As part of »Medialounge at Six«, George Barker, fellow of the »Archivist in Residence« program of the State University of Art and Design (HfG) and the ZKM talks about the Raindance Foundation. 

The Raindance Foundation were a prominent video collective and media think tank operating in New York during the early 1970s. From 1970–1974, they produced a publication named »Radical Software« which attempted to expose the new communicative and artistic potentials of video tape recording technologies, potentials which could be realized only once these technologies were removed from capital and commercial interests and environments.

Barker will present archival research performed for the exhibition »Radical Software. The Raindance Foundation, Media Ecology and Video Art« (opening at ZKM June 30th) by screening and contextualizing works and texts from the collection that lay beyond the scope of that what will be exhibited. In the process, he will discuss multiple forgotten projects and the core trajectories of the Raindance Foundation as they are detailed in the pages of Radical Software.

Although many of these projects have been sparsely documented, Barker will ask what contemporary and future attempts could be valuable in order to restore and re-historicise video art works and histories which remain outside of an art historical canon.

Organization / Institution

ZKM | Karlsruhe