This was first published (May 18 2024) as a note to Tom Sherman, replying to a posting he made about Syracuse University’s VPA and Newhouse Schools.

Tom,

Well-thought, and well-written. This is a huge subject, one that has a long and important history at Syracuse, and one that is still developing at the speed of light.

I have a lot to relate about the subjects you bring up here. And even more in the doing, every stroke of the way. I will respectfully keep it as brief as I can, as your text already invokes so much. I’ll provide some teleological history, about the early cleaving between film and video at Syracuse University. It’s personal, as I’m describing what was happening while I was part of it.

I entered Syracuse in 1970, in liberal arts. Within a month I switched to VPA, as I couldn’t stand the huge lecture class format. I entered VPA with an Independent Study major… I was the only person I knew with that designation. I took a film class from Newhouse, as Newhouse had the only film equipment. In the class we used 16mm film and equipment. My learning was primarily through hitchhiking down to Manhattan, where Anthology Film Archives had just opened, and my high-school friend Robert Polidori worked, and would show me hours of films during my visits… augmented by the formal shows at night.

In a couple of years VPA hired Owen Shapiro and announced its own film major. We continued to use Newhouse’s 16mm equipment (and B&W processing). Owen showed us hours of Godard films, which we’d never see through Newhouse. While in New York I’d visit the Kitchen and hear early Steve Reich and Phil Glass performances, my Newhouse film teacher contemptuously referred to them as the “maniacal edge” of music. No one at Newhouse would know who Michael Snow or Paul Sharrits were.

Meanwhile, a handful of brilliant, late-1960s Syracuse alumni (Lance Wisniewski, Bob Burns, Carl Geiger, Gail Waldron) put together a project proposal to simultaneously offer the University a plan to build and manage a local cable system that would offer students, staff, and faculty their own access to video production and presentation; and an offer to the New York State Council of the Arts to provide access to video production facilities and services to artists in New York state who want to get involved in the new video medium. Note that up to that moment, video production required access to television studios and their procedures, which was prohibitively expensive, not open to outsiders, nor accommodating to experimentation with the equipment.

Thus Synapse Video was born within Syracuse University. Newhouse provided access to 2” tape facilities for broadcast-quality production, and the cable head end provided access to ½” portable and 1” studio-based equipment, along with both portable and studio cameras. Here’s a link to a post by Synapse editor Paul Daugherty about the Newhouse side: https://avideolife.wordpress.com/…/editing-area-used…/

and a link to an early announcement of the Synapse visiting artist program: https://www.vasulka.org/…/MediaPoli…/VisitingArtProg.pdf

At the beginning of the program, there were three of us who were both SU VPA students and part of Synapse: myself, Pam Shaw, and Bill Viola. For my part in this, I designed and taught two classes offered through VPA: a visiting artist class that trained and provided crew for the visiting artists, and a class in “Video Aesthetics” which was a hands-on class where we all experimented with the equipment and tried to understand what we were doing in relation to the history of art.

Film majors had very little to do with Synapse, which was purely video-based. I was really the only one with a foot in both. In 1972 VPA created a Film Major, and I switched from an Independent Study major to a Film major. However, my daily practice was in both: video art (or, as you say, art video) at Synapse, and film art through my major. Note that after graduating with the first VPA Film Majors in 1974, Synapse paid my tuition for the next two years, so I continued to teach the two video courses as I was then one of the first group of students who earned a Film graduate degree through VPA. Again: a foot in both worlds, but both were in VPA.

The thing is, this all happened so fast, and the media were developing so quickly, that the University gambled that it was doing the right thing. We all did the same thing—it’s easy to see that people involved at the time in film or video art were not looking at their long-term financial prospects. There wasn’t a business there to be learned. There were just lives to be invented.

One more historical note: all of us at that time were informed by the ever-present art education department, which insisted that art education focus on the first six years of life… before the child learned to read. And the title of that department was Synaesthetic Education. VPA put an end to that a few years after I left.