Episode 059 Rebecca Cleman

Show Notes

This week on the show we are visiting with Rebecca Cleman, executive director of Electronic Arts Intermix. EAI has of coursed already come up on the show many times, and recently in episode 54 we visited with their director of preservation and media collections – today we will be going deeper into this history and evolution of EAI, and getting a look behind the scenes of an organization that has been incredibly central to the history of video art, and incredibly impactful for countless artists. At EAI Rebecca has built a long and rewarding career of working with and collaborating artists – starting years ago focused on their distribution program, sitting down with artists and facilitating the hard work to ensure that their work made it into the hands of curators, art history professors classrooms, and ultimately in front of your eyeballs in a way that honored the artist’s vision and intentions. In 2019 Rebecca stepped up as executive director, and in just a few short years has already left an unmistakable imprint on the organization, stewarding EAI through a move of their HQ, growth of their team, and really doing some important work to think through what enabling distribution means in an age where artists have infinite means at their own fingertips. Rebecca’s own professional journey is a great story and is just bursting with tales of the evolution of the art world in NYC, and life-long relationships with artists that she has built over time. Tune in to hear Rebecca’s story!

Links from the conversation with Rebecca
> EAI: https://www.eai.org

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin. And on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. Today we have a very special guest 

[00:00:15] Rebecca: Hi, I'm Rebecca Cleman, the executive director of Electronic Art Center Mix 

[00:00:20] Ben: The Electronic Arts Intermix or EAI has already come up on the show many times, of course and recently in episode 54, we visited with their director of preservation and media collections. Today, we will be going deeper into the history and evolution of EAI and getting a really, really cool look behind the scenes of an organization that has just been so incredibly central to the history of video art and very impactful for countless artists. Rebecca has built a long and rewarding career of working with and collaborating with artists at EAI starting years ago, focused on their distribution program, sitting down with artists and facilitating the hard work to ensure that their work made it into the hands of curators, art history, professors classrooms, and ultimately in front of your eyeballs in a way that honors the artist's vision and intentions. In 2019, Rebecca stepped up as executive director of EAI and in just a few short years has already left an unmistakable imprint on the organization, stewarding them through a move of their headquarters, growth of their team, and really doing some important work to think through what enabling distribution means in an age where artists have infinite means at their own fingertips. Rebecca's own professional journey is a great story and is just bursting with tales of the evolution of the art world and underground cinema and experimental film scene in New York City, and just the lifelong relationships that she has built with artists over time. Quick reminder before we get started. If you cannot get enough of the show, I highly recommend clicking the link to our Patreon in the show notes where our lovely little community of supporters enjoy all kinds of extra and exclusive content. We hope to see you over there soon and now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Rebecca Cleman. 

[00:02:11] Rebecca: I grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. My father and mother are both musicians. My father is a composer. He got his doctorate at Stanford in musical composition and theory, and my mother studied at Mills College. Because my parents were probably playing when I was in the womb, was always very artistically inclined. My father still composes music for the Episcopal Church where he composes very experimental liturgical music, which the church just happens to attract really talented musicians in Flagstaff and they are very eager to try out his atonal, discordant compositions in the service. It's pretty remarkable. I've always, really admired his contributions to a public space and I think that really set me on a path to wanna work in the arts and really also to have a career somehow connecting the public to art, but specifically to art that was unexpected and experimental. My father also taught humanities at Northern Arizona University, so I was just surrounded by conversation and books and colleagues who are constantly talking about art and art history. I've always considered myself to be a very creative person with creative inclinations that have been more directed towards writing and performance. Obviously music and performance were foundational to me, but I also was very influenced by literature, a local poetry scene, photography, and then really fell in love with film but that was mixed with the important influence of television on me, specifically Yo MTV Raps and other television programs. Gilbert Godfrey Up All Night on usa or some of my favorites. Unexpected things, like a big fascination with and crush on Charlie Chaplin and La Doche Vita was my favorite movie of all time for a period, and I watched it like 20 times over a summer. I didn't of course yet have the knowledge to understand the distinctions between all of these things that I was engaging with, but I do in hindsight think that they set the stage for what I would be drawn to later in life. There's always been an anti-institutional streak in me. EAI is very proud to be an organization that is focused on artists who tend to resist classification and, prefer to just focus on art making rather than to fit neatly in any one category. It's one of the many things that's made it a very good fit for me. And I think I feel the same as a person. And I in applying for colleges applied to Bard. It was the only school I applied to and I went there. It worked out well for me. It ended up being great. Bard was an especially important place for me, because of the experimental film program there, which is legendary. I didn't, you know, have any classes with Adolfas Mekas, but I certainly understood his significance and knew who he was. Sidney Peterson came to a class and his films were some of the first that I saw that just hit me intensely. And I thought it was remarkable that he was there in person. And of course it was, I think he was 90 something at the time. I remember distinctly that it a Jonas Mekas film. I don't remember which film, but he was swinging his camera in the air.  And I just remember being really struck, like the, it was a demystification of this thing that I was really fascinated by. yet had always been, shrouded in mystery and just seemed somehow unattainable. Whether that was, through the weird apparatuses that we had to use to engage with movies, the limited selection at our local video store, just the whole Hollywood production mode. Seeing Jonas Mekas throwing his camera around in the air was just an important moment for me because I realized there could be a different relationship to technology. One that was more personal and immediate. There could be a different relationship specifically to filmmaking, art making with cameras that was more personal and experimental. I was an art history major at Bard. As all good art history majors do. I took early Renaissance, thought that this was gonna be my trajectory that I'd just end up at a very stable curatorial gig at important museum focused on renaissance art. In spite of the fact that I really loved experimental work and I was drawn to a lot of those aesthetics, I wasn't all that interested in contemporary art until the 1993 MoMA Bruce Nauman retrospective. That was also a sea change moment for me. I went to that exhibition. I just, I'd never had an experience like that. I just was so aware of the artist's interest in my presence there. I just loved the relationship he creates. I felt seen in the museum by this artist and I loved that dynamic. It really spoke to my interest in art and the public and connecting those two things. I really love the things that he's said about being an artist he doesn't set out to make an artwork knowing what its outcome is gonna be but it's all about the journey to realizing what the artwork might be and daring to engage with the unknown is very important to him. That established a value that has been unchanged for me in. Thinking about art and artists. Another important thing that happened in college, my father composed a short piece for flute that is perhaps still on the repertoire for Andrew Bolotowsky, who is a New York City based flutist, and also the son of Ilya Bolotowsky, who is a well known non subjectivist painter working in the forties, fifties, sixties. He's a Russian American artist who came to the United States in the 1920s and was very much working in the school, the sort of Poston Dron school. Not just making abstract work, but specifically making non objectivist work had very strict rules, including not using the color green, or not wanting to use diagonals in compositions, even though Ilya Bolotowsky would work with some of those dynamics in a stark departure from Mondrian's very limited aesthetic. Andrew had this composition of my father's that he would perform, so they became really close friends. when I was at Bard we would visit New York. A former colleague of my father's lived on Roosevelt Island and later became friendly with a bunch of wild artists who lived in the Chelsea Hotel, including Lawrence Wiener. I had this in also to a vibrant art scene in New York, through learning more about Ilya Bolotowsky's work. He's really well recognized for these paintings. I know the Brooklyn Museum of Art has several of his paintings. For a while they were prominently displayed near the cafe. Probably the Met potentially MoMA have works of his and their collection. But what isn't so well known about Ilya Bolotowsky is that he was also a filmmaker. And his films are wildly different than his paintings. You might expect Ilya Bolotowsky to make Hans Richter type abstract moving image works. But that wasn't what he did. He actually made these beautiful I would say almost John Cocktail, whimsical narrative films with. Artists and friends that he knew, including folks like Yvonne Rainer. There's rare documentation of David Smith making a sculpture. And he would experiment with in camera effects and other things to add to the kind of surrealist quality of his films. And I was really fascinated by that. I did not understand why there was this stark division between art, what I was studying and film, which were literally in different buildings. You had to walk across, a lawn and upstairs and then around some other buildings to get from one department to the next. For me, there was this kind of clear lineage, especially thinking about painting and the important role that painting had played up into the 18th, 19th centuries on into cinema. It wasn't difficult to connect these things. Corbet was a favorite artist of mine. And I think that Corbet kind of lends himself to making connections to artists filmmakers who are not just, making popular cinema, but are also like, rascly about how they construct their own image and work with the press and everything. I see there's a direct line here from Corbet to Spike Lee and these other like amazing filmmakers who are just like really owning their expression in a kind of mainstream context, but that just wasn't the setup. I felt frustrated by that. I knew that I wanted to do my senior project on Ali Beski. But I was really dealing with a different kind of filmmaker artist who was not necessarily simply caring forward the aesthetics of his paintings into film but was, able to juggle these very different ways of working. through that process, I wrote my thesis on Ilya Bolotowsky and wanted to make some connections, at least to draw out his clear interest in the moving image and how that applied across his work, He had made this really beautiful mural that I hope still exists, but unfortunately the building that it was commissioned for, I think does not exist any longer. There are all these connections that he had to the moving image and I wanted to draw that out. After graduating from Bard, I had a number of art related jobs. I was in the visitor services department at the Brooklyn Museum of Art during the Sensation Exhibition, which was really fun. I had a brief internship with Barbara London at MoMA which was really cool. Was a really exciting time to be there, I have to say. I think it was 1999 that I was there because I remember a big convening to talk about MoMA and whether modern should be maintained in the museum's name, It was really like, should we continue to think of ourselves as the Museum of Modern Art? What does that mean? What are the implications moving forward? Which was pretty incredible. 

[00:13:23] Ben: You articulated something that I also felt the first time I saw a Nauman piece in person. And I think also something that I felt in maybe also my first encounters with media art that I had never put words to it and you really pinpointed it. The way that you said you felt seen by the artist it like almost feels like a wink, cuz it's like you're in this institutional context, you're expecting certain things, you're a young art student studying the cannon and all of a sudden you see something that you connect with you're also like, this is wild that this is even here. Like what? For me it was in the basement of Dia Beacon 

[00:14:02] Rebecca: Oh, I loved that installation 

[00:14:04] Ben: It is weirdly intimate in a way that I think is hard to describe especially like when you're a student of that materiality and then you encounter it for the first time in that kind of like hollowed context, 

[00:14:18] Rebecca: Yeah, it broke it open. I think that you put it really nicely. having this predisposition towards a kind of anti-institutional, Clearly, I also love institutions to a certain degree, I was excited by how Nauman broke that open and made me feel welcome there. In a way, there was that beautiful piece where you just entered an empty gallery and it was his voice saying, Get out of this room, get out of my mind. That was one that really got me and I really felt a sense of myself as a public visiting the museum and that my presence mattered to the artwork. And of course that led me back to Duchamp and thinking about well, the art work is completed by that public engagement. It spoke to larger ideas that have since been really an ongoing theme for me. I actually ended up at EAI in some ways, by chance. Galen Joseph-Hunter at Bard together and always kept in touch. Honestly, I just bumped into Galen on the street one day. I was working at the Brooklyn Museum. I knew I wanted a change. I was interviewing for a job at a commercial gallery, and I saw Galen and she asked what I was up to and I said, I'm looking around for a job. And she said, Oh, well there's an opening at Electronic Arts Intermix if you're interested. And I was. EAI, Electronic Arts Intermix was founded in 1971 by Howard Wise. Wise, had spent the bulk of his career as the president of the family business, which was an industrial coatings company based in Ohio, and actually came to New York City later in life to open a gallery dedicated to artists experimenting with technology and considering his background with the Industrial Coatings Company is worthwhile here because no doubt that company had contracted with the government during war time and had provided paint for various uses including grenades and planes and bombs. I haven't read anything specifically about this or heard Howard speak to this, but undoubtedly that heightened his awareness of and concern for the political moment and his desire to become involved with art and technology, specifically technology in the service of good, which was something that he was very clear about in his manifesto for EAI that he wanted to become part of the, what was then the countercultural embrace of technology, which he found very inspiring and exciting because it was humanizing this technology and using it for creative expression. Howard Wise's Gallery, which was located on 57th Street, was a highly regarded center for artists experimenting with light and movement, part of the kinetic and light art movements. Also fostering the careers or exhibiting works by well known artists such as Bruno Munari. Nam June Pike, of course, Tony Martin and Tom Lloyd. All head exhibitions at Howard's Gallery, along with a notable list of other artists. In 1969, he hosted an exhibition called TV as a Creative Medium, which was the first exhibition in the United States to really focus on how artists were experimenting with television and, television technology. I like to point out that Howard's Gallery was just a few doors down from the CBS studio where the 1969 Moon Landing was being broadcast. And this is key because the late 1960s really signifies the apotheosis of television. The moon landing, I think to that point was the widest television audience and it is somewhat coincidental, but also I think important to note that just months apart, just blocks apart from each other. There was the CBS moon landing, which was a big television event, but was also bringing this ethereal and almost unfathomable occasion into the living rooms of people around the world and just down the street. Howard Wise wanted to demystify television technologies. Television might have been its most mysterious or magical incantation. Howard wanted to demonstrate how individuals could retool television for personal and creative expression. That exhibition was something that I think he found so inspiring and it was received so well that he decided to rethink what he was doing and how he was involved in the community. So he closed his gallery and a few years later founded EAI as an alternative paradigm that would be able to function in a different way, notably by emphasizing distribution and artists starting to work, not just with video, but also either attempting to make work for television, but also making work that would then be distributed on video cassette tapes. Something that Howard was just as excited about as he was Paik's synthesizers and other ways that artists might intervene with the technology. So EAI starting in 1973, inaugurated an artist distribution program that to this day is its core program. We continue to distribute a catalog of now over 4,000 titles by over 200 artists internationally for exhibitions, screenings, educational use. Distribution is, I'd say 70 to 80% of EAI's operating budget, which is pretty extraordinary for a non-profit to have that strong of an earned income percentage from what we do. Distribution continues to be the driving force for everything that we are engaged with. It was Howard Wise and then Lori Zippay and then myself in 2019. And Lori really grew Howard's vision and brought it forward, nurtured it, and really called attention to the importance of that history, which continues to go against the grain certainly of art market conventions. Video art has had many challenges along the way and isn't always well recognized or appreciated within an institutional context. And I think Lori did a lot to really change how the art world thought of this type of artwork specifically. I also think about how lucky I am to end up at EAI, but also how lucky I am specifically to have worked for Lori, to have Lori as my boss. Lori is someone with whom I share a complete and profound likeness compatibility in our thinking about art. And I think that Lori is in her own way, very independent as well, and certainly is a big supporter of experimentation and has a real embrace as well of artists who resist classification. That might even be a term that I've borrowed from Lori in thinking about what it is that brings all of these artists together that we love, beyond just the fact that they work in video or moving image. There was this other quality that Lori would often say was a kind of EAIness to artists or to the staff that worked there and Lori really espoused that and nurtured it. So to have that deep connection with your boss , I think is pretty remarkable and is one of the many reasons why I stayed at EAI for so long. Obviously, Lori also had a long tenure she started at EAI in the eighties while Howard Wise was still alive, and I think he pretty quickly saw that she had a lot of potential and he groomed her to take over for him and she stepped in. It was a really quick trajectory from her first working at EAI to becoming the executive director. And she was there in an official capacity until 2019. 

[00:23:12] Ben: Wow. Obviously you are now executive director, but , but before stepping up in 2019 you spent considerable time at EAI, so I'd imagine, especially with what a small organization is, your role must have changed and evolved over the years. 

[00:23:27] Rebecca: Just to set the scene a little bit, when I was being interviewed for the job, Galen I think was giving me a little insight and said, you know, if you get this job, you'll be the distribution assistant and you're gonna be working with the new distribution director who we're bringing over from London. Which really intimidated me but when I got the position, the new distribution director who happened to be John Thompson, now co-founder, co-director of the wonderful Foxy Production Gallery with Michael Gillespie. In those early days, we shared a space with DIA. DIA's offices and our offices they were all on the same floor and they were fairly intertwined. And it was a very different setting than one might think of as like a Chelsea art institution setting today. And when Lauren was working there, Cory Archangel would drop by sometimes to hang out cuz they were very close friends And then Seth and Bob were in this technical area in the back of the office, which was like the cool area where you would go to hang out a little bit and to have heady conversations about art in general, but also video art specifically. In DIA's exhibition space. Just next door from where our offices were, the what is now Houseworth was the former DIA exhibition building and on the rooftop, Dan Graham. Had installed one of his pavilions and also designed a cafe and video salon and that became a very important space where, visitors could come and have a cup of coffee and watch video from EAI's archive. But it was also about the DIA staff and the EAI staff who all happened to be employed at that time. Wade Guyton was working at Dia, Bettina Funcke Seth Price. was like a real conversation happening about, around what they were seeing and the art world around them in that moment, which was something that I picked up on as well. I was often having these meetings or encounters with artists and just, I'd have that moment where I was like, I can't believe that I'm sitting here having a casual conversation with Charlie Atlas, or Eleanor Anton is here for an event. Joan Jonas is just swinging by with a tote bag with some tapes. Carolee Schneemann, became a good friend and like somebody that was just around. She would often come to EAI to edit and would pat around in bare feet. I became good friends with Jaimie Davidovich. I couldn't believe these artists and the relationship that you could have with them, and that's always been something that's really important for everyone at EAI is having that proximity to artists and that ability to work so closely with them. That's probably one of the main reasons I stayed so long cuz I just, I couldn't imagine another job where I would have that relationship, that direct relationship with these artists who also happen to be, I know I'm biased, but they happen to be the artists, some of the artists I most admire.

[00:26:52] Ben: Of course EAI was founded at least in part, around this premise of distribution because, around the time that EAI was founded, the kind of material media reality of video art and film made the act of distributing it enmass difficult for artists to manage themselves. In a day and age where artists can just, upload something to YouTube or even go live, and broadcast on the internet to a potentially infinite audience. So in this day and age, what does distribution mean? And what does that look like for, an organization like eai? And I'm, curious, how has the mission of EAI shifted over the years as those material realities have evolved?

[00:27:41] Rebecca: I remember when we brought Jayson Scott Musson into distribution and notably his Hennessy Youngman project, which for those who don't know, still lives on YouTube and is freely available to watch there. This question about EAI's role and what our relationship to this work was, came up and it made me really reflect on that because the origins of eai, it's rooted in this countercultural moment where there were these guerilla television collectives, the Videofreex, notably, who really wanted to connect with the public in a different way. They actually thought that they had a chance of producing programming for broadcast television. They wanted to be on that stage. They didn't just wanna use television in an experimental and creative way, they actually wanted to engage the public in a different way through the tool of television. It is appropriate, of course to make a direct connection between television and YouTube and the internet and the current moment that we're in TikTok, whatever it might be. And to emphasize that it's always been about information exchange and giving the public a way to engage with that in an unfettered way, an uncontrolled way, or a dynamic way. Our distribution, programs model, our fee structure, all of it was structured to be accessible. Getting back to the Jayson Musson moment. There was concern, I think, that EAI distributing the Hennessy Youngman project that was on YouTube, freely available on YouTube, would somehow change that relationship and maybe institutionalize it or classify it in a way that would lose, of course, the beautiful framework of YouTube. and all that surrounded that, the amazing comments that accrued over time. The free and open kind of relationship that you could have to it. But the beauty is to think of the multiplicity of platforms artists can engage with. So Jayson, for example, himself as an artist, wasn't concerned that EAI distributing his. Work would somehow lessen the impact of its presence on YouTube. Conversely, I don't think Jayson was concerned that in order to market or to make his artwork successful within an art industry or art market context, he had to pull it from the public. He had to pull it from YouTube, which is all too often an impulse, I think, is to impose a scarcity model on work that really needs to be distributed. Needs to be accessible. And that's something that is shared by a number of the artists that we work with. Ryan Trecartin is another example. He has a number of works freely available for view on YouTube while we also distribute it in a more formal context. But I see our role as just helping to be like an ambassador for the artist where the pivot point between the institutions that we're working with and the artists we're helping the artists to communicate their exhibition and screening preferences while we're also communicating to the artist what challenges a museum or cultural institution or screening space might be facing. Acting as that interface between the artist and whatever institution is going to bring their work to an audience is such an important role. In advocating for artists, obviously the fee structure that we have returns a royalty to artists so that they can get something back for their creative work. At the same time, we're not in the business of just making as much money as we can. Obviously we have to keep the lights on and the doors open and all that, but we also want to be accessible for a wide range of institutions and we're having very early conversations about how we might shift our pricing model to be able to adapt more flexibly to institutions of different sizes. Last year EAI became WAGE certified and we're all very proud of that, and we've initiated larger conversations with wage to start thinking about that model, which I hope would make it even more accessible to a broader arts community. Lori and I would often have conversations about how strange it was if we were giving a public talk, or we're meeting with a class. Increasingly we found ourselves having to define un-editioned video as opposed to editioned video and we were really perplexed by that. We thought un-edditioned video I understand that term is a little bit weird, but un-edditioned video is its natural state. EAI distributes video art that is not limited by an imposed scarcity model. speaking to the history a bit, EAI was specifically founded to offer this new model for artists, this alternative paradigm wherein they would put their video works into broader distribution. EI would handle that and then would return a royalty to the artist based on the number of screenings and exhibitions that particular work saw. So I think that EAI might have been partly inspired by a kind of film cooperative model in its distribution program, and then of course with a nod to Leo Castelli's video and film distribution program. It was meant to be a way of circulating artists film and video work in a context that also might have come a little bit more from like a theatrical distribution model. On the film side of things. So EAI provides artist works and quotes a fee depending on what that usage is gonna be. If it's gonna be a single screening, an exhibition or if it's gonna be a longer term archival license. EAI does not sell anything we only license works, even if it's for what we call now a life of work license agreement that could be in perpetuity. It's still not an outright sale. So there's still limitations in terms of what an institution or a collection can do with the work. When I started at EAI, the primary exhibition format was S V H S tape, and I have seen the changes through, of course, to D V D, then to BluRay and now we work primarily in file formats. H 2 64 files are current standard. But we have recently started to offer what I called the life of work license agreement. For institutions interested in collecting file formats as opposed to tape based masters for their collections. 

[00:35:18] Ben: EAI is unique in many ways. Of course, it's not a gallery, it's not a museum, it's not a private collection, of course. And in some ways it's a very pure expression of being an advocate for the artist's interests. Are there any artists specifically that you have had a kind of like long term relationship with during your time at EAI?

[00:35:44] Rebecca: Quite a few very important relationships that have become long lasting friendships. One of the first people that comes to mind for me is Jaime Davidovich. And just to introduce him a bit, Jaime was a very important artist who is probably most known for his cable access show. The Live Show. Which Aired on public access in New York City from the late 1970s, early eighties. He was someone who was extremely interested in working within the space of television, but artistically as a bit of a raley gesture. As part of his contribution, Jaime convinced a sports bar proprietor to swap out whatever game was showing on the TV in the bar, and instead show He did a, a few videos where he. With his camera focused on the baseboard of a room and like Intentionally very dull content. And Jaime convinced the bar owner to swap out like the football game with this videotape of his somehow. And he described it to me as his version of Duchamp's urinal, and said, I have one-upped\ Duchamp. Duchamp's urinal is great, but instead of taking the ordinary object and putting it in the museum. Isn't it great to take art and put it in this other context, this kinda quotidian context so that people might encounter art in an unexpected place, which I thought was really beautiful. Michael Smith is another one who I feel, an important friendship and connection with Charlie Atlas, Tali Hinkis of Lovid, Kristin Lucas you know, but then they're also the, foundations or organizations that have allowed me to work with an artist work where I never got to meet the artist. But I feel really honored to be a part of representing them. One that comes to mind is Merce Cunningham. Merce Cunningham is another artist who I just think is extraordinary and I feel very impacted by his thinking and by all that he did in his career. And for whatever reasons, when I would have meetings at the Cunningham Foundation, I'd come away and just think, I can't believe this is my job, , you know, like I'm talking to the Merce Cunningham Foundation and hopefully helping to advocate for, having his work be on view somewhere, be more accessible. But I've really had so many important connections. 

[00:38:27] Ben: As you've mentioned, you stepped up in 2019 as the new executive director of EAI so I would imagine that must be a huge shift. That's like a massive responsibility and big shoes to fill as we've heard, what has that been like?

[00:38:42] Rebecca: Well, It's been as intense as it possibly could be. Not just because I did have very big, very fashionable shoes to fill. But obviously because it was just a few months before March, 2020 when I emerged from a screening of strange days at Anthology Film Archives to realize that the world was never gonna be the same. And then EAI had a big relocation last year the setting of Chelsea wasn't one that we felt was a good fit for us or for our audience. And we've noticed that before the pandemic there had been a little bit of a drop off and people just stopping by for a screening or visiting the office on a whim. We realized that it was in our best interest to find a new space and a new part of the city. Just by chance and mentioning this to a group of small arts organizations that had formed a coalition to support each other in resource share during the pandemic. I mentioned that we were potentially moving, and Molly from Triple Canopy reached out to me right away and wanted to talk about potentially sharing the space that Triple Canopy moved into in 2016 and beautifully built out to be this very flexible workspace slash performance space. We wanted to have a place that would be really comfortable and open, and that would also be situated alongside colleagues like Artist Space or Triple Canopy who all had relocated to that Tribeca Chinatown area. But that was last year. So there was the leadership transition, the pandemic, the move. There was also a significant staff change. We brought the wonderful Caroline Gill on as a director of media collection and preservation. So there were a lot of really significant changes. I certainly speak for myself, but. All of my colleagues also have been talking about how great this fall feels because we're, able to sit down and not that we ever stop doing what we do, but we're really able to project forward in a way that feels different. EAI also celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021, which was another significant milestone, needless to say. And it inspired some very productive conversations, which are ongoing about our organizational mission, our strategic plan for the future. It's incredible how well Howard Wise's vision has lasted how it is still durable in a very different art context. And if anything, it's almost as if this current moment is the one that can maybe fully realize some of the things that he was talking about. Because in the early 1970s, there was a lot of hope. That television, cable television specifically, would actually literally be a new arena for artistic expression, which just wasn't how it went. There were those who knew that the internet was coming and obviously a lot of important developments were happening on that side of things. But I think that we have gotten to a point that was maybe in the fantasy or kind of the vision of a lot of those important , seventies era visionaries. I will speak frankly and say that the now reigning art model of editioned video does present a challenge of sorts for us. We have had some artists leave. EAI's distribution service because they wanted to addition their work and edition encouraged by a commercial gallery. They have thought it would be better to pull it from distribution, create again this kind of scarcity model around the work. And in some cases I think that maybe financially and in terms of institutions that might collect the work that has worked out. But, I disagree. I don't think that these things are incompatible. I think that artists can work with a commercial gallery, and work within that context, and also have their work be distributed and widely available. In fact, I think it's essential that the work be in distribution and be available because my greatest fear and what any artist's greatest fear should be is obsolescence and having their work fall out of circulation. It's one thing to have this conversation on the level of exhibitions and museum collections and private collectors. But it's a whole other thing to have this conversation in an educational context. And when art is not available for scholarly use, for classroom study, for students to discover on their own, that is a thing I think is most worrisome. You know, if EAI had to get out of the business providing works to museums for exhibitions, it would be a major change. But if EAI suddenly was not offering work for those educational purposes, I think that that would be really, awful. Thinking specifically on the kind of commercial art side, I don't think the galleries wanna do that work. So what happens is if the work is pulled from distribution, it's just at risk of being forgotten and being lost. 

[00:44:19] Ben: That's a really good point, And also even if it doesn't disappear, the artists won't really have any say over how it is seen in an educational context. When I was in art school, it was like really common for professors to have like their illicit dark archive, right? So, Rebecca, you mentioned that EAI recently celebrated its 50th birthday, so happy birthday EAI 

[00:44:43] Rebecca: Thank you. 

[00:44:44] Ben: Where do you think EAI will be in the next 50 years?

[00:44:49] Rebecca: On the one hand, as a small nonprofit organization, we can't necessarily say, Oh, well, we're gonna be at the vanguard of whatever is happening with technology art. I think that, was a very exciting, catalytic moment in the late 1960s, but so much has changed. So the relationship of art and technology has also changed profoundly, and that's something that we're talking about is how has our relationship to artistic use of technology changed. But EAI really focusing on the resources that it offers to the public and the ways in which we can support artists in various stages of their careers. Artists who are not necessarily finding support in the available institutions, which continues to be something that we're very aware of. Number of the artists that we work with are incredibly important. We could identify them as being some of the most important artists of their time. And they still slip through the cracks. They are not fully embraced by the art market. They're not necessarily comfortable in other contexts. I know that some artists are starting to experiment a little bit more with the film industry and crossing over into other arenas, but I think that EAI we're really striving to outline our unique role in supporting artists in a way that no one else can. Also, continuing to play that really pivotal role, connecting their work with the public. After two years of just thinking in a survival mode, we're very excited to get back to thinking about what we can do for the artists we represent let's say EAI's educational streaming service really grows and instead of serving maybe a hundred schools a year is serving 1500 schools a year and that group of schools represents a wonderful global diversity in all ways, of school sizes, of types of institutions, locations. That would be so profound if we were able to realize that reach. And that's not something that can happen tomorrow. But I think it's a very realizable goal. And I think that focusing on that has all of these other implications, like suddenly we would have the resources to operate in a different way. We would have the resources to support artists in a different way. A really significant milestone for us would be being able to invest more in the educational streaming model. it might offer us more stable income and at this perilous moment for small arts organizations throughout New York City, throughout the world, really focusing on stability. I'd like to think that in 50 years EAI in some ways hadn't changed too profoundly at its core. Maybe we would be representing like 500 artists instead of 200 artists and have a doubled collection. And, a whole different relationship to our archival practices and have stabilized some of those things. But I like a lot about our model because it continues to offer an alternative paradigm for artists who not only seek that out, but I think need it for the type of art they wanna make. One thing that I also think we'd like to circle back to or think about is how can we create a space, like really create a space for artists to experiment in on the production side? That's really at the core of EAI's founding. I didn't talk about it too much, but before the distribution program, EAI inaugurated its editing facility and it was one of the only organizations of its kind that offered artists access to editing tools, which they would've needed in the early days of working with video. And obviously that's changed as more artists tend to work on their own computers and in their studios, but I think that having that direct connection on the production level would be really exciting. that's always something that we're looking towards.

[00:49:11] Ben: Yeah. reflecting on what you were saying about, EAI's model and, we've been talking about sustainability and like the shift in the art market and I think that EISs longevity is a testament to this interesting, unique position that the organization holds. It's like you're not just a non-profit, right? It's like you do steward this very important collection You're not a gallery. So it's like you're not dependent on this, just like constant selling. And we've seen what happens to the small and middle size organizations in that world, my hope is the ei is like the punk rock cockroach of video art that. you know, will survive the, capitalist, apocalypse.

[00:49:58] Rebecca: I mean you put it beautifully. I, I'd love to think that EAI continues to be an alternative paradigm for another 50 years

[00:50:06] Ben: Thinking more to the immediate term , I'm curious if there are any exciting projects coming up for EAI that our listeners can look forward to?

[00:50:14] Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. We're getting back to doing events in person, which is really exciting. And we'll be having hopefully a regular schedule of events once a month. We're also working on a really significant project with No Place Press. My colleague Tyler Maxon and I and Rachel Turner of No Place Press are editing and republishing The New Television, A Public Private Art, which was a notable publication from 1977, which EAI was involved with publishing on the heels of Open Circuits a significant conference hosted at MoMA in 1974. You can still find copies, but it's basically out of circulation, really hard to find. It collected the papers that were delivered at the Open Circuits Conference, which brought together a surprising array of artists and theorists and poets to talk about the future of video art, notably artists working in a television milieu. And we're going to hopefully be launching this book on the 50th anniversary of Open Circuits in 2024. We also just recently with ICA Philadelphia made available the exhibition catalog for broadcasting EAI at ica, which is an exhibition I co-curated with Alex Klein at ICA in 2018. So it's a little bit after the fact, but it's a really wonderful volume that is more than just an exhibition catalog. One of its main highlights, in fact, is a long oral history with Lori Zippay talking about EAI's history and also going a little bit more into the background of our sort of artists who have worked at EAI and different capacities and conversations between, that we staged for the exhibition. Conversations between Ulysses Jenkins and Sondra Perry and Tony Cokes and Antoine Catala are collected there. That's available for purchase through our website or by our office and I'll be happy to give you a copy.

[00:52:34] Ben: Awesome. Well, Rebecca, Thank you so much for coming on the show. it's been just really awesome to hear your story and hear just like a real behind the scenes of the evolution of EAI and just like all of the amazing artists that have come through there over the years. So thank you so much. 

[00:52:51] Rebecca: Thank you so much, Ben, for the conversation. I've really enjoyed it. It's been really great to talk about all this with you and, I've really appreciated the opportunity.

[00:52:59] Ben: And as always, thank you, dear listener for joining us. If you want to help support our work and mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence. Or if a one-time tax deductible gift is more your speed, you can always do that through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for The Arts. over at artandobsolescence.com/ slash donate where you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes. And last but not least you can always find us on social media @artobsolescence. Until next time take care of my friends, my name is Ben Fino-radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.