Fred Barzyk

The New Wave is the seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synthesis, and performance video. This historical anthology includes excerpts of tapes by the following video pioneers: Stephen Beck and Warner Jepson, Peter Campus, Douglas Davis, Ed Emshwiller, Bill Etra, Frank Gillette, Don Hallock, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Paul Kos, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, Willard Rosenquist, Dan Sandin, James Seawright, Steina Vasulka, TVTV, Stan Vanderbeek and William Wegman.

George Orr, a man whose dreams can change waking reality, tries to suppress this unpredictable gift with drugs. Dr. Haber, an assigned psychiatrist, discovers the gift to be real and hypnotically induces Mr. Orr to change reality for the benefit of mankind --- with bizarre and frightening results.

An adult Ralphie Parker narrates several humorous stories about his teen years in an Indiana steel town.

A fictional confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf. The narrative of the film details the events that lead up to the initial exchange of nuclear weapons from the perspective of an on-going news broadcast.

A poet-astronaut is shot through an area of space called the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum. He is duplicated into infinite copies of himself, each of whom finds himself in a bizarre situations on a different world.

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini — to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin -- three of the most highly regarded civil rights leaders of the 1960s -- were united in their quest for Black empowerment. But their methods of approach were polarizing.

"The Electronic Canvas" focuses on Boston as a major center in global movement where artists in the 1960s were drawn to the growing power of television and media. Viewers learn how these artists responded to the initial challenge of not being able to become creatively involved with television. The show looks at how cultural institutions and organizations responded to this challenge and what happened when the doors were opened to artists’ desires to probe this unexplored territory. From these early efforts and experiments, the program follows the rapid growth, diversification, and sophistication of video and media art from single channel works to complex pieces involving computer programs, museum video installations, and in the Internet. The Electronic Canvas aired in April 2001 on WGBH Channel 2 in Boston and then on public television stations nationally.