The Fabulous Loop de Loop

THE PORTA PAK: SONY VIDEOROVER DV-2400 (1967) + SONY VIDEOROVER II AV-3400 (1970)

TOWARD THE PORTA PAK

Striving towards better content on broadcast TV is like building a healthy dinosaur. Better to decentralize the medium and get people into using it as their tool. There just isn't enough time to fool around with changing the broadcast mode of television when decentralized, portable VT systems can and are leapfrogging the old system.

Video tape, which had been in development for decades before the introduction of the Portapak, emerged from the development of audio tape, sharing a lot of its technological and institutional history. Even before the development of video tape, video cameras were used by the military – early video cameras were used as part of a weapons guidance systems – and were also adopted by the broadcasting industries – there was a pressing need for instantaneous playback of sporting and news events.

The main disadvantages for the development of video tape technologies had been two-fold: the amount of tape the system consumed and the fidelity of the image. To begin with, the amount of tape that fed through the machines was considerable (thirty feet per second in earlier machines) but once the “quadraplex recording” design was adopted the Ampex VR-1000, which became the TV industries machine of choice by the late 1950s, consumed only “fifteen inches of tape per second—or half an inch per frame—fitting ninety minutes of video onto a reel fifteen inches in diameter.” This brought the machine closer to portability, but it was still, by current standards, colossal and inordinately expensive for general use

The second issue, the question of fidelity of the image, was improved by allocating three functions on a two-inch thick tape. The larger part, running through the centre of the tape, would record the image and the margin at the top of the tape would record the audio, lastly a third track running at the bottom would contain the control data (regulating play back speed &c).

Ampex VR-1000 Videotape Recorder in use at Dallas television station KRLD, c. 1960.

By 1960 the Ampex VR-1000 had introduced a system which integrated the recording of audio and video and which would provide the technological basis for more flexible and portable technologies in the coming decade.

The parallel development of videotape and video-recorders had been taking place in Japan, which in the 1950s had imported the American Ampex VR-1000 systems for use in their own media. The cost and the size of the tape was reduced by Norikazu Sawazaki, who worked for Tokyo Shibaura Denki (Toshiba). His system (1957) wound the tape round a drum in a helix shape (at an angle) making it possible to record the information diagonally. Sawazaki’s system required two tape heads instead of four and reduced the amount of tape needed still further. The Japanese motivation to compete with the American Ampex system was fierce and by 1959 Toshiba, Sony, Matsushita, and the JVC (Victor Company of Japan) all had functioning prototypes of video systems – all of which incorporated a helix system similar to the one Sawazaki had devised. The sticking point for the Japanese companies was that the American firm Ampex held the patent for many of the components, but when Sony developed a transistorised VTR (Video Tape Recorder) Ampex permitted its use for non-broadcast use in exchange for Sony’s transistorized components in Ampex’s equipment.

The next significant stage in the evolutionary graph toward the Portapak is the Sony PV-100 (1961). This helical scanning, transistorised VTR weighed 145 pounds and could be carried by two people. The system could now easily be placed on a boat, train or plane and was used outside of a “mass media” context, for instance as military training equipment and as inflight entertainment on commercial flights.

The Astrovision was a PV-100 built into the bulkhead at the rear of the American Airlines plane’s flight-deck . By 1962 Ampex had developed the VR-1500 system, “small enough to be transported in the trunk of a car.” They suggested it could be used for educational purposes “[…] ideal for transmitting previously recorded educational programs over closed circuit systems and providing instant playback of ‘role playing’ and other classroom activities.”

In 1963 this system was incorporated into the Ampex Signature Home Entertainment System (an elite media package exclusively offered through one department store). This move toward domestic consumption was countered in 1965 by the Sony TCV-2010 Videocorder, which was touted by Sony as “tape yourself TV”. This promise of easy access and personalisation, a closed-circuit system that provided the possibility of real-time engagement and instant playback, bringing us into the realms of self-produced media. Such technologies established a new political and cultural horizon for countercultural initiatives such as The Raindance Corporation and the magazine for “video freeks” Radical Software, but these systems were still beyond the pocket-book of the average American media-artist.

“A New Pastime with a Big Future: Tape-It-Yourself TV,” Life, September 17, 1965, 57.

In October 1965 the Korean artist Nam June Paik, with money from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund, bought a Sony TCV-2010 from the Liberty Music Shop in Manhattan. He immediately set to work, filming Pope Paul VI, who was visiting the United Nations, through the window of his taxi. June Paik played the tape at the Café Go Go in Greenwich Village that same night. “[A]s collage technic replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas” he declared at the time. This was a few months after Andy Warhol had received the rather more cumbersome Philips EL 3400 (weighing in at 100 pounds) as a promotional gift from the company. In Warhol’s’ 1965 film Outer and Inner Space we see Edie Sedgwick talking to her own video image. It is an early recording of the unnerving bodily experience of “telepresence” – whereby the subject apprehends themselves as other and the audience, by extension, is caught in the circuitry of identification. Almost as an artifice of the apparatus, in this early film-video work the element of feedback seeks to destabilise the integrity of the subject. You may remember Lacan’s fantasy of the cybernetic tortoise, where two machines are frozen in apprehension of the self in the other so Sedgwick is caught in a moment of self-apprehension as other – caught in an intersubjective circuit. This decentering of the self could also be read through the lens of Gregory Bateson, to be removed from ones self and to be at the same time present makes one aware of the different levels of abstraction the self is constructed within. Could the video system which abstracts the real-time self and repositions to outside the body also be seen as a technologically advanced Structural Differential? Hasn't this subjective circuitry (the fabulous loop de loop) been a feature of feedback machines since the Vapour Engine? Isn't this an artefact of any feedback machine, which causes us to question the nature of consciousness and through its presence in the world (as a vapour engine, second-guessing computer or cybernetic pet) challenges our notions of how the self is constituted?

Andy Warhol Outer and Inner Space (1965)

Sony’s battery powered VideoRover DV-2400 followed in 1967. The recording unit now weighed eleven pounds, with the camera weighing five. The system recoded on 20-minute CV video reels. This was the first of the “portapaks” – a generic name for the portable video systems produced by Ampex, Sony and Philips in the late 60s and early 1970s. The most successful to emerge was the Sony VideoRover II AV-3400 (1970) which recorded on 30 minute tapes and also afforded instant playback through the camera itself or through a monitor, it carried a standard format, EIAJ Type I tape which could be used on other brands of machine, and perhaps most importantly, it retailed for $1495.

Sony VideoRover II AV-3400, 1970. Annotated photograph from Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), section II, pp. 22–23.

Although variously used as a training tool, an educational aid, in the broadcasting industry and as a surveillance system in business, portable video equipment was about to find a new application in a cultural artistic revolution which embraced ecology, media, aesthetics, which will all refracted within this mirror of subjectivity, the portable video system.

TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF MEDIA

Gregory Bateson's text Awake appeared in the fifth issue of Radical Software. It clearly annotated the errors in epistemology that threatened the future of Spaceship Earth in the second half of the twentieth century.

““[T]he ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form [are] from the Industrial Revolution.

a) It's us against the environment.

b) It's us against other men.

c) It's the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."

f) Economic determinism is common sense.

g) Technology will do it for us .

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievement of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself...”

In 1970 there was nothing unusual about an ecological polemic appearing in a magazine devoted to the uses and maintenance of video systems. There was already an abiding connection between the notion of an ecological system regulated by feedback and a technological system regulated by the same principle. And the parallel notions of "ecology" were not simply analogous, they are systematically and structurally bound together. Steps in a broader ecology of mind.

The attraction of the Portapak was that it produced a circuitry of relations, and provided a new context in which the individual and her-his relation to the collective could be examined, re-examined and performed. The revolution proposed in the pages of Radical Software described a shift from a spectacular form of media to a performative form, in which the self and the community would evolve together in a networked media ecology.

The strands that brought this media culture into existence are multifarious, we will investigate some of them here. We will discuss the antecedent of Radical Software, the counterculture magazine The Whole Earth Catalog, which was founded by Stewart Brand. This publication appeared within a context in which cybernetic ideas had begun to permeate into the broader culture, and Stewart Brand was their ambassador within the counterculture of the 1960s. We will see how in the 1950s and 1960s aesthetics and ecology are increasingly read through a cybernetic lens, and discover that Gregory Bateson's notion of an ecology of mind is central to both.

STEWART BRAND – TOWARD A (MEDIA) ECOLOGY

The model for Radical Software – in which Bateson's ecological polemic, Awake, was published – was Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which was founded in 1968. The aim of the Whole Earth Catalog was to provide “access to tools” for the counterculture communities that sprung up in the second half of the 1960s. These communities sought independence from the industrialised world and from organised politics, and the magazine recognised the need to form a network with like-minded people.

The Whole Earth Catalog provided channels through which self-sustaining systems could flow. Its models were, visually and practically, magazines such as the L.L. Bean Catalog (established in 1917, giving access to information about products from hunting boots to fishing tackle) and the Seers Roebuck and Co. Catalog “the cheapest supply house on Earth” (established 1893). These publications were characterised by a simple description of a product with the minimum of editorialising.

Brand envisioned a “catalog of goods which owed nothing to the supplier and everything to the consumer.” The Whole Earth Catalog contained a list of items and information “where to buy a windmill. Where to get good information on beekeeping. Where to lay your hands on a computer.”

The Whole Earth Catalogue spoke to a new post-war subjectivity, in which alternative, appropriate localised technologies are worked with “hands-on”. So rather than preach a position, the Whole Earth Catalog presented a complete discourse in which environmentalism, consumerism, individual choice and technology were bound together. The "progressive" elements of this culture were tempered by more conservative a culture of thrift and ingenuity which encourages self-responsibility and agency, a countercultural translation of the "pioneer spirit".

It was within this context of self-sustaining ecological living, in which – to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan – each technological development represents and extension of human potential, that cybernetic ideas of ecology were built into the structure of the counterculture of the 1960s. In a cybernetic system each element of that system is mediative, the subject can never be outside mediation.

ORGANIC UNITY – APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY

Stewart Brand first encountered systems orientated ways of thinking as a biology student at Stanford in the late 1950s. There he was taught by Paul Ehrlich, Ehrlich emphasised how elements within a system are engaged in a constant exchange of information, which affords adaptation by directing the flow of energy within that system. Ehrlich extended this cybernetic reading of biological systems further, for Ehrlich humans had reached a point where they could influence their biological development, at which point cultural engagement in the fields of politics, art and conservation become important to evolutionary development. Ehrlich's influence on Brand is apparent in this 1958 diary entry: ““the responsibility of evolution is on each individual man, as for no other species. Since the business of evolution for man has gone over to the mental and psychological phase, each person may contribute and influence the heritage of the species.”

After graduation Brand was drafted into the army and served as an infantryman for two years. Stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Brand spent his weekends visiting his friend, the painter Steve Durkee, in lower Manhattan. Here Brand encountered a group of artists – including musician John Cage, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and performance artist Allan Kaprow– who established a performative practice which blurred the boundaries between art and life. As early as 1952, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Cage and Rauschenberg had organised one the first “happenings” . In Theatre Piece No. 1 Merce Cunningham danced, M. C. Richards read poetry, David Tudor played the piano, whilst Cage gave a lecture; They proposed a form of art in which the dividing line between the artist, artwork and audience is erased.

USCO Stewart Brand second right

In 1963 Steve Durkee, with poet Gerd Stern and sound engineer Michael Callahan, established USCO – an artists’ community in an old Methodist church in Garnerville, Upstate New York.

USCO became a testing ground for methods of art-making and communal living. The “systems”, multi-media approach to art involved newly coined rituals (performances) mediated by strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers and slide shows, which contributed to the visual repertoire of "psychedelia" (the aesthetic of positive feedback). These media served as technologies of self and technologies of community, along with marijuana and peyote and LSD, which all served as tools of the augmentation of consciousness.

It was at USCO that Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller alongside the writings of Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomeraswamy. Coomeraswamy emphasised the traditional role of tribal living and collective craftsmanship which could be observed in many non-occidental societies.

This ecological aesthetic did not involve a rejection of technology but an acceptance of the technologies of non-western cultures which served to enhance ecological and communitarian cohesion. In this sense the counterculture took an approach similar to structural anthropologists – the structures of non-western cultures could be applied to their own experimental culture (cohesion is maintained through the circulation of knowledge through the community). The contemporary media theorist Fred Turner has termed the USCO performances “theatrical ecologies”, they take the on board the cybernetic notion that the individual is a part of a larger environment. This striving for social unity was reflected in the titles of USCO’s multimedia pieces: Who R U? and We R All One.

For several years USCO served as a base as Brand travelled back and forth across America visiting the sites in which a new communitarian counterculture was emerging. Brand also stayed close to the technological developments within the research cultures of Stanford University and the San Fransisco valley (which would later become Silicon Valley) and visited the reservations of Native Americans (he founded an organisation called America Needs Indians).

Brand’s early career describes the contours the emerging counterculture: at Stanford he encountered a vision of ecological unity based on cybernetics; in New York, and at the art commune USCO, he encountered a form of “systems art” which was philosophically close to cybernetics from an ecological and technological perspective. Brand went on to encounter at first hand a nescient communitarianism which understood organic unity in cybernetic terms and used cybernetic technologies of self as forms of collective and individual expression.

Merry Pranksters, on the "Magic Bus"

RESEARCH CULTURES – LSD – ARPANET

In 1959 the writer Ken Kesey joined the creative writing programme at Stanford University. He took up residence with a community of academic bohemians in Perry Lane, a line of ramshackle cottages close to the Sanford golf course. Vic Loval, a Freudian psychologist also living at Perry Lane, introduced Kesey to the experimental "psychomimetic" drugs programme at Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park (the same institution where Bateson conducted his research into the double-bind). The programme, which paid 75 dollars a day, was covertly funded by the CIA's MKULTRA programme. The programme was the singular most influential means by which LSD (then legal) was popularised amongst the staff and students of elite universities across the country. Kesey also took a job as a night assistant at Malmo psychiatric ward, an experience which provided the basis for his first novel, One Flew Over the Coocoo’s Nest (1961) Before long Perry Lane became an unofficial centre for experimentation, inviting others to experience LSD, mescaline and peyote. After Perry Lane was condemned for demolition in 1963, Kesey and a dozen like-minded fellows set up their own community in La Honda, California. This became a laboratory for a life augmented by LSD. This was before the drug was made illegal, and before Timothy Leary and the League for Spiritual Discovery released the drug from a controlled, scientific environment into the realm of cultural experimentation, as “avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers”. Kesey and the group that grew around him, the Merry Pranksters, promoted the drug with missionary zeal, developing a nescient counterculture which would soon become international. They converted an old school bus into a mobile cybernetic sound system; comprising input into the bus via microphones and output via speakers; tape machines would serve as an interface, scrambling, mixing, lagging and playing back. The overall performative play with technology and ambient sounds was similar to the technologies of tactical media championed by William Burroughs in his 1963 text The Invisible Generation [see previous]. The Pranksters painted the bus in vibrant clashing colours (visual positive feedback), attached a sign on the back reading “weird load” and set off from California to New York – with Prankster Mike Hagen filming the odyssey.

Trips Festival 1966

In 1965 Kesey and the Pranksters organised a series of Acid Tests. These were parties devoted to the exploration of LSD, and further experimentation with lights and noise. The Acid Tests took place mostly in the bay area of San Francisco. It was at events like the Acid Tests that the aesthetic of immersion developed. “mixed media” installations that incorporated light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock 'n' roll and black light; all amplifying, visual and auditory feedback. Alongside LSD, these media worked as a technological ensemble which wrapped around the individual and the community.

Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey centre, in chair Stewart Brand at back (in white)

In 1966 the Acid Tests upscaled to the three-day long Trips Festival, at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Fransisco. The organisers included Kesey and the Pranksters along with Stewart Brand and members of the artists’ commune USCO. The event featured the most developed immersive light show that had been seen to date; the 6000 visitors were offered punch laced with LSD and listened to music by live bands including The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. This event would later be interpreted as the counterculture’s introduction into mainstream cultural life, this “gathering of the tribes” indicated a cultural shift had taken place in the younger generation of (mostly white middle class) Americans which was developing a different value system and a different aesthetic.

The Mother of All Demos, 1968, Stewart Brand at the camera

The three technologies I outlined above (1) the “cybernetic bus" (2) the light show and (3) LSD, all serve in an ensemble as technologies of the self, in which the senses are enhanced and extended. The aim of the psychedelic project (in the minds of Kesey, Brand, Leary et al at least) might be understood as the augmentation of human potential. But this notion of augmentation and extension can also be understood as an artifice of cybernetics per se. Which is why the co-evolution between humans and the technologies that surround them was evident as a concept in the therapies that emerged at the time (see next chapter); the countercultures that emerged at the beginning of the 1960s and also in the research cultures of the Bay Area.

Mother of All Demos, Engelbart types code on split screen, in real-time, 1968

A good example of the protean ground that cybernetic ideas provided can be seen in the Stanford Research Institutes, Augmentation Research Center run by Douglas Engelbart from 1957 The project was situated a short distance from Veterans Hospital where Kesey and others had participated in LSD research programme. At the Augmentation Research Center Engelbart and his team developed elements which would be integral parts of the future personal computer, such as bitmapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and early versions of the graphical user interface.

And here again we see a material connection between the work of Gregory Bateson and the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Members of Engelbart’s research team were also enthusiastic “avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers” which helped inform their attitude to augmentation; Gregory Bateson’s notions of “co-evolution” and “level’s of abstraction” were incorporated into Engelbard’s theorisation of the new systems they developed; when Engelbart organised what came to be known as “the mother of all demos” (1968) – in which the key elements of what would be the “personal computer” were shown to the world – Stewart Brand (the organiser of the Trips Festival and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog) was there to record the event.

Mother of All Demos (keyboard and mouse), 1968

The demo was a multi-media event in itself, using real-time split screen showing Engelbart’s face alongside the code he types into the system. We see the cursor (then called the “tracking spot”) crossing the screen,; we see the user making drawings; we see real time video links between different computers; we see the keyboard and the mouse demonstrated as an augmentation of human capacities. Engelbart’s colleague, from a remote monitor, explains the code that runs the system (NLS); Engelbart explains how all these elements are co-extensive, and the forthcoming ARPANET (the forerunner to the internet) as an augmentation of the human ability to store and share knowledge. Beginning in 1967, Engelbart was also under a contract from ARPA, to develop a system called NLS, (oNLine System) which would network computer-literate communities, which again serve to augment human intelligence. All the time the media through which all this is communicated reenforces the notion that the information feedback loop extends organisation into new areas, that this technology is a technology of the self and of the coming community. The performativity that feedback apparatus naturally engender is evident here, as it is in the “neuropharmacological research” of the merry pranksters; or the blind improvisations of the cybernetic tortoise.

It was into this culture that Radical Software was born. Within the broader counterculture community, video emerged as a technology of self, amongst a repertoire of other technologies which situated the self within a broader media ecology. By the late 1960s it was also evident that the counterculture extended beyond an enclave of "hippies" but was manifest in multifarious research cultures.

Phylis Gershuny

Beryl Korot

RADICAL SOFTWARE - TOWARD A (MEDIA) ECOLOGY

The Raindance Corporation was established as a platform for media activism, users of new video technology and as a "think tank" – a radical alternative to the RAND Corporation. Radical Software, which became the editorial outlet for Raindance, was founded by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny.

It provided a forum for discussion, the decimation of information and the formulation of media theory as well as a platform for established writers and theorists. The founders and contributors to Radical Software were largely artists working with the new Portapak video system which became accessible at the end of the 1960s. At the cost of $1495 it was not cheap, but it was in the range of many more users than had previously been the case, and could be easily acquired by collectives. Tapes were easy to distribute, and could be re-used and copied. The second technological revolution came in the form of cable (CATV). Ralph Lee Smith’s article The Wired Nation (1970) heralded a new media revolution which would accord access to the contact of “newspapers, mail service, banking and shopping facilities, data from libraries and other storage centres, school curricula and other forms of information too numerous to specify. In short, every home and office will contain a communications centre of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life.” The artists Frank Gillette and Ira Schnider, in the first issue of Radical Software (1970), recognised that the combination of cable hooked up to portable video equipment would break the ecology of the mass media, radically changing the subject positions of producers and consumers of media. CATV, like CCTV, was a closed circuit system extended to a very great extent allowing for a feedback loop of communication between participants over a great distances. The recursive structure of this system could take the form of shared communication and could equally create positive feedback (noise). Both feedback as noise and negative feedback as a system of control offered political and artistic potential which the community around Radical Software were keen to exploit.

Raindance and Michael Shemberg’s publication Guerrilla Television (with graphics by architect-design collective Antfarm) (1971) would identify mainstream ‘Media America’ as designed to minimise such feedback, allowing only a one-way flow between sender and receiver. This resulted in an accumulation of cultural power into the hands of corporate America. Portable video systems, along with access to cable technology, would help redress this imbalance. A principle platform in the pages of Radical Software, therefore, was to lobby for the open uses of CATV (the appointment of licences began in 1970). Between 1968 and 1972 cable operators offered support to community based projects, this was exploited by a wave of artist-activist initiatives and underwritten by New York State Council for the Arts (which in 1970 increased its budget to the arts from $2m to $20m). Initiatives by artists and artist collectives also received support from private foundations. The emphasis and motivation on the community of video artists working for and around Radical Software was on community based media projects and ecological activist projects (the annual Earth Day began in 1970). Paul Ryan had worked for Marshall McLuhan whilst McLuhan was visiting professor at Fordam University (1967-1968). McLuhan gave Ryan access to Sony Portapaks and tape that McLuhan had received from from Sony (he had little practical use for them).

Ryan and Gillette, along with their colleague Roy Skodnick would become key architects in the discourse of video-art-activism as it emerged from the ecological movement. They produced seminal works, texts and forums for theory and practice (often through the offices of Raindance and Radical Software). Radical software combined pragmatic advice of how to work the technology with an emergent theoretical framework which considered the implications of that technology on future culture and society. Ryan was inspired by McLuhan at his most optimistic, who in Understanding Media, had posited that electronic media could result in “the ultimate harmony of all being” , this, in Radical Software was tempered with a politically critical approach which advocated “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare” which challenged the "top down" monopolies of Media America.

Videofreex Cc. 1973. Relaxing with a Portapak

Frank Gillette: Random Notes on the special case or (loop de loop), pg 6, Radical Software, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1970

If the Portapak as a piece of technology encouraged a radical new form of social-media and media collectivity, it also allowed for the creation of artworks which made the individuals place within a media circuitry visible. Paul Ryan’s Everyman’s Mobius Strip (1969), Frank Gillette and Ira Scheider’s Wipe Cycle (1968),and Dan Graham’s TV Camera/ Monitor Performance (1971); Frank Gillette’s, Video: Process and Meta-Process (1973) all performed the logic of the self as co-extensive to a given system =(nervous system, system, environment). As Skodnick was to reflect years later, social movements and media movements were converging “[…] with Bateson as principle guide to the complexities of nature and culture. [Frank] Gillette did it, Randy Sherman did it, and apparently [Dan] Graham did it too. Anyone who happened to get hold of a portable video system at the time immediately overloaded on circuits, playback, feedback and fabulous loop de loop.” The Porta Pak, Skodnick observed, was a “beautiful system” that not only allowed the user to “ track social behaviour but also to see how social behaviour is framed […] TV dissolved into a more plastic language.” Skodnick continues, “ [T]here was a full-bore media war of information then, and visual information was fully up for grabs. We could put ourselves in it, see ourselves seeing ourselves, and even enter the jouster with the ‘News cycle’ emptying out, as was demonstrated in [Gillette’s] Wipe Cycle.” Such was the “radical ecology of Radical Software”. Paul Ryan: “Video itself mutated from a counter cultural gesture to an art genre. When video was principally a countercultural gesture, it held the promise of social change unmediated by the art world. Now, whatever promise of social change video holds is mediated by the art world. This is a significant difference. People unfamiliar with the mutation find it difficult to appreciate the unlimited sense of possibility that early video held.”

It was in this milieu that Bateson's ideas made their transition from the sphere of ecology into media art. For Bateson, in the realms of anthropology, psychiatry, ecology and aesthetics the self-reflexive subject is central, the medial subject who recognises their place within a hierarchy of abstraction The progression from Behaviour, Teleology & Purpose, the McCulloch-Pitts model, Norbert Wiener’s negentropy and, Ashby’s Homeostat to the emerging ecology movement and its abiding connection to media ecology can be found in Bateson's 1968 essays Effects of Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation and The Roots of Ecological Crisis.[discussed in the previous chapter] In these Bateson returns to the beginning of the fabulous loop de loop, and to the evolutionary models that had excited Samual Butler's imagination a century before, to the 'vapour engine' which, even on this side of the fabulous loop de loop, serves again as a model for evolution.