The Paul Ryan Video Collection

Paul Ryan (1943, New York City – 2013, Solebury, Pennsylvania) was an American video artist and theorist. He began his career as a research assistant to Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, where he turned his attention to the medium of video. In 1969, he co-founded the »Raindance Corporation« (renamed the »Raindance Foundation« in 1971), whose archive is also housed at the ZKM and which was the subject of the exhibition »Radical Software. The Raindance Foundation, Media Ecology and Video Art« (2017–2018) at the ZKM. Ryan published numerous articles in the magazine »Radical Software«. His work »Everyman’s Moebius Strip« was shown in 1969 in the groundbreaking exhibition »TV as a Creative Medium« at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York.

Paul Ryan used the medium of video to explore urban environments and ecosystems and developed an ecologically oriented approach to video production. Based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce and the cybernetics of Gregory Bateson, he created the »Earthscore Notational System« a notation system for a shared perception of ecological realities in the medium of video. Based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories, Ryan also developed the relational concept of »Threeing.« This is a social practice in which three people or elements build sustainable, cooperative relationships, both between people and between people and ecosystems. This concept also found expression in the medium of video. The aim was to elicit behaviors that are in harmony with the Earth’s self-preserving mechanisms, thereby ensuring the survival of humanity with the help of artistic strategies. In doing so, Paul Ryan drew attention early on to the potential of the medium of video to establish a new relational, ecological way of thinking and to use art as a tool for social change in the sense of »cybernetic guerrilla warfare.«

Ryan was a professor of media production and theory at the Savannah College of Art and Design and the New School for Social Research. He was also a co-founder of the Gaia Institute, where he served as co-director from 1985 to 1991. 

Since 2016, over 1,000 videos from the Paul Ryan Collection have been housed in the ZKM archive. In the project »Video-Wissen. Künstlerische Medienforschung in der frühen Videokunst« (2020), which was implemented by Barbara Filser together with students from KIT, some of the videos have been catalogued.