{"id":5621,"title":"Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Romance of Interactivity","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/reach-out-and-touch-someone-romance-interactivity","version":"b5e3f8a1c21d7f0cff4ea79a5e6a5fa5dd553276a7c70958956b94e1731c403f","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.442359+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Ann-Sargent Wooster"}],"authorKeys":["Wooster, Ann-Sargent"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Bay Area Video Coalition","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1020","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Romance of Interactivity.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/reach-out-and-touch-someone-romance-interactivity.","publication":"Ann-Sargent Wooster. Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Romance of Interactivity. Bay Area Video Coalition. 1990.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5621.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1020","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":100169},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":91},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":882},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC1020","generated":false,"characters":91}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"The telephone was introduced in 1876 and for the first time allowed people to be two places at once. Until fairly recently long-distance telephone calls were an exotic phenomenon and were only used in extreme circumstances such as a death in the family. I remember a time when it was a daring, almost erotic experience to call a boyfriend long-distance instead of writing a letter simply because the kind of intimacy the telephone makes possible was not yet the everyday experience it has become and long-distance telephone calls were regarded as expensive, extravagant luxuries on a par with a dozen long-stemmed roses. Today, we have to use the telephone \u00F4to reach out and touch someone\u00F6 because families are fractured into ever smaller units separated by vast geographical distances. Atlas Van Lines estimates typical corporate managers move fourteen times during their lifetimes. (2) Transience and isolation have become characteristics of suburban family life, and only 5 percent of American children see their grandparents on a regular basis. (3) Physical intimacy is being eclipsed by an ongoing dialogue between computers and humans that has already lead to a symbiotic, co-evolution that is central to artists\u00C6 dreams of interactivity. Many artists from Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean Arp once wanted to reduce the total arbitrariness of their increasingly subjective visions and to renounce specific goals in favor of a \u00F4pervasive openness to new impressions\u00F6 by giving over control of part of their compositions to \u00F4external arbitrary forms\u00F6 (6) through the use of chance or aleatory composition. Chance allowed them to create open-ended structures that produced \u00F4a kind of chaos characteristic of nature.\u00F6 It was also a device for bridging the gap between art and life because many like John Cage believed \u00F4art should not be different from life but an act within life. Like all of life, with its accidents and variety and disorder and only momentary beauty.\u00F6 (7) Recent computer studies have shown that use of chance in art only symbolically reduced the artist\u00C6s control by substituting one kind of order for another more limited one. McCorduck has noted that by \u00F4deliberately using chance, tossing a coin, we derive not uncertainty but a very large measure of certainty that can not be achieved otherwise.\u00F6 (8) Artists\u00C6 reasons for using chance anticipate the new reality models (the mainstay of postmodern science), which are concerned with such things as \u00F4undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, \u00E6fracta,\u00C6 catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes.\u00F6(9) While denying us any sense of free will by showing us subject to unseen whirlpools of fate, mathematical theorems and computer modeling have shown that the nonlinear twists and wild disorder of chaos have their own structural logic, albeit one composed of infinitely spiraling subatomic coastlines of fractals. At the end of the nineteenth century the illusionistic fourth wall of the theater was toppled and works by Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and others eliminated traditional distinctions between stage and audience with new and more environmental theater configurations. By the middle of the twentieth century happenings used all the available three-dimensional space, including that occupied by the spectator. In destroying theatrical conventions they anticipated the synesthesia of discotheques and the experience of participating in the mass spectacles from peace marches and rallies to rock concerts like Woodstock that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s. The genesis of video art in the late 1960s was directly attributable to the introduction of low-cost, portable, 1/2-inch consumer-grade video equipment to the United States by Sony in 1968. The early black-and-white portapacks were a far cry from today\u00C6s home equipment. A portable recorder, black-and-white camera and monitor cost between $1,500 and $2,000 dollars, about the same price as the comparable low-end equipment today, but the dollar was worth more then and the tape had to be threaded on an open reel. Also, the unit produced an unstable signal that was adequate in closed-circuit situations but was close to \u00F4junk\u00F6 compared with broadcast television. In spite of these disadvantages, this ugly duckling immediately appealed to several constituencies that were virtually identical at the time: artists interested in new art materials, especially sculpture in an expanded field; technological or kinetic art; conceptual art; avant-garde film; and political activists. These groups eventually separated into several different camps-documentary, video installations, and video art. However, elements of the issues and ideas present at the initial nexus remained. Video art was born at a time when the monolithic power of broadcast television as a mass communication and entertainment medium was being examined critically. As David Ross pointed out, \u00F4Television was no longer viewed as the activity of the culture, it was the culture.\u00F6(19) Video artists came to their new medium with \u00F4seven channel childhoods.\u00F6 (20) Video art is more closely associated with broadcast television than a house painter is to Rembrandt. Not only do they share common tools and similar imagery and imaging systems, video art constantly compared itself to broadcast television and defined itself as being different from its jumbo elder relative while secretly yearning for a share of its power. Many video pioneers saw independent video as a revolutionary and utopian tool for giving power to the people and changing the world. \u00F4Video offered a means to decentralize television so that a Whitmanesque democracy of ideas, opinions and cultural expressions made both by and for the people\u00F6 could correct the bias of broadcast television and enfranchise the disenfranchised. (21) Almost a decade before Sony successfully introduced Betamax and (Matsushita UVC and Panasonic) introduced VHS (Video Home System), the videocassettes and recorders that turned television audiences into active participants, artists were farseeing in their immediate understanding of implications of the half-inch revolution. As Erik Barnouw has pointed out, videotape has become \u00F4low cost . . . reusable and could be expended . . . as freely as a novelist uses paper. Suddenly all sorts of people-alone or in schools, churches, groups and businesses-were in video production.\u00F6 (22) The compact, paperback-book-sized 1/2-inch cassette offered many new possibilities of distribution. Artists were among the first to realize the liberating aspects of the new format and sense its value as both a political tool and a new art form. Video artists were not content with showing their work in lofts, art galleries, and museums. They wanted to be \u00F4on the air.\u00F6 The Television Labs at WGBH, WNET, and KQED provided early and substantial support both for the production and exhibition of artists\u00C6 television on their channels. The development of cable and low-power television in the mid sixties seemed to offer a chance for even greater access. In 1968 the Supreme Court gave the FCC the right to regulate the cable industry. In 1972 the FCC\u00C6s Cable Television Report ordered cable systems to have four different kinds of public access. To give this legislated \u00F4access\u00F6 any real meaning, the cable facilities were required to provide low cost production facilities. This opened the door for artists. Soon video artists were asking, \u00F4How soon will artists have their own channels?\u00F6 (25) There were many successful projects on cable television. These included the early TVTV (Top Value Television) and also Jaime Davidovich\u00C6s Cable Soho, which began in New York City in 1976 and the next year became the Artist\u00C6s Television Network. Another project also starting in 1976 was the Video Art show on Los Angeles, Theta Cable and Long Beach Cablevision. More recently, Paper Tiger Television in New York City has had a series on public-access cable television in New York City for seven years, examining the communications industry through a critical analysis of print media in a hard-hitting style that resembles aspects of performance art. None of these projects could be called truly interactive. In all of them the artists functioned primarily as senders on the same level of the many kinds of special-interest and personal programming that became a feature of cable television. Artists\u00C6 programming generally lacks both the genuine interactivity of call-in radio shows and the less well-understood interactivity of broadcast television\u00C6s audience. Broadcast television can be regarded as advertising interrupted by programs, and one way the broadcast audience interacts with television and determines what they watch is by buying or not buying the products that are advertised on the air. Artists\u00C6 Television does not rely on the financial support of the audience to stay on the air, so interactivity with the audience is immaterial. The act of simply being on the air is enough to satisfy the concept of increased communication. Some of the more radical developments in interactivity made possible by cable television were found in social services and grass roots democracy. In 1971, the Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine under the direction of Dr. Harold Wooster built the New Hampshire-Vermont Interactive Network complete with a television studio at each site to allow doctors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire to participate in medical meetings long distance. The doctors could hear the papers but also participate in the question and answer period as if they were present in the room where the paper was given. Here, the necessity for knowledge causes the development of real interactivity whereas artistic projects, with a few exceptions, merely play lipservice to it. The system is still in use today. A branch of twentieth-century art has always been interested in machines and a machine aesthetic that was an artistic response to new technologies and new ideas of perception. On a practical and theoretical level, groups such as the Raindance Foundation and publications such as Radical Software and The Spaghetti City Video Manual sought to demystify the technology of television so that it was easily accessible. Many video artists were dedicated to achieving sufficient machine literacy to be able to use their tools effectively and imaginatively. A small group concentrated on video\u00C6s soul and hardware, inventing new machines that, freed from television\u00C6s constraint to generate recognizable universal product, produced new and often abstract images. Woody Vasulka has stated, \u00F4There is a certain property of the electronic image that is unique... [It\u00C6s liquid, it\u00C6s shapeable, it\u00C6s clay, it\u00C6s an art material, it exists independently,\u00F6 (28) These artists saw video\u00C6s special properties as the basis for a new art form, the art form of the future. Along with Paik they believed, \u00F4As collage technique replaced oil paint, so the cathode ray tube will replace canvas.\u00F6 (29) Borrowing the ideas and terminology of computer programming, they began to think of these manifestations as a kind of language, and their work with video hardware as, in Vasulka\u00C6s words, a \u00F4dialogue with the tool and the image, so we would not perceive an image separately...We would rather make a tool and dialogue with it.\u00F6(30) This led to the development of new machines such as colorizers and synthesizers, which, in turn, affected the development of special effects generators used today in the television industry. Video art\u00C6s ongoing acceptance of the latest technologies has left it committed to exploring the cutting edge of an almost science-fiction vision of art. Because they are unfettered by the necessities of the marketplace, video artists are often the first to see an artistic application for technologies developed for information processing, storage and retrieval (compu","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":100169,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}