Radical Software, Volume II, Number
3
Videocity, Summer 1973
Click cover for thumbnails
At the turn of the decade, San Francisco had a powerful
music scene, a vibrant and subversive community of comic
book cartoonists and illustrators, and a laid-back Marin
County lifestyle. Right next door at Berkeley, activists
of the New Left conceived the notion of participatory
democracy and developed the habit of speaking truth
to power. Video was a natural.
Videocity was Phillip Gietzen's name for it all; there
was a lot of video in San Francisco, and very early
on as well. Gietzen, the editor of this issue, was himself
making video in 1970. Video Free America, piloted by
Skip Sweeney and Arthur Ginsberg, and championing the
inventive genius of Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of
television, was active early in 1970 (and is still going
strong). Peter Berg's Homeskin, the Portola Institute
in nearby Palo Alto, Ant Farm from Sausilito, and Gietzen
himself had all contributed a paragraph or two to the
very first issue of Radical Software in 1970.
Even earlier, in 1967, The National Center for Experiments
in Television was founded at KQED, San Francisco's public
TV station. It was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation,
and directed by Brice Howard. Howard was less interested
in programming suitable for broadcast than he was in
true video experimentation. He coined the term 'videospace'
and invited artists from all over to his workshop in
San Francisco.
Gietzen himself was an interesting player. A native
of North Carolina, a licensed architect and a visionary,
he worked for various architectural firms in the Bay
area before opening his own office. With a small circle
of friends, he gathered and assembled this very inclusive
survey of San Francisco video activity in 1973. Sadly,
Phil Gietzen died of a heart attack at his home in the
Mission in 1999.
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