UC Berkeley

In 1974 artist and filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek identified the rise of what he called "a new social media consciousness." This dissertation, Social Media: The News in Experimental Film, Video Art, and Performance After 1960, begins with VanDerBeek's statement in order to excavate a history of social media that predates the online platforms that have been associated with that phrase since the mid 1990s. It traces the development of new forms of filmic montage and media appropriation in VanDerBeek's multi-channel "information concerts," Bruce Conner's found footage films, and Carolee Schneemann's "kinetic theater." Taken together, these examples reveal the emergence of a network imaginary bound up with television's increasing importance as a source of daily news. Recognizing television's unprecedented capacity to bring national audiences together, particularly during moments of political crisis and violence, the artist-filmmakers at the center of this study began to question how it might operate differently, and in doing so articulate alternatives to the social form of the mass audience. Each chapter looks at works that cull news images from various sources and employ experimental forms of montage to imagine networked relations that pose a challenge to broadcast's modes of address. Feeling out the complexities of life lived in and through social media, this work offers a surprisingly prescient sense of the way networks both enliven and delimit social life. The figures at the center of this study--VanDerBeek, Conner, and Schneemann--each invest cybernetic feedback with the capacity to redefine social life. A pattern emerges in the case studies I consider: a prevailing concern with formal relations configured through networked feedback--on screen, on stage between performers, or in some instances between members of the audience--starts to falter once historically embedded forms of social difference come to the fore in works that respond to the pressing news events of the day: assassinations, street protests, and war. As a result the capacity of feedback to fully mediate antagonism begins to break down. Social conflict appears as something that cannot be adequately addressed by recourse to feedback or form alone. In these moments, tension arises between gestures that figure social life primarily through physical arrangements between bodies and directives for their interactions, and social life defined by historically bound contradictions, conflicts, and codes. This work invites us to reconsider what it means to understand media as social, which is to say, as something that inflects our experience and understanding of social life in profound and affecting ways.