Frank Gillette Video Collection

New York artist Frank Gillette (* 1941, Jersey City) is a pioneer of video art. From 1959 to 1962, Gillette studied painting at the Pratt Institute in New York. He attended seminars with Marshall McLuhan and began filming on the streets of New York in 1968 with a borrowed Sony Portapak camera. 

In 1969, he co-founded the »Raindance Corporation« (renamed the »Raindance Foundation« in 1971), a media think tank and video collective whose goal was to explore the utopian, socially critical, participatory, and emancipatory potential of the newly available medium of video. In the context of the US counterculture of the late 1960s and inspired by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Gregory Bateson, the Raindance Corporation challenged the monopoly of commercial television and attempted to create a counter-public sphere in the media. A central medium for this was their magazine »Radical Software«.

Gillette developed multi-channel video works in particular, such as the groundbreaking closed-circuit installation »Wipe Cycle«, which he conceived together with Ira Schneider in 1969. Early on, he began superimposing video recordings with pre-recorded information, such as typography. His closed-circuit installations staged feedback loops and time delays, which he used to explore concepts from information theory and cybernetics. This systems theory perspective was also linked to an ecological approach. In numerous works, he used the medium of video to empirically investigate ecological systems, environments, and taxonomies.

The Frank Gillette Video Collection has been housed at the ZKM since 2018. The approximately 470 analog videotapes were digitized in the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems. The video archive of the Raindance Foundation is also located at the ZKM.