1. Ant Farm Redux: Pyrotechnics and Emergence.
- Author
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Mellencamp, Patricia
- Subjects
- *
MASS media , *ARTISTS , *MASS media & art , *POPULAR culture - Abstract
The article presents information on creation of media culture by a group of committed artists who called themselves Ant Farm from San Francisco, California. This San Francisco artistic and hippie collective lived, played, and worked together from 1968 until 1978, joining up with other groups like T.R. Uthco for bigger projects. For this band of merry, anonymous art makers, reality was elusive, hard to grasp, but they understood by the mid-1970s that "the media" would define reality for us, based on our belief in the truth of vision, television's founding principle. During the 1970s, Ant Farm staged bizarre, magnificent media events, including "Media Bum," and "Eternal Frame,"in 1975, well-funded yet still on the cheap, to reveal the way television, and media culture as a whole, worked. "Media Burn," "Eternal Frame," and the "Amarillo News Tapes," a post-Ant Farm project are still the most intellectually sophisticated critiques of commercial television and media culture ever produced. In the "Amaritto News Tapes," the artists in-residence apprentice themselves to, and impersonate, news personnel at a local commercial TV station in Amarillo. Texas. The January 2004 show at the Pacific Film Archives paid tribute to the sublime media events created by Ant Farm and to the visionaries behind these still extravagant, perhaps outrageous, endeavors.
- Published
- 2005