Merging a rich visual sensibility with empirical observations of natural phenomena and technological systems, Frank Gillette is a foundational figure in video art. An early theorist and practitioner of video’s formal and aesthetic possibilities, in 1968 Gillette used a Portapak camera on loan from Marshall McLuhan to create one of the earliest known multichannel video works, Keep. In 1969, he was a founding member of the trailblazing collective Raindance Corporation, which published the influential journal Radical Software. Pulling from influences as diverse as cybernetics and painting, Gillette’s early experimentations pushed the limits of early video technology with image feedback, time-delay, and closed-circuit systems. His seminal installation Wipe Cycle (1969, with Ira Schneider), first exhibited in the watershed 1969 exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, entered MoMA’s collection in 2023. Gillette also participated in the conference Open Circuits, which took place at MoMA in 1974 and made an indelible impact on the developing role of television and video in contemporary art.
Join us for an evening of screenings and discussion as we trace Gillette’s prolific exploration of the tension between technology and ecology, a topic that resonates with renewed urgency today. The artist will be joined in conversation by Barbara London, writer, curator and former associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance, and Peter Oleksik, a media conservator at MoMA. London was the first curator to begin collecting video art at the Museum in the 1970s. Oleksik develops models for how to steward and preserve these works, while also making them legible and accessible to contemporary audiences.