The Videofreex are proud to announce the free symposium We’re All Videofreex coming up November 1, 2012 at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. Presentations and a screening of Videofreex work will explore the collective’s contributions to early video and why their work means more now than ever before.

The skinny:

We’re All Videofreex

Time: 4-9 p.m.

Location:

School of Visual Arts Theater
333 W. 23^rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Fee: Free

RSVP: none

Description: Co-chairs David A. Ross, chair of the SVA graduate program in art practice, and Ron Simon, curator of television and video at the Paley Center for Media reunite members of the Videofreex for a one-day symposium on the pioneering video collective. Between 1969 and 1978 the group produced hundreds of hours of real-time video documents shot with newly-invented portable cameras and founded Lanesville TV, the first pirate TV station.

Simon will lead a discussion about “Subject to Change,” the Videofreex production commissioned—and subsequently dropped—by CBS in the context of the challenges to traditional journalism spurred by the introduction of video and the impact of the emerging counterculture.

Following a screening of the group’s work, Ross will moderate a panel on the Videofreex’s contribution to the history of video art and their renewed significance at a moment in which unprecedented proliferation of personal recording devices and decentralized broadcasting platforms fuel uprisings worldwide. Today, with cell-phone cameras always at the ready in our pockets, we’re all Videofreex.

Presented by the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice Department with support by the MFA Photography, Video & Related Media Department, the BFA Fine Arts Department, and the Visual and Critical Studies Department.