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Ernie Kovacs's Musical Office

Thinking of ourselves as original and critical and the 1950s as uncritical and uninventive, an era of pure mass culture, is naïve at best and certainly bad history.

Above is one of many videos available on YouTube by Ernie Kovacs, an American comedian who did fabulous work on prime-time TV in the 1950s and early 1960s until his death (the video above is from 1961, so not technically in the 1950s, but it's consistent with the earlier work). This work was outrightly experimental, often engaging with television, the new media of its day. 

Will our own experiments with new media be as little known one day? 

Submitted by kazys on 25 April, 2009 - 07:47

ubuweb

Bored of Youtube? Then try Ubuweb,which is the kind of archive of avant-garde video that you always hoped existed on the Internet but didn't, until now. I had a chance to watch a video performance by Joseph Beuys, an Yves Klein's Anthropometries of the Blue Period and Fire Paintings, and a Brief Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in time. Well, you get the drift.

Submitted by kazys on 8 June, 2007 - 22:34
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Kazys Varnelis [CV] is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. With Robert Sumrell, he runs the non-profit architectural collective AUDC. Click here for more.