Dayton record store visit - very unusual tapes

I took advantage of the holiday last Tuesday and headed up to Dayton, Ohio to peruse the last record store left in town, where I'd never been before. To my surprise, they had a decent variety of cassettes as well.

I found a number of these tapes for 50 cents apiece and assumed (based on some other stuff they were grouped with) that they were lectures. Turns out that they are of FAR more importance than that.

Frank Gillette is a video pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observations of natural phenomena. An early theorist of video's formal and aesthetic parameters, in 1969 he was a founding member and president of the influential video collective Raindance. With influences ranging from cybernetics to painting, Gillette was an innovator of the multi-channel installation form, experimenting with image feedback, time-delay and closed-circuit systems. His seminal installation Wipe Cycle (1969), produced in collaboration with Ira Schneider, was included in the landmark 1969 exhibition TV As A Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York.

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In 1977, at the opening of documenta 6, alongside Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis took part in one of the first international satellite telecasts with his live performance The Last Nine Minutes. Davis received grants for his work by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts & the Trust for Mutual Understanding, among other institutions.
Early internet works

His exploration of interactivity involving various media continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He is the author of one of the earliest art pieces on the world wide web, The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994).
He taught advanced media at more than 25 universities and art colleges and served as consultant in this field for several corporations & foundations. Davis published the book Art and the Future in several countries in 1973. ArtCulture: Essays on the Post-Modern (1977), is a book of theoretical essays. The Five Myths of TV Power (or, Why the Medium is Not the Message), 1993, focuses on the crucial importance of the viewer, the "human" element in media theory.

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In 1969, he exhibited in the seminal TV as a Creative Medium show (widely regarded as one of the birth pangs of video art) at the Howard Wise Gallery and cofounded the Raindance Foundation with Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg and Ira Schneider.
As an artist, Ryan exhibited and performed at The Kitchen, the Rose Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, The Cloisters, the Venice Biennial, and the Dancing Theatre in New Paltz, New York. He taught at New York University, the State University of New York at New Paltz, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and The New School, where he was associate professor of media studies at the time of his death.

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Raindance Foundation was begun in 1969 by Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Ira Schneider and Paul Ryan among others. Raindance was a self-described "alternate culture think-tank" that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.
In 1976, Raindance members Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot edited Video Art: An Anthology, one of the first readers on video art. The original Raindance collective dispersed in the mid-1970s.

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No information is available about these two, except listings in a directory of artists.

The most important tape to come out of this haul is pictured below:

The Videofreex was one of the pioneer production groups that formed when consumer video was first introduced in the late 1960s. Over their nine-plus years together, they produced thousands of videotapes, installations and multimedia events and trained hundreds of videomakers in the brand new video medium. Many of the videos are now archived at Chicago’s Video Data Bank.

They went on to found the country’s first pirate TV station and capture some of the most up-close and memorable records of the social movements of the 1960s and 70s.

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As there seemed to be the most information available regarding this "Videofreex" group, I began to listen to it. I realized that this was not a recording of some lecture, but a one-on-one interview with two of the founding members.

I sent a message to the proprietor of the Facebook page for Videofreex, explaining that I found a tape from 1973 containing an interview and that I couldn't find any mention of it online. The guy running the page expressed considerable interest, so I digitized both sides and sent them to him. (It sounds pretty good for being 40 years old - a little hissy and with wind noise, but still perfectly understandable!) Turns out that a group has been spearheading the production of a Videofreex documentary, which is now in the final stages - and the owner of the FB page appeared to be a charter member of this group. I told him to do as he pleases with the recording - hopefully it is useful to them.

I have not listened to the other tapes yet, but I expect that they're more interviews that are worth preserving. Quite exhilarating to unearth tapes that have been untouched for 40 years or so...

(My only regret is not buying all of the tapes with those distinctive Dymo labels on them. I bough about half of what they had, but I don't get up there often at all...hmm...)

Well there is one other thing to be learned here -
Decent brands really do hold up.
Those tapes are a year older than me.

it's great when things like this happen & stuff "falls" into the right hands!! Had the same thing happen with a book I went to return today... orig owner had moved on & new person was like - THIS is JUST what I need right now

What an amazing find! Well done! As someone who also dabbles with that kind of art, I'd lobve to hear the rest as and when you digitize them.

Now get your a** back up there and find those tapes you left behind!

eclectik said:

Now get your a** back up there and find those tapes you left behind!

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I don't think I will be able to make a visit any time soon, but there's a possibility that I could enlist a fellow audio enthusiast in the area to go buy them... :scratch2:

I'll work something out. It's funny because I originally bought these for the cool vintage factor, and possibly as tapes to record over - but obviously that will not be happening! I'd hate to see them go to someone who will not take good care of them.

PM sent.

Staggering historical find, 45rpm, and kudos for recognizing it. I don't know that I would have caught that.

I didn't wait to hear back from Mr. 45, I trucked down to Omega Music and snagged the rest of the collection that I could find, which was 12 tapes. I expect to pass them on to 45rpm on a strictly non-profit basis....

Thank you, DQ! Very much appreciated.

PM headed your way as well...

Can feel the love.........:yes:

Yeah, phatster is right.

One more reason I love AK.

My old radio boss once found a reel to reel of President Kennedy giving an interview at Western Ky University. Some important people found out, and I think it ended up being sold for over 10k. Seems wrong to sell it, since it is historically very significant, but hey, more power to him.

Great job, men.

The second batch of tapes has arrived at "headquarters". Will try to get some pictures and information out soon.

Damned laptop decided to put its hard drive in a retirement home - not dead yet, but pretty freaking slow. Time for a little eBay hunting for another Thinkpad...two hard drives in six months indicated that something's amiss with my current one.

45rpm said:

The second batch of tapes has arrived at "headquarters". Will try to get some pictures and information out soon.

Damned laptop decided to put its hard drive in a retirement home - not dead yet, but pretty freaking slow. Time for a little eBay hunting for another Thinkpad...two hard drives in six months indicated that something's amiss with my current one.

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Looking for a new Thinkpad myself. One word: SSD. Not sure I like the idea of a hybrid drive, just want a straight SSD for the OS, at least. If you can get a second slot for a spinner (hard drive), that would be ideal.

4343 said:

Looking for a new Thinkpad myself. One word: SSD. Not sure I like the idea of a hybrid drive, just want a straight SSD for the OS, at least. If you can get a second slot for a spinner (hard drive), that would be ideal.

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I ended up getting a refurbished T43 for $75 off of eBay - it's a slight step up from my T42. Downsides so far: Windows 8 does NOT run well on it, very slowly in fact, and the laptop runs pretty noisily. But hey, it's in great shape for something bought on a shoestring budget.