Circles of Circuitry in the Lower East Side
Circles of Circuitry in the Lower East Side
A History through the Grain of the Internet
Words: Blair Johnson
Illustrations: Luke Williams
May 27, 2025
Walking up to the CultureHub studio, on the third floor of La MaMa’s Great Jones Street building, you can feel the ever-present history of experimental theater, one of CultureHub’s artistic lineages. It lives in the bones of that building, in the particular kind of magic that buildings have for holding on to the past.
In May, for Lower East Side History Month, I wanted to map our other lineage, the one that I kept coincidentally encountering: the history of art and technology in the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and 80s. This history is full of “used to be” places, my searches pulling up a grid of black and white thumbnails, showing now expensive buildings.
Reaching for any history through the internet, you sense voids everywhere, leading off into a snarl of questions: Where was this? Who was there? Who filmed it? Who photographed it? On what? Where was it stored, and how? And who put it on the internet? As I click between photographs and videos, nothing snaps back to its context, back to where, or who, it came from. Every file emerges from an unknown elsewhere.
It’s not that there’s nothing to find. I watch a video of Trisha Brown’s Opal Loop / Cloud Installation, choreographed against a controlled fog, designed with engineers at Bell Labs. [1] I scroll through black and white photographs from FOOD, the restaurant founded by artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard and Carol Goodden. [2] I find a scan of Robert Rauschenberg’s handwritten edits to the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) founding documents, on which he crosses out involvement for cooperation, adding labor to the organization’s mission. [3]
The story I’m looking for is where these videos, photographs, stories, and documents came from, who saved them, and where. Because much of the work of this period explored its own situatedness, ways to foreground being there, the photographs, videos, or texts that we have leftover are a strange interruption of that being thereness. Because of CultureHub’s interest in liveness, I start to look especially at early broadcasting, which further complicates what I’m even trying to find. What am I looking at, when I’m looking at a photograph of a happening, or a video of a live broadcast? What is a history of a live medium?
The media theorist Lisa Gitelman has observed that part of the complexity with that question arises from the fact that “media are reflexive historical subjects” (20). We cannot approach the history of any medium without reckoning with how we also encounter history through media. This is especially true for inscriptive media, as she explains: “There’s no getting all the way ‘outside’ them to perform the work of historical description. Our sense of history…is inextricable from our experience of inscription, of writing, print, photography, sound recording, cinema, and now (one must wonder) digital media that save text, image, and sound” (20-21). [4]
To go looking for a history of art and technology in the downtown New York scene of the 1970s and 80s, I can only record my encounters with the impossible double vision of history and technology. And to tell a history of early or experimental broadcasting, as it was employed in a particular community, I can only locate its traces, and to mark the distances and media, through which I tried to sense this particular past.
These encounters will happen in four parts:
On Joan Jonas and perceptual doubling
2. "I see you, I see you too"On the intersection of happenings and broadcasting
On "the tv series by rock fans, for rock fans"
4. "going through channels"On television's surrealism and bending reality
the context of then vs. the context of now
The downtown New York scene in the 1970s and 80s was too vibrant and full of personalities to ever form one coherent shape. But it was an undeniable force, the catalyst for a surge of media and movements, all seemingly forged in impossibly cheap lofts. Joan Jonas, the sculptor turned visual, video, and performance artist, is one of many who comes out of this artistic flurry. “Everybody was kind of on the edge of something,” she said in Interview Magazine in 2014. From the inside, she’s less prone to reducing it to a scene, or fitting it into a particular medium: “…there wasn’t anything like performance art yet,” she said. “There was a feeling, rather, among friends. There were sculptors, painters, dancers, musicians; it was all these different people working in different mediums. So there wasn’t one, isolated scene. Everybody went to see everybody’s work, including mine.” [5]
Everyone’s work was happening everywhere, she said, but “all below 14th street.” There were performances in galleries, in the basements of churches, outside, near the docks or in empty lots. Jonas remembers going to Jack Smith’s loft, where the performances began at midnight: “He had two floors and the roof had burned out from a fire, so he had a kind of double-story theater. He had a bleacher made out of two-by-fours, and there would be about six people there for a midnight performance.”
There is no recreating that time, or experiencing any of that work unmediated. We have to see it through the lens of memory or media. Describing her more recent projects to re-stage some of her pieces, Jonas acknowledges it’s a different work. “You can never see the original work as it was,” she says, because you’re immersed in “the context of then versus the context of now. The audience perceives it differently.”
This is true, for me, of video as well, which became a popular technology for many artists during this era. The Sony Portapak, for example, a handheld video camera, “became recognized by artists as an ideal tool for recording performances, happenings, and tamper with video’s inherent properties as a metaphorical vehicle for articulating illusion and reality,” Adam Hencz writes. [6]
Jonas worked with video to explore video itself. Her pieces tend to center on the capacity of the medium to double perception, through monitors or mirrors, using video as a way to “[reflect] the layered ways in which we perceive the world and how our minds process information about the past, present, and future.” She writes:
After I bought my first Porta-Pak in 1970, I imagined I was still making films while I worked with the qualities peculiar to video—the flat, grainy, black-and-white space, the moving bar of the vertical roll, the closed circuit with instant feedback. Camera, deck, monitor/projector, and artist formed a circle of circuitry. I thought about the discrepancy between live action and the detail of that action which was captured by a video camera. These considerations were translated into performances for a live audience.
All of my performed actions were for the camera; the audience witnessed the making of images for the camera during the performance. There are two temporal experiences: the live action and the one framed in the space of the video. We experience multiple things at the same time. [7]
Black and white, and beautifully grainy, these videos now teleport us back to this world — but one we can only experience in the hermetic and contextless environment of the present internet, like astronauts feeling the surface of the moon through thick, oxygen-filled gloves. The internet, as a technology, accentuates the multiplicity of our perception. I know two things at once, watching Jonas’s Vertical Roll on YouTube [8]: I am watching it from a great distance, in my own context, highly saturated with video, and I feel I am watching a video for the first time, a way I might feel no matter how many times I press play on Vertical Roll, and hear its soundtrack, Jonas banging a metal spoon, again and again and again.
I see you, I see you too
The happenings of this period exemplify the paradoxes of this particular historical and geographic nexus. Rooted in liveness, specific to sites and places and people, these public proto-performance art pieces were always going to resist the broader machinations that turn subversive gestures into tradable commodities. At the same time, happenings coincided with technologies that captured them, at least after the fact. One of these was handheld video, another was broadcasting.
In the middle of a video that I watch on Ubu web, there’s a grainy, black and white segment, zooming in and out on groups of people gathered around a stack of television monitors. [9] Each gathering keeps to a script, saying: I don’t see anybody or a second later, a surprised: I see you, Hello, I see you, I see you Harriet, I see you too, there you are. Their voices deliver only confirmation that seeing each other is happening.
This particular performance, or “tele-happening” as it was called, was constructed by Allan Kaprow (one of the artists credited for the term happening), and fittingly titled Hello. Kaprow connected each group via a closed-circuit tv network, “[using] four locations in Massachusetts, five cameras, 27 television monitors and people trying to get in touch.” Hello was presented as part of The Medium is the Medium, featuring work by six artists in a 30-minute broadcast in 1969. The piece now serves as a time capsule of the atmosphere of activity and thought that broadcasting intersects, as an infrastructure, technology, and medium. Kaprow’s technological performance staged what mediated, live communication might look like, in a way that makes something normal, almost invisible to us, undeniably weird again.
Writing about the rise of broadcasting as an artistic medium during this period, Julia Wolkoff argues that:
It may not be a coincidence that the rise of avant-garde Happenings—publicly staged artworks that sought to test conventional relationships between performers and their audiences—in the 1960s was simultaneous with TV’s growing ubiquity in the American home. But unless you regularly hung out in Greenwich Village bars or unventilated SoHo artists’ lofts, boundary-pushing performances by doyennes of the downtown New York art scene like Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Nam June Paik would have been experienced almost exclusively on late-night cable. [10]
Here again, is another missing story: How did their work travel from unventilated loft to cable television? What kind of work did they show? What did they think of broadcasting as a medium? Who watched it, and where?
The artistic potential of broadcasting lagged behind access to broadcasting as a technology or even infrastructure. E.A.T. founder Billy Klüver recognized the potential of public access for artists, announcing the organization’s intention to “provide artists with the opportunity to broadcast their work on a continuing basis.” But their earliest attempts were largely rejected, remaining unfunded and unrealized. But eventually, they did present “Artists and Television” in 1971, a series of video pieces broadcast on Tuesday nights in November and December that year:
The works shown were: Michael Snow, Back and Forth; Nancy Graves, 200 Stills; Lucas Samaras, Self; Les Levine, Open Art Hearings; Andy Warhol Producer, made by Michael Netter; One Hour of Tape, Keith Sonnier, a compilation of films transferred to ½ inch video; Michel Auder, A Natural Childbirth; Joan Jonas and Richard Serra, Veil; Joan Jonas, Blue Wind; John Chamberlain, Cocaine Blues; and Richard Serra, Color Aid. [11]
I work my way through this list—some I find only in text descriptions, others are on YouTube, a few containing the automatic caption: No description has been added to this video. Many of them, like Jonas’s work, are self referential pieces that draw attention to the medium itself.
I try to imagine happening upon any of these. What would I have watched, before and after? How would I have watched it, and where, and how long? I’m asking the wrong questions. What’s true is that watching it now, in a flood of searchable, pausable, consumable content, is that we don’t live in the future that these artists imagined television might create. This list, the way it maps a particular kind of thinking, does let us imagine differently, the world where what video and television meant had not yet been decided yet, by what was profitable.
play it loud
The story of history is full of reminders that you weren’t there. This is not a new observation, but the feeling of it sticks with me at the NYU Special Collections Reading Room, watching the digitized tapes of Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, known best for their tv broadcast Nightclubbing during the mid-70s and 80s.
I think about not being there while I’m sitting at a fake wood office table in Special Collections, wearing creaky plastic headphones, pointing a tv remote to start each dvd of footage. I’m not allowed to touch the dvds myself, they bring them out one by one to insert them in their plastic tray. (I misunderstood the librarian’s question and accidentally say I’ve never used a tv remote before (a lie), so I could be receiving extra attention.) I press play. I see the color bars from the tape, and hear the lilting drums that open Iggy Pop’s song “Nightclubbing” alongside the show’s title sequence, a montage of clips of the crowd footage that transitions to clips of some of the most iconic moments the two filmed.
Nightclubbing, the broadcast, began after the two had already been filming bands in the punk scene, amassing hours of tapes that few got to see. But after wildly popular screenings of their tapes were held PS1, Mudd Club, and New Cinema, Ivers and Armstrong started the series in October of 1979, which aired at 1am on Channel 10. Nightclubbing started to show up as a recommendation of something to watch. The Weekly Soho News even offered recommendations of where to see the footage: “We’ve been told of two places to go to watch cable: Jimmy Day’s Bar and Restaurant (186 W. 4 St.) and Martin’s Bar and Grill (228 W. Houston St.) Other suggestions for viewing rock on cable are requested.” Anthology Film Archive would also hold regular screenings, tickets were a $3 donation.
Cable was still new enough that access wasn’t just a question of paying for it, but whether they had wired your building. Even Ivers and Armstrong didn’t have cable themselves. In an interview series with Document in 2019, Pat remembers:
”It took us years before we even got it in our building. We would have to go to, there was a bar called Paul’s Lounge on 11th Street and 3rd Avenue, and once we started doing our show Nightclubbing, that’s where people would go to watch it. You know, most people didn’t have cable downtown. They wired the Upper East Side. They wired the Upper West Side. But Lower Manhattan, Lower East Side, are you kidding me?” [12]
I’m trying to keep this in mind, watching Nightclubbing in headphones, but I’m distracted by how badly I’m following their instructions, made clear in the press release for Nightclubbing: “play it loud.” Not only do I not know that much about the punk scene—everything I know comes from Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 1—but the studious visitor behind me is reverently turning the pages of giant blueprints, and I’m meekly inching the volume down so I won’t bother them.
But despite all of this, the footage is undeniably magic. It proves the show’s tagline, again and again, “The tv series by rock fans, for rock fans.” Ivers, behind the camera, knows this music. I feel like I’m directing the gaze of her camera, immersed in the same kind of attention you might have at a show, following the energy on stage. She even manages, in their footage of The Heartbreakers, to keep the uncontainable Johnny Thunder in frame, despite the speed at which he goes from standing at the mic to lying down on stage, singing while his chin hangs over the stage like a cat’s.
Ivers and Armstrong would go on to amass hours and hours of tapes, filming punk and new wave from 1975 to 1980. The two boil their success down to the fact that they had worked at television and broadcast stations. Armstrong states it simply: “we were familiar with the equipment,” she said. “That was really, I think, the key to our success. We had access to it, and we knew how to use it.” [12]
Watching their footage, I’m not thinking about history. I’m not seeing through the ghosts of someone’s hands, or trying to understand how media creates strange folds of time. I’m watching a show. The camera, the video, the buzzing little whir of the dvd player, all of that brings the energy of that space from the past into my space in the library. They’ll never know it, but us from the future, all of us who watch this footage, are in that moment now too, because the conditions were met: people who lugged heavy cameras, who saved the masters of their tapes— though some were stolen during a police raid — who made space for them until they reached the archive, and they became a portal for me to move through.
going through channels
I’m watching a clip that was uploaded to YouTube on May 2, 2007. It’s 2007-digital grainy on top of 1980s-tape grainy. The camera pans to a man standing at the microphone, wearing sunglasses and a grey suit, introducing the show we’re watching: “People have said, ‘what is this? Is this surrealism, is this dada, is this new wave, what is this?’”
“This is subrealism,” he says. A solitary person to his right claps three times. “Thank you,” he turns, his voice briefly off mic. “Subrealism is like surrealism except that it’s in the opposite direction. What happened was that after surrealism was introduced in the 30s, and the artists explained to the whole world how surrealism could be accomplished, surrealism was taken up by the corporate structure, and soon—” the band starts to sound check, behind him, ”television advertising and the most common forms of entertainment were actually surrealist. So we’ve decided to take a dive way below all of that and present you with a subrealist show.” [13]
This is Glenn O’Brien, introducing TV Party, a show that was broadcast live on Tuesday nights in New York City until 1982. Writing for an exhibition at The Hammer Museum, Gavin Butt describes the show as “a document of a remarkable downtown scene, in which black graffiti and hip-hop artists mingled with white gallery artists, and queer performers occupied the same billing as straight film directors and musicians.” [14]. You might have seen footage from TV Party without knowing it, in the form of washed-out clips of Jean Micheal Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Debbie Harry, Klaus Nomi, Arthur Russell, or David Byrne.
TV Party’s project was always both artistic and political. “TV PARTY is the TELEVISION SHOW that’s a COCKTAIL PARTY but which is also a POLITICAL PARTY,” the tagline read. In a manifesto O’Brien published in BOMB in 1981, he writes that: “Nothing can be governed but people and TV has proved the greatest modern instrument of their control.” Cheekily (and presciently) calling for all government to be subsumed into television’s logic to be truly socialist, he writes: “GOVERNMENT consists of GOING THROUGH CHANNELS. We can change the government simply by CHANGING THE CHANNEL.” [15]
It is this same television atmosphere in which Gretchen Bender begins to make work. Bender is part of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists connected to the Nature Morte Gallery, which used to be on 10th Street. Whereas Jonas, Ivers, Armstrong explored broadcasting’s potential for connection and distribution of work, Bender took incoming feeds as raw material, more interested in the incoming image than in broadcasting out.
In 1987 at The Kitchen, Bender presented what would become one of her best known works, Total Recall, an 8-channel video installation comprising 24 monitors and 3 projection surfaces. In a review of a 2012 exhibition including the piece, Jonathan Thomas described Total Recall as an “implicit portrait of the military-industrial-media complex”, writing that the piece “confronts the spectator with a mesmerizing critique of the violence of images in a society now predicated on their commodification.” [16] Bender distinguished her work from video art by calling it “electronic theater,” a somewhat paradoxical term suggesting she was less interested in video as a medium, than in how the image moved and behaved on television, the perception and construction of the reality it brought into being. She wrote “I want us to feel how disturbing it is that we flatten our politics of death through visual representation.” [17]
I usually avoid nailing an idea to a word as big as reality. But both TV Party and Total Recall share this concern, wanting to interrupt the interruptions of their medium. In a series of statements titled “The Perversion of the Visual,” Bender writes that neither “the short-circuiting of reality by the media” nor the “short-circuiting of the media by reality” still apply. Instead, she says: ”We manipulate the manipulations of ‘reality’; skillfully depicting a society already living outside its own reality. This double-distancing allows a criticality that frees us to exchange one present tense for another.” [18]
Clicking through YouTube, watching short snippets of both of these projects, I feel a creeping sense of recognition. Although our media lexicons differ slightly — I might use platform when O’Brien would use channel — I start to notice the concerns of my reality, percolating back in this particular moment in (media) history.
This history, of broadcasting and television in New York City in the 70s and 80s, is a particularly revealing one, for tracing the story of technology as a story of control and access. Clicking through YouTube—a platform that has commodified and even live streamed mass violence—I start to feel the sense of encroachment, of reality bending, the way that we are submerged in a stream of corporately branded surreality, how violence and commodification reach us through the same mechanisms.
Some artists are described as being “ahead of their time.” To me, this phrase actually tends to describe those highly attuned to the present, a form of attention focused on the earliest new glimmers on the horizon, which have not yet fully saturated the current. Our own time, immersed in the always-there, always-on internet, has only accentuated the surrealism of the image. The past becomes familiar, no longer history, but the foundation of the present.
notes
Brown, Trisha. “Opal Loop / Cloud Installation.” Trisha Brown Dance Company, https://trishabrowncompany.org/repertory/opal-loop-cloud-installation-72503.html. Accessed 26 May 2025.
Anand, Keshav. “Remembering New York’s Seminal Artist-Run Restaurant FOOD.” Something Curated, 16 Aug. 2018, https://somethingcurated.com/2018/08/16/remembering-new-yorks-seminal-artist-run-restaurant-food/.
“E.A.T. Booklet, with Rauschenberg’s Edits.” Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/archive/eat-booklet-rauschenbergs-edits. Accessed 26 May 2025.
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. MIT Press, 2008.
Jonas, Joan. “Joan Jonas.” Interview by R.H. Quaytman. Interview Magazine, 10 Dec. 2014, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/joan-jonas.
Hencz, Adam. “Sony Portapak: How a New Artistic Medium Was Created.” Artland Magazine, 11 Dec. 2020, https://magazine.artland.com/agents-of-change-how-the-sony-portapak-has-created-a-new-artistic-medium/.
Jonas, Joan. “Joan Jonas.” Artforum, 1 Sept. 2012, https://www.artforum.com/events/joan-jonas-4-193299/.
texto sobre tela. “Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll.” YouTube, 6 Dec. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFpkZa12Qwc.
Kaprow, Allan. “The Medium Is the Medium.” UbuWeb Film & Video, https://ubu.com/film/paik_medium.html. Accessed 26 May 2025.
Fiore, Julia. “The Avant-Garde Art That Was Made for TV.” Artsy, 23 Jan. 2019, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-avant-garde-art-made-tv.
“Artists and Television: Artists Television Programming Projects at Automation House.” Experiments in Art and Technology, https://www.experimentsinartandtechnology.org/artists-and-tv. Accessed 27 May 2025.
Malley, Clara. "From Iggy Pop to Blondie: Meet the Women Who Documented Punk Royalty in ’70s New York.” Document, 25 July 2019, https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/07/from-iggy-pop-to-blondie-meet-the-women-who-documented-cbgbs-royalty-in-70s-new-york/
olicom1005. “TV Party Live 1: TV Party Band and David Byrne pt. 2.” YouTube, 2 May 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDIlPomGyA
Butt, Gavin. “Welcome to the TV Party.” Hammer Museum, https://hammer.ucla.edu/take-it-or-leave-it/essays/welcome-to-the-tv-party. Accessed 26 May 2025.
O’Brien, Glenn. “TV Party.” BOMB Magazine, 1 Apr. 1981, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1981/04/01/tv-party/.
Thomas, Jonathan. “Gretchen Bender.” ARTnews.Com, 6 Nov. 2012, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/gretchen-bender-61362/.
Bender, quoted in Bigman, Alexander. Pictures and the Past: Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art. The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Bender, Gretchen. “The Perversion of the Visual.” Sprüth Magers, 22 Mar. 2024, https://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/gretchen-bender-the-perversion-of-the-visual-los-angeles/.
Blair Johnson is a poet and writer, studying digital poetry. She works at CultureHub.
Luke Williams is a video game designer and musician.