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April 10, 2026
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"Since the early 1970s, Beryl Korot has been recognized as a pioneer of video art and of multiple channel work in particular. She was co-editor of ', the first publication to discuss the possibilities of the new video medium in 1970, and co-edited Video Art: An Anthology with Ira Schneider in 1976. Her study of the technology of the loom, in 1974, marks a critical shift in her own investigations and played a significant role as a thinking tool in her subsequent video work. Her first multiple-channel works, “Text and Commentary” and “Dachau 74”, are groundbreaking efforts that moved the video medium beyond the television’s frame and into a vocabulary of installation. By 1980, these and earlier works were featured at Dokumenta 6, The Kitchen, Leo Castelli Gallery, The Everson Museum, The , among others and was featured in Video Viewpoints at the ."
"Just as the spinning and gathering of wool serve as the raw material for a weave, so the artist working with video selects images to serve as the basic substance of the work. All technology, in its capacity to instantly reproduce, store, and retrieve information, has moved continually in a direction that seeks to free us from laboring with our hands by giving us greater conceptual freedom to organize, select, and judge."
"In an effort to put different video artworks into separate categories, authors have come up with various solutions. Already in 1976 Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot observed three basic approaches to the video image: video in which the artist/performer is subject; video in which the environment is subject; and video in which the abstract synthesized image is subject."
"There have always been two aspects to my work: formal innovation and strong content. That goes for Steve’s tape pieces as well. To make a work together, we had to be engaged by the subject matter, and we shared an interest in technology as it has advanced. Looking back at the Hindenburg and , and forward in “Dolly” to new technologies, was a way of rethinking and understanding the soup in which we swim. We call this a theater of ideas, but its success as a work depends on the strength of the video and the music."
"I was attracted to video art because it allowed me to combine a strong sense of content with formal innovation. The field was wide open and allowed for a great deal of experimentation for creating new forms."
"Germany at that time was synonymous with the Holocaust to me and as a Jew it was necessary to face that."
"In making the four-channel video work Dachau, my experience as a weaver directly influenced the basic structuring of the work. The content itself was taped in 1974 at the former concentration camp Dachau. The symmetry of the architecture and the present ambience of the space were the focus of the recordings. The past was recorded only insofar as the sounds of the voices of the present commingled with the feeling absorbed in the wood and revealed in the structure of forms which has no amount of time can erase."
"Ira Schneider was a pioneer of video in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his work with video installation and single-channel tapes, he explored the manipulation of time, interactivity and simultaneity as formal and conceptual devices. A participant in the landmark exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, he created several important early multi-channel video installations, including Manhattan is an Island and, with Frank Gillette..."
"Paul Ryan, a research assistant with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University, lent Fordham's equipment to Frank Gillette, a painter; filmmaker Ira Schneider met Gillette at a party and later taught a video workshop at Antioch College with Gillette... Completing the variety of work in "TV as a Creative Medium" was Everyman's MobiusStrip, by Paul Ryan (who, along with Gillette, was soon to become the theoretical mover in the video collective Raindance). Working with McLuhan, Ryan was exploring video as a psychological mirror, asocial tool, and a communications device."
"You are sitting in a curtained booth on a stool, a TV aperture hangs before you like a surrealistic picture frame, beyond which the portable video camera sits and observes, as you are prodded ever so gently by calculatedly stimulating questions: "React to the following people : Nixon, your mother, Eldridge Cleaver, Teddy Kennedy, you... for the next ten seconds, do what you want... now let your face be sad..." You watch yourself in full audio-picture recap of your "interview," erasing all but the fewest frames of the previous tape as your tape will be obliterated by the next."
"The most important thing was the notion of information presentation and the notion of the integration of the audience into the information. One sees oneself exiting form the elevator. If one stands there for 8 seconds, one sees oneself entering the gallery from the elevator again. Now at the same time one is apt to be seeing oneself standing there watching Wipe Cycle. You can watch yourself live watching yourself 8 seconds ago, watching yourself 16 seconds ago, eventually feeling free enough to interact with this matrix realizing one's own potential as an actor."
"The arrangement I worked out with Fordham was that I would do my alternate service there as a conscientious objector, working with McLuhan directly during the 1967–1968 academic year and then experimenting with video for 1968–1969. It was terrific. I had an office two doors away from his. McLuhan would stop me in the hall and with great excitement tell me about a book he read the night before on the sense ratio of Russian peasants. Once he invited me into his office to talk about a paper I had written about war. He sat on this couch, spun around, lay on his back, held the paper up, read a bit from it, put it down, and continued to lie on the couch for a good hour, free-associating."
"Eventually, I'd like one monitor at the North Pole, one at the South, and two at the equator, big monitors switching images back and forth."
"Traditional guerrilla activity such as bombings, snipings and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seem like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternative lifestyles. Yet the guerrilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerrilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat."
"Ira Schneider's 1974/2006 Manhattan is an Island was one example (of the surprises)... On 23 monitors mounted on unusually tall pedestals of varying heights, suggesting skyscrapers and evoking Manhattan, Schneider presented black-and-white video footage of people moving about he city, capturing the ceaseless intensity of life on the sidewalks and streets."
"When I met Terry Fox in Berkeley in 1970, we became fast friends. I felt his sensibility had a lot in common with Beuys, whom I’d known for some time, and I helped get them together."
"MAM: Liza Béar, welcome back to Arts Magazine. Avalanche—tell us what it was and what it’s going to be."
"The old art depicted space as uniform and enclosed. The new art perceives space as organic and open. The old art was an object. The new art is a system. The configuration of the movement is more important than the shape of the object. The message of a kinetic and luminic work is the light and movement it produces. It has no other message. It has no meaning besides movement."
"Somehow it doesn't seem long since I trudged in a picket-line; in the street here, and in the rain. A fairly muted demonstration against the Museum, which wasn't always in a mood for showing abstract paintings by Americans. It was fun I suppose-needless to say, the picketing produced no results. Yet a majority of the picketers are visible through their works at the moment, upstairs on the third floor, where it's warm and out of the rain. However, this is no time to celebrate in fact it's better if artists never celebrate. New abstract picket-lines are doubtless assembling, to protest the former picketers."
"A Systems Esthetic will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present."
"The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal. The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation [in other words, a mythic structure] as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside." It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art."
"The tools of scholarly criticism-stylistics, iconographical analysis, historical context, and formal analysis in the last 50 years remain as trusted now as ever. Yet they explain with diminishing clarity what has happened after 1800, and almost nothing of what has happened in sculpture in the last 60 years."
"The cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and being replaced by what might be called "systems consciousness." Actually, this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing quantities of energy and information. Seen another way, it is a refocusing of aesthetic awareness – based on future scientific-technological evolution – on matter-energy information exchanges and away from the invention of solid artefacts. These new systems prompt us not to look at the skin of objects, but at those meaningful relations within and between their visible boundaries."
"Unless the world is substantially altered for the worst, the logical outcome of technology's influence on art before the end of this century should be a series of art forms that manifest true intelligence, but perhaps more meaningfully, with a capacity for reciprocal relationships with human beings."
"In 1968 the American critic Jack Burnham published Beyond Modern Sculpture, the first of a series of books and articles on contemporary sculpture produced over the following five years that attempted to establish a post-formalist discourse. The culmination of this project was the exhibition Software staged at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970 and Burnham’s theoretical treatise The Structure of Art, which was perhaps the first sustained attempt to provide a model of structuralist art criticism and theory. At the root of Burnham’s project were two inter-related concerns; the first, a quasi-determinist notion that the historical development of sculptural practice during the 20th century was the consequence of scientific and technological innovations and, second, a notion that traditional art historical terminology was inadequate to its critical analysis."
"When I started in video I was one of two or three dozen video artists in 1970. And now, to paraphrase Andy Warhol, everyone's a video artist. Video, through your cellphone and camcorder, has become a form of speech, and speech is not James Joyce. It's great, and to be celebrated, but it has to find its own level."
"The graphic portrayal of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, which are intertwined with each other. They also connect with the rise of statistical thinking up through the 19th century, and developments in technology into the 20th century. From above ground, we can see the current fruit; we must look below to see its pedigree and germination. There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel."
"Many schools are now introducing computers into the educational curriculum. Within 10 years it is predicted that computers will play a significant role in every classroom in North America. The question is, how will they be used? Many educators have been focusing on the use of computers for drill and programmed instruction—to provide individualized practice and instruction in the usual curriculum areas. There is another use for computers in education which some educators, myself included, find more exciting. These involve using the computer:"
"It is common to think of statistical graphics and data visualization as relatively modern developments in statistics. In fact, the graphic representation of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into the histories of the earliest map-making and visual depiction, and later into thematic cartography, statistics and statistical graphics, medicine, and other fields. Along the way, developments in technologies (printing, reproduction) mathematical theory and practice, and empirical observation and recording, enabled the wider use of graphics and new advances in form and content."
"From his earlier orthodox, even conservative, tendencies Harris was released by Keynes and the New Deal. His work came to reflect a strong commitment to Keynesian economics and policy and to the broad welfare measures of the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson years. He was not a compelling writer; in his books, however, this was more than compensated for by the solid competence of his research and preparation, his strongly compassionate views on welfare issues and his very evident desire to extend knowledge on a great range of subject matter."
"The president has very little effect on the economy. If you want to put blame or credit, the main person who influences the business cycle is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank."
"People want more and more leisure time which means the freedom to do what they want to do, not what they have to do, and as we get richer and richer, more and more people will be able to afford that."
"We have attacked the traditional interpretation of the economics of slavery not in order to resurrect a defunct system, but in order to correct the perversion of the history of blacks — in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil."
"Economic history has contributed significantly to the formulation of economic theory. Among the economists who have found history an important source for their ideas are Smith, Malthus, Marx, Marshall, Keynes, Hicks, Arrow, Friedman, Solow, and Becker. Failure to take account of history, as Simon Kuznets (1941) stressed, has often led to a misunderstanding of current economic problems by investigators who have not realized that their generalizations rested upon transient circumstances. Nowhere is the need to recognize the role of long-run dynamics more relevant than in such pressing current issues as medical care, pension policies, and development policies."
"As we get rich, the basics of life--food, clothing and shelter--become a very small part of total expenditure. And people have enough money to purchase things that enhance them spiritually and I mean the word spiritual not necessarily in a religious sense but in the sense that it adds to your feeling of well-being."
"Mr. Sweezy did not think of himself as a Stalinist or sectarian. His Marxism developed as a response to the Great Depression..."
"Robert Fogel and Douglass North have been awarded this year's Prize in Economics for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."
"Supply and demand will be in equilibrium only when the price of every commodity is proportional to the labor time required to produce it. Conversely prices proportional to labor times will be established only if the forces of competitive supply and demand are allowed to work themselves out freely. The competitive supply-and-demand theory of price determination is hence not only not inconsistent with the labor theory; rather it forms an integral, if sometimes unrecognized, part of the labor theory."
"Under simple commodity production, to which we have so far largely confined our attention, each producer owns and works with his own means of production; under capitalism ownership of the means of production is vested in one set of individuals while the work is performed by another. Both means of production and labor power, moreover, are commodities; that is to say, both are objects of exchange and hence bearers of exchange value. It follows that not only the relations among owners but also the relations between owners and non-owners have the character of exchange relations. The former is characteristic of commodity production in general, the latter of capitalism only."
"The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at."
"In every society, from the most primitive to the most advanced, it is essential that labor be applied to production and that goods be distributed among the members of society. What changes in the course of history is the way in which these productive and distributive activities are organized and carried out."
"Capitalist society is characterized by a degree of labor mobility much greater than prevailed in any previous form of society."
"Turning from political economy in a narrow sense, it is apparent that the commodity-producing form constitutes the most effective possible veil over the true class character of capitalist society."
"The magnitude of the rate of surplus value is directly determined by three factors: the length of the working day, the quantity of commodities entering into the real wage, and the productiveness of labor. The first establishes the total time to be divided between necessary and surplus labor, and the second and third together determine how much of this time is to be counted as necessary labor. Each of these three factors is in turn the focal point of a complex of forces which have to be analysed in the further development of the theory. The rate of surplus value may be raised either by an extension of the working day, or by a lowering of the real wage, or by an increase in the productiveness of labor, or, finally, by some combination of the three movements. In case of an increase in the length of the working day, Marx speaks of the production of absolute surplus value, while either a lowering of the real wage or an increase in productivity, leading to a reduction of necessary labor, results in the production of relative surplus value."
"So far as the individual capitalists are concerned, each takes the wage level for granted and attempts to do the best he can for himself. In introducing machinery he is therefore merely attempting to economize on his own wage bill. The net effect of all the capitalists’ behaving in this way, however, is to create unemployment which in turn acts upon the wage level itself. It follows that the stronger the tendency of wages to rise, the stronger also will be the counteracting pressure of the reserve army, and vice versa."
"In possessing use value a commodity is in no way peculiar. Objects of human consumption in every age and in every form of society likewise possess use value. Use value is an expression of a certain relation between the consumer and the object consumed. Political economy, on the other hand, is a social science of the relations between people."
"The legitimate purpose of abstraction in social science is never to get away from the real world but rather to isolate certain aspects of the real world for intensive investigation."
"Society is more than a number of individuals. It is a number of individuals among whom certain definite and more or less stable relations exist."
"It seems obvious that in this way the economist avoids a systematic exploration of those social relations which are so universally regarded as having a relevance to economic problems that they are deeply imbedded in the everyday speech of the business world. And it is even more obvious that the basic point of view which modern economics has adopted unfits it for the larger task of throwing light on the role of the economic element in the complex totality of relations between man and man which make up what we call society."