Paul Ryan
Year of birth, place
Year of death, place
Role at the ZKM
- Artist of the archive
Biography
Paul Ryan was a theorist who, while working as an assistant to Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, began to take an interest in the relationship between video and cybernetic theory. His first installation was the work “Everyman’s Moebius Strip,” which was presented in 1969 at the exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium.” With his videotapes and contributions to Radical Software, which he subsequently expanded upon in the publication “Birth and Death and Cybernation” (1973), Ryan made a significant contribution to the thematic direction of Raindance. In 1972, he moved to the Hudson Valley and began working on the so-called Earthscore notation system, an ecological approach to video production. Ryan also served as a professor of media theory. His works have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at MoMA (1984), The Whitney Museum (1999–2000), and the Venice Biennale (2002).
Since 2016, the ZKM archive has held over 1,000 videos from the Paul Ryan Collection.