“The Freex are the most production oriented of the video groups… in terms of finished, cleanly edited, high quality tape, which is generally quite entertaining, the Videofreex are clearly the best.” - Michael Shamberg, Guerilla Television, 1971, Holt, Rhinehart & Winston
Videofreex was one of the pioneer production groups that formed when consumer video was first introduced in the late 1960s. Over the nine+ years together, they produced several thousand videotapes, installations and multimedia events and trained hundreds of videomakers in the brand new video medium. Forty years later, in 2007, the VideofreexArchive@VDB.org was launched as a source for the Freex’ early videotape coverage of this unique era of social and cultural change.
The first members of the group met at the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 (where the tapes record what happened away from the stage in the muddy temporary counter culture community). Over time there were 10 founding members (David Cort, Parry Teasdale, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Nancy Cain, Chuck Kennedy, Skip Blumberg, Davidson Gigliotti, Carol Vontobel, Bart Friedman and Ann Woodward (in order of appearance) and perhaps a dozen more people who participated in the collective (not to mention the Hog Farm buses which stayed with them for what seemed like a month)).
It was their good fortune in their earliest days in 1969 to be “discovered” by a CBS broadcast TV network executive, Don West, who commissioned them to develop a new kind of TV show that used the brand new portable video format… one that actually told the truth on TV... combining both reality TV (they traveled the country making the first non-fiction videos focusing their cameras on the alternate culture and interviewing countercultural figures such as Abbie Hoffman and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton) and creative art video techniques (with home-made electronic circuitry inventions). The resulting “live” and tape pilot, from the Freex half-built Prince Street studio, “The Now Project: Subject to Change”, with a studio audience and live rock band (lead by underground rock legend Buzzy Linhardt), was scorned by CBS and Don West left the network.
In 1971 they all (plus a dog, 3 cats and a parrot) relocated to Maple Tree Farm, a 17-bedroom former rooming house in the Catskill Mountains of upstate NY, which became one of the earliest media centers. With grants to their non-profit corporation, Media Bus, Inc., from the NYS Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as contracts with many educational agencies and the first cable TV public access stations, they were electronic Johnny Appleseeds, with traveling workshops, screenings, multi-media events and community cablecasts, spreading the new medium, first of all because it was fun, but also in efforts to democratize the dominant American mass medium that at that time was controlled by three large corporations.
They also covered their Catskill Mountain hamlet, and in early 1972 they launched the first pirate TV station, Lanesville TV, using a transmitter given to them by Yippee Abbie Hoffman. An exuberant experiment with two-way, interactive broadcasting, LTV used live phone-ins and cameras stretched from the living room studio to the highway, transmitting whatever the active minds of the Freex, coupled with their early video gear, could share with their rural viewers. Their hundreds of pirate Lanesville TV broadcasts were the basis for low-power TV stations later legitimized by the FCC. The LTV videotapes are a record of their upstate collective life and work, their friends and neighbors, the issues they were thinking about, their artistic urges, and the alternative lifestyle they were living.
With 10 plus active video artists/producers, the Freex were known for their innovative and sometimes even entertaining video productions with subjects that ranged from rock music, avant-garde performance art, the erotic, circus arts, street demonstrations, and alternative culture, to traditional crafts, behind-the-scenes at national events and travel through foreign countries.
Without regard for the status quo of broadcast TV or for independent filmmaking, they strove to find out what was unique to the new medium and passionately broke new creative ground.
Applying the skills and talents of the 10 individuals, they surprisingly lived and worked together for nine years until their love lives, family plans and career goals drifted them apart. The last Videofreex moved out of the Media Center in Lanesville in 1978. Recently, however, the group reformed in order to archive their videotapes and to rejuvenate the myth of their 1970s escapades.
During the near decade that the Freex were together, this pioneer video group amassed 2000+ original 1/2-inch open-reel raw and edited videotapes. In 2001, the Video Data Bank at the Art Institute of Chicago began assembling this unique archive, collecting them from basements and attics where the tapes had been stored for decades, restoring them and now making them available for viewing.
VideofreexArchive@VDB.org, launched in 2007, chronicles the beginnings of indy video and the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a unique period in U.S. history, an era of alternatives where anything, including profound social change, seemed possible.
Books/Publications: Videofreex by Parry Teasdale Spaghetti City Video Manual by Videofreex Subject to Change by Deirdre Boyle
“A Micro-TV Service in the United States” Report to the Federal Communications Commission, April, 1980 by Parry D. Teasdale
“Cooperstown TV is a Museum,” by The Videofreex, January 10, 1973
Magazine articles:
"Talk of the Town," New Yorker, December 12, 1970
“The Video Underground,” Chloe Aaron, Art in America, May/June 1971
VIDEOFREEX: America’s First Pirate TV Station
by
Parry D. Teasdale, 1999 (Black Dome Press)
“The inside story of the birth of pirate broadcasting in the U.S. and the collective of artists and video experimenters near Woodstock, NY, who put the first illegal underground TV station on the air. In the process they found themselves at the forefront of a movement that would change the style and content of television.
Between March 1972 and February 1977, the VIDEOFREEX aired 258 TV broadcasts from a home-built studio and jury-rigged transmitter in an old boarding house they rented in the tiny Catskill Mountain hamlet of Lanesville. It was a revolutionary act in defiance of FCC regulations - the first unlicensed TV station in America.
Complete with help from Yippie Abbie Hoffman, spying by the FBI, and encounters with cultural icons from the ‘60s and ‘70s ranging from the Hell’s Angels and the Black Panther Party to network newscasters, this is a true saga filled with a memorable cast of characters from a time of huge social change.”
Freex Glossary "Videofreex" is the name of the group (singular).
"Videofreex, Inc." is profit-making (or rather money-losing) corporate name, rarely used.
"Videofreex Partnership" is the 2007 formalized partnership that is the proprietary owner of "Videofreex" and its stuff. Only used in-house.
"The Videofreex" refers to the plural of group members (as in "The Videofreex are thrilled with our archive!")
"The Freex" or "Freex" (as in "Hi, Freex") are also plural referrals to the individual members.
But "Freex" is also an abbreviation for the group name (gets confusing).
"The Videofreex loft" or "studio" was at 98 Prince Street in the early days of artist settlement of Soho.
"Media Bus" refers to our workshop program (there was no bus only vans). (it's about myth-making).
"Media Bus, Inc." was our non-profit grant-receiving corp.
"Lanesville TV," our pirate TV station, was probably America's smallest TV station ever.
Click on the previews above to see the full size flyers.
