Throughout December: Ongoing exhibition of streaming NO-TV videos

From 1984 to the early 2000s, VSW had an open call for experimental film and video that would be selected by staff and students for a weekly broadcast on Cablevision, Rochester’s public access network. Called NO-TV, this edgy series gave regional and national video artists a chance to have their work shown to a wider audience while adding their videotapes to the growing archive of video art at Visual Studies Workshop. Today, the NO-TV collection consists of more than 200 works by 160 artists, and encompasses a variety of styles and interests: documentary, biographical, street tv, self-processing, performance, narrative experimental, social, political, and emerging technology. This online program includes a playlist of videos from the NO-TV collection as well as related ephemera and an oral history from series founder Robert Doyle.

Watch Program 1: Document

Watch Program 2: Experiment

Notes from the Curator

Beginning in the late 1970s, the VSW Media Center provided equipment, editing facilities and grants to film and video makers in the Rochester community. Part of a network of media access centers throughout Western New York, the Media Center was housed in the basement of VSW, and was a vital resource for students, filmmakers and artists in the region. To celebrate and promote the work of these independent videomakers, VSW created NO-TV, a curated series of video works for broadcast on the emerging platform of cable television. The NO-TV videotape collection at Visual Studies Workshop is an early example of the VSW Media Center’s innovative role in video education, production, and promotion. This unique collection encompasses a variety of styles and interests: documentary, biographical, street tv, self-processing, performance, narrative, experimental, social, political, and emerging technology.

NO-TV began in 1984 as the brainchild of VSW Media Center Coordinator Bob Doyle and took on a life of its own, broadcasting 21 seasons over the next 18 years on Greater Rochester Cablevision. (You can read more about the founding of NO-TV in An Interview with Bob Doyle) The structure of the program was anchored in an ethos of artist support: artists whose tapes were selected for broadcast were paid for their work through grant-funded stipends. Chosen videos were compiled into a number of half hour programs which made up a NO-TV “season.” The programs aired weekly on Channel 12, often after 11pm, and sometimes exhibited as extended screenings in VSW’s Viewing/Listening Room.

An open call for “videotapes by artists and independent producers” was advertised in local and national periodicals, including VSW’s own media journal, Afterimage. Submissions were open to working artists and community members, and later included student submissions as well. Eventually, a steady stream of videotape submissions provided curators with ample content for program selection. Many of the submissions were sent back to the artist (at their expense) – and many remained at VSW. Today, the VSW Video Archive contains hundreds of these submission tapes, episodes and compilations made for traveling exhibitions.

The VSW Video Archive contains over 180 tapes that are designated NO-TV in some shape or form. We continue to build a complete inventory of the series as we digitize tapes and related paper records. Like all good archive mysteries, there are consistent runs of seasons punctuated by unexplainable gaps and mysterious notations. The first knot we’ve untangled in our media archaeology is the case of the missing first season tapes. As he was inspecting the NO-TV Season 2 tapes for digitization, our intrepid Preservation Specialist, Nilson Carroll, noticed writing visible beneath the labels. Looking closely, he discovered the titles and program details from “Point of View”, the first season on NO-TV: season 1 had been taped over to make way for season 2.

NO-TV & Movies #2: #5 Waiting for the Invasion: US Citizens in Nicaragua (2020:0002:2936), 3/4″ U-matic tape, VSW Video Collection

To date, VSW has preserved over 30 U-matic videotapes from the NO-TV collection. The works chosen for this Salon/line program are individual videos from various NO-TV episodes, selected to represent the variety of programming that was offered throughout the 15+ year timespan of NO-TV. The videos represented in this grouping ranges from early works by well-known artists, to experiments by artists exploring media art before moving on to a completely different life path.

The fourteen selected videos are presented in two programs: Document and Experiment. Not meant as a binary and certainly not a hard boundary, my distinction references the artist’s purpose in wielding their technology. “Document” anchors in the impulse to contain and capture a camera moment or a kind of narrative, presenting a record or story to the viewer. “Experiment” takes the video image and technology itself as a platform for further explorations – interrogating the functions of technology, wallowing in their delights, or expanding narratives and philosophies into new dimensions. Neither heading is exclusive, and there is occasional overlap. I hope you find plenty to enjoy in this first survey of our NO-TV archive materials.

Mary Lewandowski, Collections Manager, Visual Studies Workshop

The VSW Salon is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts and by the ArtWorks program of the National Endowment for the Arts.