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Steve Seid and John Rogers, with Tom Weinberg and Diane Andrews Hall
Recorded Thursday, April 1, 7 PM PDT

Watch a recording of a live conversation with media curator and writer Steve Seid, author of Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image, and John Rogers, a former member of Optic Nerve video collective who continues his moving image artistry as a partner in the local production company Ideas in Motion. They will be joined by Tom Weinberg, founder of the Chicago-based archive Media Burn, and artist Diane Andrews Hall, a member of the 1970s performance collective T.R.Uthco.

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In celebration of former BAMPFA video curator Steve Seid’s new book, Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image, we present a screening of the re-edit of the video work Media Burn (1975–2003), along with an illustrated lecture about the little-known backstory of Ant Farm’s legendary 1975 conceptual performance of the same name in which a customized 1959 Cadillac, dubbed the Phantom Dream Car, collided with a pyramid of blazing TV sets. Devised, revised, and relocated over several years, Media Burn was finally staged in San Francisco’s Cow Palace parking lot. A critique of the viral image, years before social media manufactured its manic multiples, this surprisingly complex undertaking required mythopoetic stand-ins for very American preoccupations—here, the dream of mobility embodied by the automobile is in conflict with the dream of immobility, the televised world delivered to the stationary viewer. From the imagistic energy generated by this incendiary collision, Ant Farm, a San Francisco–based art collective, would compose a singular image to set loose upon the unwitting world.