TVTV
Top Value Television (TVTV) was founded in 1972 by Michael Shamberg, Megan Williams, Allen Rucker, Hudson Marquez and Tom Weinberg (with a handful of associated artists) as a guerrilla video collective based in San Francisco, California. The group developed from ties to San Francisco Bay Area and New York City arts collectives such as Ant Farm (of which TVTV co-founders Hudson Marquez, Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, and Doug Michels were members), Videofreex, and Raindance (of which Shamberg was a member). Independent producers such as Wendy Apple and Paul Goldsmith provided essential technical skills. The group was influential in bridging the gap between 1970s counterculture and broadcast television. (Source)
TVTV pioneered the use of independent video based on wanting to change society and have a good time inventing new and then-revolutionary media, ½" Sony Portapak video equipment, and later embracing the ¾" video format. Shamberg was author of the 1971 "do-it-yourself" video production manual Guerrilla Television. (Source)
In 1975 the group left San Francisco for Los Angeles, where it took up a contract with PBS to shoot Supervisions, a series of short tapes on television history. The group disbanded in 1979. Their last production was TVTV: Diary of the Video Guerillas. [1]
- Work, archives
- TVTV in Media Burn Archive
- Preserving Guerilla Television: TVTV, BAMPFA, University of California. Digital collections. [2]
- TVTV in Video Data Bank
- Top Value Television papers in Online Archives California
- Documentary films about TVTV
- VTR: TVTV, 1975, 31 min.
- TVTV: Video Revolutionaries, dir. Paul Goldsmith, 2018, 82 min. Film website. IMDB.
- Links
- TVTVNow.com [3]
- Alternative Convention: Top Value Television’s Four More Years, exhibition, HartHouse, U Toronto, 2021.
- Wikipedia
