no place press

Occasioned by the recent publication of The New Television: Video After Television, a collaboration between Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and no place press, editors Rebecca Cleman and Rachel Churner, along with contributor Tausif Noor, discuss the book’s origins in the catalytic 1974 conference Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television.

The book includes a full reproduction of the conference’s compendium, The New Television: A Public/Private Art (1977), and newly commissioned texts and panel transcripts considering the legacy of artists’ work in video. Situating the conversation in the history of experimental television, the presenters will be joined by BAMPFA’s curator emeritus Steve Seid, who will discuss KQED’s National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET), the first public television art project in the United States. Works from NCET will screen alongside other examples of artists’ television from EAI’s archive.

Book signing to follow.

Rebecca Cleman is a writer and the Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). She has programmed and curated numerous exhibitions and screenings exploring media art history, including Broadcasting: EAI at ICA with Alex Klein at the ICA Philadelphia (2018).

Rachel Churner is the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. An art critic and editor, she has published work in Artforum and October magazines. Churner is the editor of multiple books, including Catherine Lord’s The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men (2023), Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:) (2022), Yvonne Rainer: Revisions (2020), and two volumes of writings by film historian Annette Michelson (2017 and 2020).

Steve Seid was a media curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for twenty-five years. During that time, he presented almost one thousand public programs, featuring experimental media, forgotten film genres, and a sampling of international cinema. He also helped build PFA’s collection, particularly in the areas of video art and personal cinemas from the Bay Area. Notable acquisitions made under Seid's leadership are the restoration of Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1971) and poet ruth weiss’s only film effort, The Brink (1961). Seid has also published Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, coedited with Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz; Ant Farm 1968–1978, coedited with Constance Lewallen; and his recent solo effort, Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of An Image.