Before MTV, before Industrial Light and Magic, a radical group of people believed that television was an art medium. They felt free to play with the television signal to make funky, sophisticated, chaotic, poetic, raw, cutting edge, disruptive, politically savvy, artistically elegant tapes that were the antithesis of the broadcast television of then and most of now.
Tucked away in upstate New York, the Center is outside the mainstream. It is easy to forget its ongoing importance, but many of the 1,200+ artists who have passed through there, including Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Doris Chase, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Shalom Gorewitz, Sara Hornbacher, Barbara Hammer, Peter Rose, Kathy High, Ernie Gusella, Richard Kostelanetz, Peter d’Agostino, myself and many others, have all been nourished in its crucible…
Excerpted from 25 Years of the Experimental Television Center (2006) [Ann-Sargent Wooster, pdf].