Video Journey Through Utopia

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail.

Oscar Wilde

The founder of the Raindance video collective, artist Frank Gillette, in a public statement in 1991, distinguished between the Fluxus current and the utopian current in video history. The Fluxus current, which surfaced in the careers of a host of individual video artists led by Nam June Paik, overwhelmed and diluted the utopian current that lived and died with the video collectives of the late 1960s and early 1970s. [1] The anomalous case in the Fluxus tradition is Joseph Beuys who considered his work social sculpture. However, as with the video collectives, Beuys failed to change society in any radical way.

One "sociological" way of describing this "victory" of the European Fluxus current over the indigenous American utopian current is to say that the institutionalization of video as art came at a price. Anonymous collectives (the Videofreex once refused to give out any of their names to an interviewer, except that of their house cat) gave way to 'name" artists. For their work to become validated as "art," the collectives' desire to radically change society with video, triggered by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, had to mutate into the acceptance of celebrity status for select individuals willing and able to structure their egos in compliance with the star system for solo artists.

Currently, there is renewed interest in utopia. Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence (1997) echoes the early ideas of Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan by linking utopia with electronic technology. The subtitle of Levy's book is "Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace." He sees mankind as emerging out of a commodity space into a knowledge space. Here we have access to diverse knowledge and identity becomes nomadic. New ways of living in time and space emerge from collective becomings. [2] Collective intelligence is a "utopia of the unstable and the multiple." [3]

Levy sees utopias not as unrealizable dreams for fools and fascists, but as seeds that can engender the actualization of highly differentiated pluralistic societies. A utopian "seed" emerged from my own experiences: I started a utopian video community that was active between 1973 and 1976, after having participated in the Raindance video collective from 1969 to 1971. [4] I propose that the utopian current in video history can be reinterpreted as a fecund virtuality. Acceptance of my suggestion does not necessarily require a willing suspension of the post-'60s cynicism that now uses the term "utopia" in a disparaging way. What it does require is an appreciation of the distinction, used by Levy, between the possible and the virtual. This distinction, originally put forth by philosopher Henri Bergson, is key to what I am articulating. [5]

For Bergson the possible is linked to the real; the virtual is linked to the actual. The link between the possible and the real is one of a model and its copy. The concept is complete in the model before being executed in the copy. According to this way of thinking, the fully-formed human being is already "modeled" in the fertilized egg. Embryological development is just a rendering in reality of a correct copy of the model. Monsters are failed copies. By contrast, the link between the virtual and the actual is a link of differentiation. The fertilized egg encodes a virtuality that generates a range of self-differentiating organs that actualize into a self-organized fully-formed human. The virtual does not make copies of itself but instead creates differences that in turn cause change in the actual world. Failure of the virtual is a failure to create differences. Artists understand this distinction. Serious artists with shared interests, such as the French Impressionists, do not copy each other but rather fo rm a virtual community, a "mutual differentiation society," that manages to actualize the plurality of work. Before applying this distinction to the utopian current in video history, let me elaborate on my own experience.

In the fall of 1971,I moved from New York City north to the beautiful Shawangunk Mountains near New Paltz. At the time New Paltz was a thriving countercultural center populated by art students and former art students from the State University of New York at New Paltz, well-known for its arts programs. The local movie theater played King of Hearts (1966, by Philippe de Broca) every month to a full house of locals who believed Shakespeare's assertion that "the poet, the lunatic, and the lover are of imagination all compacted." This wonderful movie about the eccentric inmates of a mental institution let loose in the midst of the follies of World War I provided New Paltz with a self-validating countercultural self image during the Vietnam War.

Through the organization Space Inc., I received a $20,000 regrant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to figure out how to produce video interpretations of ecological systems. In-1972, NYSCA provided another regrant of $5000 to support my efforts. By 1973, I had hit an impasse with my work and did not re-apply for funds. During a trip to the southwest that year, a conceptualization for a utopian community of ecological videomakers came to me in a burst and I created a blueprint in three days. [6]

The idea was to configure Earthscore, an intentional community of 36 videomakers. Each videomaker was to be part of three different triads. The first triad's function was to care for its members, the second to take care of the business of supporting a community and the third to produce video interpretations of ecological systems. My intuition was that if self-correcting teams of three people could be stabilized, then am leaderless, thriving community could be established as well. Of course, my own attempt to start a leaderless community involved an inherent contradiction that I became keenly aware of over the next few years.

In the early 1970s, the idea of utopian communities living within ecological limits was in currency. In 1975, shortly after I codified Earthscore, Ernest Callenbach's widely-read book Ecotopia, about a breakaway state in the Pacific Northwest, appeared. In conceptualizing Earthscore, however, I did not rely primarily on readings from the utopian tradition such as Marie Louise Berneri's Journey Through Utopia (1950). My key text was the rule of Saint Benedict, the founder of western monasticism. From the ages of 17 to 22 I lived in a contemplative preaching order of the Roman Catholic Church. Although I left the order, I appreciated its formal stability and long-term traditions. I wanted to start a non-celibate, aesthetic order of artists capable of interpreting ecological systems with video that would be as sturdy and enduring as the ascetic order of the monastic tradition I had experienced.

In an attempt to recruit members for the community, I passed out over 100 copies of the Earthscore utopian document to people I knew in New Paltz and found two takers: videographer Steven Kolpan and artist Robert Schuler. We started working together in 1973, setting up a non-profit organization and drafting an intricate set of triadic bylaws. We submitted the utopian document to NYSCA, which supported the Earthscore Foundation with a total of $60000 from 1974 through 1976. During that time we produced shelves of videotape interpretations of natural and built environments, some of them merely exploratory, some quite successful and beautiful. We recorded land forms such as corn fields, mountain ranges, ponds, streams, waterfalls, domestic and wild animals and a range of technologies used by humans including cars, trains and planes as well as 45 hours of triadic tape (tape of people interacting in three-person combinations), most of which was produced in collaboration with the Dancing Theatre company in New Paltz, founded and directed by tap dancer Brenda Bufalino. The premise of the utopian document was that self-balancing groups of three would be the basic unit in this video community. There would be no hierarchy. However, since normal interactive patterns usually involve hierarchy and two-against-one dynamics, we first had to invent triadic behavior.

A showing of some of this work took place at The Kitchen Performance Center in New York City in the spring of 1976. But after that, Earthscore Foundation went dormant. Although we also invented a basic repertoire of collaborative behavior for three people we had drained ourselves emotionally, had not developed a triadic decision-making process and could not figure out how to address issues of gender in regard to triadic behavior. Moreover, NYSCA decided to terminate our funding in 1977.

If Earthscore is thought of strictly as an attempt to create a utopia, a possibility that went unrealized, then it is a failure. The post-'60s cynicism is justified. But I ask that Earthscore be thought of as a virtuality that has been actualized in many divergent ways, none of which are simply executions in practice of the original utopian document. In fact, only after the effort to realize the possibility of Earthscore as a utopian community was abandoned did its virtual power start manifesting itself. For myself this meant that rather than being trapped in an isolating effort to realize the utopian concept of a video community, I was released into the actuality of the world, and the actual, as poet Wallace Stevens says, is a "deft beneficence."

Since 1976, Earthscore has mutated from a utopian plan into a notational system based on three comprehensive categories of knowledge organized for collaborative learning by a relational circuit. The notation also includes a formal way of understanding events and a method of interpreting anything for anybody.

The power of Earthscore as a virtuality, as a notational system for generating differences, is evident when you consider the non-utopian actualities that have been generated using the Earthscore Notational System. Here are some of these projects actualized by myself and others using components of the Earthscore Notational System. As video was originally deployed for both art and social change, so the Earthscore Notational System has been deployed in both the realm of art and the realm of social change, including the following:

* The conceptualization of a bioregional magazine I founded and edited in northern New Jersey called Talking Wood that included a Watershed Watch Program. Talking Wood was published from 1979 to 1980 and successfully used a three-person procedure for making editorial decisions. Before folding, the magazine managed to identify and publicize the dumping of toxic waste by the Ford Motor Company in an abandoned mine shaft near a reservoir as well as secret test drilling for uranium by Shell and other oil companies. The waste site was put on the Superfund list of the country's most contaminated sites and a law banning uranium mining in New Jersey was enacted in 1981.

* The implementation of four intensive two-week programs during 1994 and 1995 to retrain workers displaced from the defense industry in Connecticut. The program used a three-person team learning strategy to teach the workers to use "new workplace skills" in their job search. Fifty out of the 60 workers trained found work. [7]

* The conceptualization of an art of relationships called "Threeing" that works for three people the way t'ai chi or yoga works for an individual. This art of relationships has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Whitney Museum in New York City.

* An unimplemented design for an environmental television channel that has been presented at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the United Nations and MoMA in New York City.

Other uses of the notational system include the design and implementation of an educational program on sustainability for New York City public school teachers, the design and implementation of an architectural curriculum at Parsons School of Design and the production of numerous videotapes. The newly created National Sustainable Design Education Initiative started by The Earth Group and Global Possibilities will help students work collaboratively on sustainable design. [8] This initiative is using an adaptation of the Earthscore Notation as a methodology for d developing curricula for sustainability.

These iterations demonstrate that Earthscore as a notational system can cultivate differences that make differences. The notational system itself is a kind of virtual code for organizing differences that can help actualize a rich and healthy diversity in society. I consider this notational system more valuable than any videotape I have produced. I doubt, however, if the notational system itself could have been generated without a video journey through utopia.

PAUL RYAN is the author of Video Mind, Earth Mind (1993) and a member of the Core Faculty of Graduate Media Studies at The New School for Social Research. His video art has been shown in Japan, Europe and the United States and is currently included in the exhibition "The American Century" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

NOTES

(1.) Frank Gillette, in a public statement at the anniversary celebration of the Raindance Video Collective at The Kitchen in New York City in 1991.

(2.) Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Plenum Trade, 1997), p. 175

(3.) Ibid., p. 202.

(4.) See Paul Ryan, "A Geneology of Video," in Leonardo Vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 39-44. In this article I traced the tension between using video as a tool for social change and using it as an art form.

(5.) Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), pp. 91-106 and Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 91-113.

(6.) Paul Ryan, Cybernetics of the Sacred (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1974). Also see Paul Ryan, Video Mind, Earth Mind (New York: Peter Lang Press, 1993). This includes both the Earthscore as Utopian Community document and the Earthscore Notational System document as well as "A Genealogy of Video."

(7.) See "Peirce and Work," in William Pencak and Ralph J. Lindgren, eds., New Approaches to Semiotics and the Human Sciences (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 1998).

(8.) Two conferences on the subject were held at the Smithsonian Institute in October 1998 and at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and again at the Smithsonian in June 1999.

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