this antiauthoritarian worldview was self-consciously in opposition to existing formats for news and documentary. It included street tapes, home videos, oral histories, ethnographic tapes, process tapes, and nonfiction explorations of political, social, and cultural themes. These diverse experiments share a creative, improvisational spirit and a desire to reclaim the tools of communication for noncommercial expression.

The development of a totally new style of media production surrounding half-inch videotape was due both to the experimental inclinations of the early adopters and to the unique technical features of the new portable equipment; in "From Portapak to Camcorder," Deirdre Boyle outlined in great detail the unique cultural and technical factors that produced the singular style of guerrilla television. In this way, the nonfiction work of the early video period documents both the inherent possibilities of the medium and the innovative choices made by the community of early adopters.

The earliest periods of independent videomaking were marked by a strong sense of experimentation with the new medium of video. However, the spirit of guerrilla television did not die with the end of the 1970s; these video pioneers continued to use their cameras to communicate and create, even as the collective structure eventually gave way to work by individuals. Fertile work in this genre continued throughout the 1980s and 90s and continues to this day.

Limitations on the Contemporaneous Distribution of Half-Inch Video

Although much of the early half-inch video movement was marked by an emphasis on critiquing the pervasive and preexisting structures of broadcast television, little half-inch videotape actually found its way to the airwaves. Technical incompatibilities made the direct broadcast of the half-inch video signal over nationwide airwaves an impossibility; this would require first transferring the inexpensive tape to the much bulkier and more expensive two-inch broadcast standard controlled by the television studios. This meant that only a handful of independent videotapes were broadcast on television during the early 1970s, despite the fact that groundbreaking video work was flourishing around the country.¹

Since the chance of reaching a mass audience through national airwaves was so limited, much early video was seen only on a local basis or was informally distributed through networks of like-minded community groups. For example, early video publications such as Radical Software had lists of video groups around the country and information on how to exchange tapes. These groups organized screenings at media arts centers and galleries, but the audience for these events was minimal compared to the television mass audience. By the time home video players became mainstream, half-inch tapes were already obsolete. As a result, much of the video created in the fertile period surrounding the medium's earliest stages has...