Artists and activists outlined their plan to decentralize television so that the medium could be made by as well as for the people, in the pages of Radical Software and in the alternative movement's 1971 manifesto, Guerrilla Television, written by Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation,. These "alternative media guerrillas" were determined to use video to create an alternative to the aesthetically bankrupt and commercially corrupt broadcast medium.

Earlier in the 1960s various versions of "the underground"--alternative political movements, cultural revolutionaries, artists--began to search for new ways of reaching their audience. Cable television and the videocassette seemed to offer an answer. The movement was assisted, perhaps inadvertently, by federal rules mandating local origination programming and public access channels for most cable systems. These channels provided a forum for broadcasting community-driven production. The newly developed videocassette allowed independent media producers to create an informal distribution system in which they could "bicycle" their tapes--carrying them by hand or delivering them by mail--to other outlets throughout the country, or even the world.

These new forms of exhibition and distribution were accompanied by the development of a portable consumer-grade taping system. In 1965 the Sony Corporation decided to launch its first major effort at marketing consumer video equipment in the United States. The first machines were quite cumbersome, but in 1968 Sony introduced the first truly portable video rig--the half-inch, reel to reel CV Porta-Pak. Prior to this, videotape equipment was cumbersome, stationary, complex, and expensive, even though it had been used commercially since 1956. With the new international standard for 1/2" videotape, tapes made with one manufacturer's portable video equipment could be played back on competing manufacturer's equipment. In the hands of media activists these technological innovations were used to realize radical changes in program form and content.

Underground video groups appeared throughout the U.S., but New York City served as the hub of the 1960s underground scene. Prominent early groups included the Videofreex, People's Video Theater, Global Village, and Raindance Corporation. Self-described as "an innovative group concerned with the uses of video," Videofreex was the most production-oriented of the video groups and developed a high expertise with television hardware. In 1973 the Videofreex published a user-friendly guide to use, repair and maintenance of equipment titled the Spaghetti City Video Manual. The People's Video Theater made significant breakthroughs in community media; members used live and taped feedback of embattled community groups to create mini-documentaries that "spoke back to the news." The Global Village was perhaps the most commercial of the original groups, and initiated the first closed-circuit video theater to showcase their work. Raindance Corporation functioned as the counter-culture's research and development arm; Shamberg described it as an "analogue to the Rand Corporation--a think tank that would use videotape instead of print." Raindance chronicled the movement by publishing Radical Software, underground video's chief information source and networking tool.

Top Value Television, one of the earliest ad hoc group of video makers, assembled in 1972 to cover political conventions for cable TV. Equipped with porta-paks, TVTV produced hour-long documentary tapes of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, providing national viewers with an alternative vision of the American political process and the media that cover it. Four More Years (1972), a tape covering the Republican National Convention, was produced with a crew of 19, and featured footage of delegate caucuses, Young Republican rallies, cocktail parties, antiwar demonstrations, and interviews with the press from the convention floor. TVTV's success with its first two documentaries for cable television attracted the interest of public television and the group became the first group commissioned to produce work for national broadcast on public TV. In 1974, shortly after TVTV introduced national audiences to guerrilla TV, the first all-color portable video documentary was produced by the Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) and aired on PBS.

In 1981, the Paper Tiger Television Collective formed--a changing group of people that came together to produce cable programming for the public access channel in New York City. Drawing upon the traditions of radical video, Paper Tiger Television invented its own home-grown studio aesthetic using rather modest resources to make revolutionary television. Many of Paper Tiger's half-hour programs are live studio "events," faintly reminiscent of 1960s video "happenings." The show's hosts are articulate critics of mainstream American media who examine the corporate ownership, hidden agendas, and information biases of the communications industry via the media in all of their forms.

Paper Tiger Television
Photo courtesy of Paper Tiger