Hunter College Art Galleries Present: The Experimental Television Center: A History, Etc...

Exhibit running from September 25-November 21, 2015

205 Hudson Street Gallery
Hunter College MFA Campus
Gallery entrance is on the south side of Canal between Hudson and Greenwich Streets
Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 1-­6 pm

Organized by: Sarah Watson, Chief Curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries, Timothy Murray, Curator of the Rose Golden Archive of New Media Art, and Sherry Miller Hocking, Assistant Director of the Experimental Television Center.

For over forty years, the Experimental Television Center (ETC) in Owego, New York, has been one of North America's preeminent organizations for video art, fostering a community for creativity and innovation through its residency and tool-building programs. The Experimental Television Center: A History, Etc . . . is the first academic survey of the Center's prolific, yet under-recognized, role in the evolution of video art. Through works of art, ephemera, and video processing tools, this exhibition maps the ETC's influence within the larger narrative of the history of video into the digital and internet age. 

From 1971 to 2011, over 1,500 artists participated in the ETC residency program, which functioned as a site for exploration, education, and practice for media artists. This exhibition spans works from the 1960s through the 2000s and also includes a collection of original analog instruments designed by artists/technologists, as well as two interactive installations featuring contemporary tools designed by Dave Jones, a long‐time collaborator with ETC, and by Jason and Debora  Bernagozzi, founders of the new media organization Signal Culture in Owego, New York.

This exhibition and programming have been made possible by the generous support of The Hunter Art Exhibition Fund, Foundation To Life, Inc., The Ruth Stanton Foundation, The Arts Across the Curriculum Initiative at Hunter College, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and the Digitization and Conservation Services, Cornell Library; Society for the Humanities, Cornell University; the Experimental Television Center, New York State Council for the Humanities, Electronic Arts Intermix, Dave Jones Design, and Signal Culture.

This exhibition is presented by the Hunter College Art Galleries in Collaboration with the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library.

About the Experimental Television Center

In 1971 Ralph Hocking, a professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University founded the Experimental Television Center out of his media-­access organization Student Experiments in Television (SET). As the interest in video as an artistic medium gained momentum, the ETC provided access to and training in the use of this new technology to artists, interested citizens, and social, cultural, and educational organizations. Invested in pushing the boundaries of the video medium, the ETC developed a research program to create a more flexible set of processing tools for artists. Under the direction of artist Nam June Paik and video engineer Shuya Abe, a Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer was constructed for the Center's permanent use, which launched the ETC artist's residency program.

Although the Center closed its physical space in 2011, its philosophy and ethos endures through an ongoing commitment to education, research, and the preservation of video as a medium. According to this mission, the ETC's comprehensive   archive is now housed in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and is  currently being digitized, preserved, and made available for research. The Experimental Television Center would like to  thank some of its many funders over the past forty years: New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, the Andy Warhol Foundation, mediaThe foundation inc., and the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University.

About the Hunter College Art Galleries:

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter of a century ago. This exhibition builds on a long tradition of creative interchange between the disciplines of art history and studio art at Hunter.

Widely regarded as one of the leading art programs in the country, Hunter College's Department of Art and Art History serves both undergraduate and graduate students, offering an undergraduate major in Art, a BFA and an MFA in Studio Art, and an MA in Art History. In its 2012 rankings of "America's Best Graduate Schools," U.S. News & World Report ranked Hunter's Master of Fine Arts program thirteenth and the painting and drawing program seventh in the nation.