Community of Images: CATV Works of Video Earth
From Early Work of Video Earth: Izu Shimoda CATV/ Hokkaido Ikeda CATV, 1971 ©Ko Nakajima
This September, we present our second program in the ongoing series, Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s. This month’s screening features three more works from the CCJ Viewing Library: the productions of the members of Video Earth, a video collective begun in 1971 under the organization of Ko Nakajima.
Mostly composed of students and staff at the Tokyo College of Photography, Video Earth was a socially-engaged organisation with global aspirations, exploring the potential of video to connect individuals & communities in new ways. The early history of video in Japan, particularly in its use for alternative television, had a close relationship to North America with influences such as Michael Goldberg’s video workshops held in Tokyo, Michael Shamberg’s philosophy of “guerilla television,” and figures in the U.S. public access television scene such as DCTV’s Keiko Tsuno.
Introducing the program, we’re thrilled to collaborate with Antoine Haywood, PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and researcher of public access television. Haywood contextualises the practice of Video Earth within a wider global context of alternative television projects and the developing technology that supported them.
September Members’ Viewing
Ko Nakajima & Video Earth Tokyo, Early Work of Video Earth: Izu Shimoda CATV/ Hokkaido Ikeda CATV, 1971
Ko Nakajima & Video Earth Tokyo, A Graveyard and a Beggar, 1975
Ko Nakajima & Video Earth Tokyo, Under A Bridge, 1974
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The programs will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform.
This Members Viewing program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation.
Japanese Street Vids and Public Access Television: Unseen Gems Excavated and Preserved in the Video Earth Digital Archive
By Antoine Haywood
Founded in 1971, Video Earth was part of the first generation of Japanese video art collectives that used emergent televisual technology to oppose previous generations' artistic traditions.[i] Other notable collectives launched during this period include Video Hiroba, formed in March 1972, and the Video Information Center, founded by Ichiro Tezuka in 1974. Distinct from its contemporaries, Video Earth was initially formed by Ko Nakajima to “unite people interested in public-access cable television” and “heighten viewers’ awareness of ecological dilemmas.”[ii] While much attention has been given to Nakajima’s influential animation films, art installations, and time-lapse video experiments, this essay sheds light on the significance of the street-level perspective videos that Nakajima’s collective created in the 1970s. “A Graveyard and Beggar,” “Under A Bridge,” and “Early Work of Video Earth: Izu Shimota CATV / Hokkaido Ikeda CATV” are striking reflections of what media historian Deirdre Boyle described as the “larger alternative media tide” that swept through the United States and many other countries in the 1960s and ‘70s.[iii]
The subject of A Graveyard and a Beggar. ©Ko Nakajima
Unlike traditional journalists, Video Earth members used unorthodox methods to capture the authentic qualities of the communities they explored. They did not use video to create scripted stories and formulaic news reports. Instead, they made themselves vulnerable to the fate of their interactions, which, as seen in “A Graveyard and Beggar” and “Under A Bridge,” was a perilous choice. The Video Earth members that boldly approached strangers were clearly unwelcome. Both interviewees firmly opposed the invasion of their privacy, which raises ethical considerations about this cinéma-vérité style of documenting human experiences. Nonetheless, the interviewers’ tenacious ability to establish a rapport with their interlocutors demonstrated an impressive process-oriented technique. While the woman who lived at Aoyama cemetery never let her guard down, besides cracking a few smiles and sarcastic remarks, the man under the bridge opened up and recounted life stories. Like geologists searching for gems in geodes, the Video Earth members used the portable video camera as a tool to find humanity sparkling in unexpected places.
In the mid-1960s, Japan’s Sony Corporation introduced the portapak—a groundbreaking portable camera and half-inch videotape recording system that allowed collectives like Video Earth to rove and produce vérité-style videos, as seen in “A Graveyard and Beggar” and “Under A Bridge.” The unconventional documentary approach Video Earth used resembles the so-called “guerrilla video” methodology that was also being practiced in North America during this period. The Canadian Challenge for Change program, the New York-based Downtown Community Television (DCTV), and other guerrilla video collectives, like the Videofreex, Top Value Television (TVTV), Global Village, and the Raindance Corporation, were made up of vanguard media makers who used 16-millimeter Bolex film cameras and video portapaks to capture authentic perspectives of life lived on a neighborhood community level.
Like Video Earth, Keiko Tsuno, the Japanese-born co-founder of DCTV, also started creating short ethnographic shorts and a “series of video poems” during this period.[iv] Tsuno began experimenting with video shortly after she graduated from art school in Japan, moved from Tokyo to New York City, and met her life partner and co-founder of DCTV, Jon Alpert. Tsuno was particularly drawn to video because of its unique properties. Unlike film, which required a processing wait time before viewing, video could be immediately played back and relayed to a television monitor (as Nakajima demonstrated in Video Earth’s CATV documentary). Tsuno also believed video rendered a unique softness resembling reality and provided undefined artistic exploration potential.[v] After saving the money she earned while waiting tables in a Japanese restaurant, Tsuno had her mother purchase a Sony portapak and ship it directly from Tokyo to the U.S. In 1972, Tsuno and Alpert founded DCTV to teach their neighbors how to use video as a community organizing tool. They realized community-made videos and public screenings were a powerful way for people to tell their own stories in ways that major broadcast networks did not.
Although there is little evidence of specific, formal ties between Video Earth and DCTV, there was a healthy transnational, cross-cultural exchange between Canadian video activist Michael Goldberg, who participated in a video communication residency in Japan. Goldberg’s influential “Video Communication Do-it-Yourself Kit,” an exhibit sponsored by Sony in Tokyo, attracted the attention of Japanese artists like Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Fujiko Nakaya. Inspired by Goldberg’s teachings, a cadre of Japanese artists formed Video Hiroba (literally, “video plaza”), which followed a mission that reflected Michael Shamberg’s and the Raindance Corporation’s vision to transform consumer (video) technology into a politicized alternative media.[vi] According to Nakaya, Raindance Corporation's journal, Radical Software, which Schamberg distributed while visiting Tokyo in September 1971, significantly influenced the ideas and methods that defined Video Hiroba’s work.[vii] It was Video Hiroba’s founding members Fujiko Nakaya and Nobuhiro Kawanaka who, in 1974, made a Japanese translation of Shamberg's influential book Guerilla Television. While collaborative spirits, progressive ideologies, and portable video systems propelled groups like Video Hiroba and Video Earth, cable television also emerged in the 1970s as a new, locally accessible communication mechanism that allowed communities to distribute alternative media content.
Starting in the 1940s, tech-savvy individuals developed what was initially called “community antenna television” (CATV) in remote locations where broadcast signal reception was weak or entirely obstructed. These ad hoc systems drew from “an eclectic combination of makeshift technologies that captured broadcast signals from high places (such as mountaintops) and transmitted them to television sets in lower elevations.”[viii] In the 1950s and ‘60s, these CATV systems were primarily used to improve the reception of network broadcast signals. In this period, Japanese television was developed as “open-air television”—a novel marketing ploy implemented by the first commercial TV station, Nihon Terebi, also known as “NTV.”[ix] NTV strategically placed televisions in public places like railway stations, parks, and plazas to instill in working-class people the “desire to buy their own television sets, while simultaneously boosting the station’s advertising revenue.”[x] Another influential network that emerged during this time was the Japanese public broadcasting corporation—NHK. Early on, commercial networks and state agencies controlled what was televised over the national airwaves (mostly in industrialized countries). However, by the 1970s, artists, activists, and NGOs (non-government organizations) in various countries began tapping into closed-circuit cabling systems to leverage local communication infrastructure as an alternative to corporate media dominance.[xi] Video Earth’s tour of Izu Shimota, Hokkaido Ikeda, and Iida CATV stations captures this revolutionary communication phenomenon coming to life in Japan.
The opening scene of Early Work of Video Earth: Izu Shimoda CATV/ Hokkaido Ikeda CATV ©Ko Nakajima
The opening scene of “Izu Shimota CATV / Hokkaido Ikeda CATV” immediately conveys a long-term community-access television problem: lack of awareness. For decades, community access practitioners have faced questions about audience engagement and what matters most to practitioners. Is it the process or product of community television that influences change? One of the station managers was even asked how they get people to watch, especially those audiences captured by commercial broadcasting’s allure.
In contrast to “A Graveyard and Beggar” and “Under A Bridge,” the CATV piece is intentionally edited to juxtapose the perspectives of community television proponents and individuals in the community who are just being introduced to it. Most of the subjects interviewed were willing to express themselves on camera. Even the media students attending the special event appeared amicable and responsive to Ko Nakajima’s extemporaneous interview style. The inserted clips of community-made videos were excellent examples of how CATV channels provide programming that stands out from commercial media. As one person mentioned, people on professional networks are “robots.” These community clips ultimately illustrate CATV’s humanness and what one station manager described as “a gallery showcasing people’s passion.”
While the station managers expressed much optimism, the challenges of building and operating community-access television channels were quite apparent. Failing equipment, limited staff resources, and precarious relationships with local governments are issues that unfortunately still exist today, particularly in the United States, where community media centers that operate local access channels struggle to maintain their relevance in the digital age. Nonetheless, Video Earth’s CATV station tour video illuminates community-access television’s lasting potential as a resource that communities can use to cultivate what one interviewee called “video culture.” Although many operations that showed promise in the 1970s and ‘80s have since closed, thousands still exist worldwide. For example, in the U.S., 1600 local access television centers currently operate 3000 channels that feature community-made public, educational, and governmental (PEG) programming.[xii] Recent studies have shown that these community cable channels provide essential communication services, especially in crisis moments when residents need neighborhood-level information, perspectives, and connectivity.[xiii] As community television has demonstrated in the past and present, there will always be a need for grassroots communication infrastructures that public schools and local groups like civic and agricultural associations can use to disseminate timely information in places not directly served by national broadcast networks.
A CATV producer speaks about his aims in Early Work of Video Earth: Izu Shimoda CATV/ Hokkaido Ikeda CATV. ©Ko Nakajima
The Video Earth Collective work archived in Nakajima’s collection is an excellent glimpse of how Japanese visionaries were involved in the 1970s global alternative media tide—a phenomenon shaped by the convergence of portable video, cable television, and a progressive ethos. This inspired a new wave of alternative media makers determined to promote humanity and advance progressive social change. The television producer, interviewed at the end of the CATV video, articulated the community access television movement’s purpose best: “At this point, I want to use my resources to put the spotlight on people who usually are not in the spotlight. Just to let the world know, there are all these people, you know, living among us.” Media-making methodologies practiced by groups like Video Earth are essential subjects to remember and study because they remind us of how communication technology can be used to promote humanity genuinely.
notes
[ii] London, Barbara. 1992. “Electronic Explorations.” Art in America, May 1992. 120-129.
[iii] Boyle, Deirdre. 1997. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press), xiii.
[iv] Hoberman, J. 1981. “Jon Alpert’s Video Journalism: Talking to the People.” American Film. June 1981, 58.
[v] Anderson, Joel Neville. 2017. “(Community) video art: DCTV’s expanded documentary practice.” Millennium Film Journal 65 (1).
[vi] Hiro, Rika. 2010. “Between Absence and Presence: Exploring Video Earth’s What is Photography?” Spectacle East Asia 15.
[vii] Meigh-Andrews 2014, 41.
[viii] Mullen, Megan. 2007. “The Moms ‘n’ Pops of CATV.” In Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting. Edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 25-43. New York, NY: New York University Press.
[ix] Yoshimi, Shunya. 2005. “Japanese Television: Early Development and Research.” In A Companion to Television. Edited by Janet Wasko, 540-556. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
[x] Ibid. 540.
[xi] Halleck, DeeDee. 2005. “Local Community Channels: Alternatives to Corporate Media Dominance.” In A Companion to Television. Edited by Janet Wasko, 489-499. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
[xii] Alliance for Community Media. n.d. https://www.allcommunitymedia.org/
[xiii] Aufderheide, Patricia, Antoine Haywood, and Marian Sanchez Santos. 2020. “Public, Educational, and Governmental Access Media: Providing Contactless Community in a Pandemic.” Social Science Research Council, October 1, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/mediated-crisis/public-educational-and-governmental-access-media-providing-contactless-community-in-a-pandemic/
program
Early Work of Video Earth: Izu Shimoda CATV/ Hokkaido Ikeda CATV (ビデオアース東京初期：伊豆下田CATV・北海道池田町CATV) 1971, 23:38, b/w & color, sound.
A document of the nascent Video Earth's activities relating to the programming, operation and organisation of cable access television networks across Japan. When Keiji Ito, a new member of Video Earth Tokyo, expressed an interest in starting a cable television station in Shimoda, the collective brought in and wired the coaxial cables themselves, and established a local transmission studio, broadcasting live to about 20-30 homes. The contents of the program were community-based guerrilla programs, continuous shot of the clock for time signaling, and other kinds of material. As this was a project for the local community, the collective did not broadcast any individual work that is experimental in nature. This project became independent in 1978 as Video Earth K2, and continues to operate to this day (Shimoda Cable TV Broadcast Co., Ltd.) The team found out later that there was a cable television operation in Ikeda-cho, and covered their story as well.
A Graveyard and a Beggar (墓地と乞食), 1975, 11:30, video, b/w, sound.
A work by a young female member of Video Earth Tokyo, it is a guerilla-style interview with a homeless woman who lived in the Aoyama cemetery. True to the aims of Video Earth, the video apparatus creates the possibility for encounter and dialogue between two women in the community, each from distinct age groups and circumstances. The interaction, however, is a difficult one, and only highlights the struggles that each woman navigates: one behind the camera and the other an unwilling subject for it.
Under A Bridge (橋の下から), 1974, 23:38, video, b/w, sound.
Under A Bridge documents an interview of a locally known man who lives under a bridge. The documentation was later broadcast on Video Earth Tokyo's affiliated cable television network. Initially showing anger and frustration to the Video Earth members, the man gradually opens to the collective members, ultimately sharing personal stories about his life.
KO NAKAJIMA
Ko Nakajima began his career in experimental animation with the creation of works such as Seizoki (1964). At his solo exhibition at the Sogetsu Art Center, a space for avant-garde art in 1960s Tokyo, he produced Seizoki by painting directly on the film between screenings. His perennial interest in integrating new technologies, exploring the potential of film, video, and eventually computer animation, joined his desire to explore human intersections with nature, as seen in his Biological Cycle series (1971-); he created the first work in the series, Biological Life (1971-), by copying manipulated film footage onto video, then further manipulating the work with a video synthesizer.
In 1971, Nakajima established Video Earth Tokyo, the pioneering video-art collective. Nakajima used one of the earliest available portable video recorders to document Video Earth Tokyo performance pieces and teach the new technology. Video Earth Tokyo members created works, broadcast works on cable television, and participated in international exhibitions and emergent CG (computer graphics) conferences. In 1982, Nakajima introduced his Aniputer. Aniputer technology allowed wide access to creation of video animation, as this personal portable computer integrated with a video camera, developed in collaboration with Japan Victor Company (JVC), allowed any user to directly manipulate video and images on a screen, creating animations in real time. Nakajima used his expertise manipulating film, photography, and video with computer technology to create what is perhaps his best known work, Mt. Fuji (1984), a ninety-minute rhythmic meditation on nature, spirituality, and perspective.
Nakajima has produced works in France, Canada, New Zealand, and Denmark. Representative works include Biological Cycle series (1971-), My Life series (1976-), Mt. Fuji (1984), and Dolmen (1987). His works are in permanent collections internationally, including in Centre Georges Pompidou (France), The Museum of Modern Art (U.S.), Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive (U.S.), and the Getty Research Institute Special Collections (U.S.).
ANTOINE HAYWOOD
Antoine Haywood is a PhD candidate and Penn Presidential Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. His research focuses on local storytelling networks and understanding the contemporary relevance of community access media. Before Annenberg, Antoine spent fifteen years working as a community engagement director in the PEG access media field.
community of images: Japanese moving image artists in the uS, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s will be an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
We have partnered with the University of the Arts, and will present this exhibition at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance in June - August 2024.
The project is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation.
