Synapse: Personal Recollections
Thought I'd add a couple of notes to your excellent piece on Synapse (if you're still accepting content). Between 1973 and 1976 I taught two classes each semester at Synapse--not through the Newhouse journalism school as the present article suggests, but through the College of Visual and Performing Arts. One was the visiting artist program, where the students worked to produce and then post-produce visiting artists' work. The visiting artists included Nam June Paik, Dennis Oppenheim, Juan Downey, Jaime Davidovich, Tom DeWitt and Dimitri Devyatkin. We had about one visiting artist per month during the school year. The other class was a production class in video aesthetics. During the summer before the 1974 school year, all of us involved with Synapse pulled the University's first cable system into being--through the manholes and crawlspaces throughout the University. We'd hang big monitors in the university buildings where it appeared that people could congregate and watch them, and the professors whose offices opened onto those spaces would routinely turn them off. There was a push to create an alternative to commercial television, one that probably wasn't realized until the coming of the web. Overall, Synapse had more a creative orientation than a documentary one, and so differed a bit from more community-focused groups like Videofreex and Raindance. Synapse's social consciousness was probably most widely publicized when Wavy Gravy dropped in with a 16mm version of Deep Throat, which was inadvertently cablecast into the geriatric building associated with the university housing. We were covered on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What is hard to imagine today is that without the visiting artist program most New York artists would not have had access to broadcast. After all, that's why they came. Contributed by email 8/04 Robert Edgar
Summary
Robert Edgar contributed an eyewitness account by email on 8/04; between 1973 and 1976 he taught two classes each semester at Synapse through the College of Visual and Performing Arts, a visiting-artist program and a production class in video aesthetics. Visiting artists included Nam June Paik, Dennis Oppenheim, Juan Downey, Jaime Davidovich, Tom DeWitt and Dimitri Devyatkin; Synapse averaged about one visiting artist per month. In the summer before 1974 participants installed the university's first cable system via manholes and crawlspaces, mounted monitors in campus buildings, promoted an alternative to commercial television and drew front-page Wall Street Journal coverage when Wavy Gravy inadvertently cablecast a 16mm Deep Throat into university geriatric housing.
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Last modified 13 September 2026