EZTV: A Case Study in Misunderstanding

Michael Masucci argues that EZTV’s history requires a broader account than its familiar association with independent narrative video. He traces a Los Angeles community in which inexpensive recording equipment, personal computers, analogue video processes and live performance converge. John Dorr’s exclusion from mainstream filmmaking provides an impetus for creating alternative infrastructure, while collaborations with LA SIGGRAPH and other organisations establish sustained opportunities for digital artists to exhibit. Masucci describes screenings, group exhibitions, educational experiments, networked exchanges and the Cyberspace Gallery, showing how curating organisations and curators helps audiences and practices grow together. Dance, music and performance remain central, with increasingly ambitious projections moving from small rooms to buildings and public spaces. He highlights collaborators whose technical and artistic contributions risk disappearing from conventional accounts, particularly women and queer practitioners, and situates the archive within the losses caused by AIDS. Recent retrospectives and archival research become opportunities to reconnect scattered evidence with living testimony. Throughout, he challenges neat divisions between video and computer art, between analogue and digital processes, and between art and science. His proposed intervention, hacking the timeline, asks historians to recognise alternative spaces and collaborative networks as constitutive of an artistic movement rather than peripheral to established institutions.

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