Then in 1971, Hoppy went to North America again:

“We were commissioned via the University of Southampton to do some research work for the Home Office about video in community development. There was a small amount of money available but it was enough for me to go to New York and to Montreal, collecting information. In New York from independent video makers [particularly the Alternative Media Center (AMC) in New York, run by Red Burns and George Stoney,] and from Montreal [Videographe and] the Challenge for Change project run by the National Film Board of Canada. I picked up a lot of ideas, both artistic and social, from that visit, which later we wrote up, and became a standard work, called “Video in Community Development”.

“The idea [was to show] how to use video or film to help people develop their own communities, and it”s quite a difficult puzzle to work out how to do it without parachuting in from somewhere up there an advisor to say this is how you must do it. It has to be done on a more interactive level, and I think that was the meta-message that I heard, particularly from the National Film Board of Canada, and also from George Stoney, who worked in New England somewhere.” [28]

This research resulted in the publication “Video in Community Development”, [29] a handbook for establishing community access video projects. Initially published as a very limited edition of 75 copies for the University it was later reprinted as the first issue of the Journal of the Centre for Advanced Television Studies. It describes the main portable video technology of the time (the Sony Porta-pak), the process of making community video and the reasons for producing it, as well as the range of experiments in communities video in Britain, Canada and the US.[30] And it emphasised that it was more important to use video at the interactive level rather than send in a development officer to tell people how to build their own communities. [31]

At this time, as Sue Hall notes:

“There was no editing. We had to edit in camera... on half-inch open-reel at that time 1973. First of all we were living in this very large squatting community which was unique. There'd never been anything quite like it. So things were happening all the time... This was participant observation . We were squatters ourselves we were not from the outside, and at first people were very hesitant about the video. Then we took it out and let other people handle it... this is what you do... this is how you handle it... [So] after people had had a go themselves they felt reassured. They didn't see it as dangerous or [from the ] outside or any of those things... And we videoed occupations, parties, evictions, street actions, lectures, seminars, marches. I think that just about covers it. [Then] we showed it back to the squatters and also to squatters in other parts of London, and then gradually other people started to be interested, and we broadened the scope of the work.

“The forming of Fantasy Factory was a bridge between squatting and the rest of the world, because as soon as we were running the facility we were much more restricted in the shooting we could do ourselves because there was so much demand [and] you know, we wanted to meet the demand 'cause that's how we were earning our money. Suddenly the money was pouring in even from the artists and we always had a roughly equal mix of work. I mean we didn't plan it like that, but there was demand from the education sector, who paid more, there was demand from the commercial sector, who paid a lot more and there was demand from the artists and community groups who paid the least. But they all paid because when we tried to do it for nothing we were treated with great disrespect. People didn't value our time, they didn't tell us if they weren't going to come. A lot of time was wasted like that.

“Hoppy and I had very different skill sets and that was one of the good things about working together.

“The most important thing with the squatter's work is that it was all self-organised with very little money. And therefore it's something that can be applied anywhere, if people are interested.”

That period (from 1969 to about 1974) was an exciting time for my generation. So many new ideas were afoot as many of us tried to keep up with what was happening across the world. Importantly from 1972 to 1975 we had a left-leaning government in Australia that saw its role as supporting and helping the Australian community and recovering national control over our social, medical and resources capacities.

The Australian member of TVX, John Kirk, was living in Sydney in 1969. He had done a teaching Diploma at what was then the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education (CAE) [32] and had been running the film society there. He found out about community video through the local Canadian Embassy which had a collection of films produced by Challenge For Change, which they would lend to local film societies and which he screened to his students. As Kirk described it Challenge For Change, was using film and later, video, as a tool for intervening in and facilitating community processes [33] He also had a standard 8 film camera which [he] was shooting bits of stuff on.[34] and had been getting copies of International Times from a local radical bookshop, probably Goulds Bookshop on Liverpool St, Sydney. [35]

“And in that there was a whole bunch of stuff. One was a column by Hoppy about using video as a journalistic tool, and so on. And I thought, well, okay, that’s interesting. But the “Institute for Research in Art and Technology” [at] the Arts Lab, had an electronic section as well, that was doing stuff. And having an arts background, I was interested in interactive environments, basically. So I was interested in the electronic side of that, and so I just went to London on spec, but that’s why I went.

“Checked it out when I got there. [The electronic side of IRAT didn’t work out, but] the door was open on the video thing, so I was... bang, straight into that. And they had inherited a bunch of gear from John Lennon, I think, or one of the Beatles, which was a 405 line video rover, and a 1-inch Ampex home video recorder, which just fitted in the back seat of the mini, if you took the seats out of the back, right.

“And then what was happening was that they [TVX] were preparing for shooting Video Space, and there was a deal done with the BBC.” [36]

Kirk arrived in London just after the OZ magazine Schoolkids issue (#28, May, 1970) that led to the trial (somewhat later, over June to August, 1971) of the editors, Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, for obscenity. [37].

He hooked up with TVX just before the recording of VideoSpace (1970) the concept for which was based on experiments by Brice Howard at the National Centre for Experiments in Television in San Francisco in 1970. Howard’s process was to lay down the basic mix on videotape and to re-mix with other image tracks once only. This he calls making a pass of the original mix, and can be done again and again (like different final audio mixes) until a pass is made that seems to be satisfying. [38] A similar technique is probably the basis for the experimental work done by Bush Video in the studio at the Futron Building in Ultimo (Sydney) in 1973 (to which we return in Chapter 19).

TVX's Videospace (1970) was a commissioned video event for Late Night Line Up on BBC2 television. It was perhaps the video project of greatest impact (and from my point of view, the most extraordinary) from this period. Tom Corcoran, a BBC producer at the time, offered TVX some time in one of the production studios to see what they could do. So they gathered a bunch of people together including Richard Neville who was editor of Oz [39] and treated it like a “happening”. [They] roughed out, not a script but who would do what and when. They did one take which lasted 20 minutes and played it back then [they] did another take that lasted 20 minutes. [40] ... The production included visual feedback. There was a light show there, a studio discussion, [and they] also experimented in the control room with a vision mixer and... an elementary colour synthesiser and stuff like that... [41]

And then, supposing one looks at this notion of 'impact' from the perspective of media politics, the disruption of the David Frost interview with Jerry Rubin takes the cake. Rubin was a leading voice in the Yippies and the hippie revolution that was taking place in the U.S. and the U.K. He was booked to appear as a guest on the David Frost Show on the BBC for November 7, 1970. It would be a live-to-air interview. Rubin invited a number of friends all luminaries of the British Underground scene [42] such as Richard Neville of OZ and a couple of TVX video people including John Kirk (who came with a Porta-pak) and Cliff Evans to accompany him. After an initial conversation with Frost, Rubin invited his fiends, who were in the audience, to join him on-stage where they crowded into camera-shot, armed with water-pistols [43] and joints and proceeded to break up the show until a commercial break. The whole event outraged Frost, some of the audience and the British press. However its impact was probably of greatest benefit to Frost himself.

Kirk comments:

“I was videoing it. I started rolling as I walked down to sit down in front of the set, there were two versions. There was the edited version which the [BBC had] done, because they’re shooting it on a multi-camera setup, and somebody’s directing the vision; and the single camera coverage which I shot, which is from the participants point of view back to David Frost, who was frothing at the mouth.” [44]

Between them, Kirk and Evans ended up with a spectacular, if not readily watchable, video called FrostBite. [45]

Then on a different note, other tapes that John Kirk shot included the recording, to Ampex 1” video, of the Bath music Festival (1970) [46] and a spontaneous portapak video recording of a drug bust at:

“the old Arts Lab, and there was a big drug bust there, right. So there was an art gallery on the bottom floor. Stuart Brisley was showing some sort of medical installation down there, of bandages oozing all sorts of slime. The Film-makers Co-op was on the first floor. We had a telephone switchboard. The thing came through on the intercom to say: the cops are busting the theatre downstairs, what are you going to do? So monitors open, bags of dope went into the monitors, some went out the window, all that sort of thing.

“And what happened, the police came up to search TVX. So I can remember changing out of my clothes, my jeans, into a three-piece suit in front of them, and picking up the portable and walking out the door that led onto the fire escape, going up onto the top of the building, back of the building, coming down, coming out onto the back lane. And they said, No, no, no, you can’t go in there, blah, blah, blah. So that was shot, so we sold that to the BBC, right.”

Hoppy notes:

“Editing had to be done in the camera, as you shot. So without post-production you’re really limited to what you can do using video more as process rather than product.

“There was a police raid on the New Arts Lab, I think they were looking for drugs. They didn’t find any, but they didn’t know that we were recording video while this was going on. When they left we looked at it to see what we’d recorded on video. [But] it didn’t work at all well with the low light level, so we decided to do a bit of theatre and simulate what had just happened, which was people up against the wall and the police patting them down. So we recorded that, and one of us knew someone in the BBC. It was in the mid-evening and we phoned up and said “Hey we’ve got some video of the police doing a raid. What? You’d better come over.” So we piled into my mini (car) and went over to the BBC in the city. Because it was a non-standard format we had to take the playback deck and the porta-pak and the power supply with us and we got into a small studio in the BBC and pointed a broadcast camera at the portable screen. And that made a few seconds of broadcast on the same night. We were really very pleased because it showed that despite all the technical difficulties which the ACTT union put in the way that it was possible to do something and get it broadcast if it was interesting enough. So that was a first.[47]

“So that was taken and edited with a razorblade, and played back on a J-series mains deck, I think, onto a black and white monitor that had a broadcast camera locked off on it. So that was the first piece of half-inch tape to air, sort of thing.” [48]

TVX had started in 1969 and by 1974 had more or less morphed into Fantasy Factory, an independent video post-production facility run by Hoppy and his partner and colleague Sue Hall. They had been squatting in Camden and were re-housed [49] in a Victorian era office building in Theobald’s Road, (West Central) London in 1974. They were also running the Centre for Advanced Television Studies which by 1976 had become a library, the journal J-CATS (of which “Video in Community Development” (above) was the first issue), and Sue Hall had established her video production agency called Graft-on which trained people in how to use Porta-paks and small editing facilities like the one at Fantasy Factory. [50]

They focussed on editing and post-production for community and low-level corporate video-makers, while also producing their own work along lines they had established as TVX; recording various aspects of then contemporary English culture including the Bungay May Horse Fair (1976). Other videos they made at Fantasy Factory included: Com Com Alternative Commercial (1978), for late-night transmission on London Weekend Television; Slow Scan is a Slow Scam a video art piece; Stop the Blitz (1978), a community activist video on housing in London; Trigger Happy, a demonstration tape of their custom built editing controller, and Xerox TV (1977) for RAI Italy. [51]

Much of the Fantasy Factory video work was on community self-organisation and squatters' rights. One tape, Ben's Arrest (1974), was used in court as evidence against the police prosecution of a young squatter. [52]

Ben's Arrest serves as a prime example of the difference in approach taken by the English video makers and the Canadian Challenge For Change. The TVX video was shot virtually on the run, i.e., it was shot live (in real-time) as the arrest was happening. Whereas with the CFC work, usually, a more considered approach was taken, although more considered is a relative term. Much of the CFC video involved seeking out the concerned people, recording, playing back, responding to and editing it and only then sending it on to whatever bureaucracy was involved. In other word their videos were “finished”, not shot in real time and more or less immediately played back.

Meanwhile at IRAT which had had to move from Camden to Chalk Farm they

“got the word from ITV, or someone, that they were throwing a whole lot of gear out, black and white gear, so we scored a truckload full of monitors and things like that. So we wired up a monitor bank, with twelve monitors or something, and were running a video theatre on that. Playing a lot of music tapes, [and] a lot of agitprop stuff that had been shot round the community.”

Fig 3. “Hoppy” Hopkins

Following TVX, Hokpins set up, again as with IRAT, for the purposes of establishing bureaucratic credibility, the Centre for Advanced Television Studies which published a serious academic journal (J-CATS) over 1973-1980. During 1969 Hoppy had spent some time in New York:

“In 1971 we were commissioned via the University of Southampton to do some research work for the Home Office about video in community development. There was a small amount of money available but it was enough for me to go to New York and to Montreal, collecting information. In New York from independent video makers, and from Montreal the Challenge for Change project, run by the National Film Board of Canada. I picked up a lot of ideas, both artistic and social, from that visit, which later we wrote up, and became a standard work, called “Video in Community Development” [ref ?].

“The idea [was] how to use video or film to help people develop their own communities, and it’s quite a difficult puzzle to work out how to do it without parachuting in from somewhere up there an advisor to say this is how you must do it. It has to be done on a more interactive level, and I think that was the meta-message that I heard, particularly from the National Film Board of Canada, and also from George Stoney [see George Stoney, “The Mirror Machine”, Sight and Sound, c.1972], who worked in New England somewhere.”

“Video in Community Development”, a handbook for establishing community access video projects, was the first issue of J-CATS. It had been written in 1971 as a report for a [British] Home Office research project. Hopkins visited New York (where he met George Stoney, who had previously been a senior producer for Challenge for Change) and then Canada to actually see the Montreal-based Challenge for Change project that was helping people use video to develop their own communities (see above). “Video in Community Development” describes the main portable video technology of the time (the Sony portapak), the process of making community video and the reasons for producing it, as well as the range of experiments in community video in Britain, Canada and the US. And it emphasised that it was more important to use video at the interactive level rather than send in a development officer to tell people how to build their own communities.

But, looping back: late in 1972, Kirk mentions that during the period at IRAT he

“got this message from Johnny Allen [in Australia], about the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin, and I thought, Well, that’s interesting. And it was an incentive [to come back], because I just felt if I stayed there for too long I’d become part of the furniture, sort of thing.”

In the day-to-day one didn’t notice it, but all this activity was going on pretty much in parallel, between countries (particularly Canada, Britain, the US and Australia), across the country and among activist groups, with each person and/or group feeding off the work of the others in one great network of ideas.

TVX had been talking with (and providing local video material to) Tom Corcoran at the BBC and others were no doubt noticing all these things going on so that, as Kirk notes:

“out of what we were trying to do, Rowan Ayres [then a producer at the BBC] [53] picked up on that. Like, I’d come back to Sydney, and in the intervening six months, Rowan had [set up a program called Open Door [54] where the BBC had offered community groups or individuals access to tools and production expertise so that they would drive the content, and the Beeb would make the program for them.” [55]

Not long after that (1974) Ayres came to Australia. Kirk continues:

“He’d blown backwards out of the Beeb, and was advising the Whitlam Government on media policy. This is now post-Nimbin where we had set up Australia’s first cable TV network, and access centre, right? And there’s a whole bunch of politicking came out of that, and Tom Uren and the Department of Urban and Regional Development found the funding to set up the Community Access Centres. So Rowan was one of the key advisors in that process.” [56]

Now, remember; all this is going on more-or-less in parallel. The period was humming and lots of experiments and models for community access to the media were being broached and tried out. I will come to the Australian aspect of this in due course.

But here I should note that there are two distinctly different models of community activist video operating. While the Canadian (CFC) approach was to arrange with a local community worker to send a video crew into a particular community, TVX and subsequently Hopkins and Hall were actually living as members of the community that they were making videos about. They lived and breathed the squatters’ situation more or less full time for several years while the CFC crews could actually see a pending endpoint and return to their own homes (although it would have been rather different for the community workers who had the job of co-ordinating between the local people and the video-makers).

I have covered the early developmental period of activist video at some length so as to show where the Video Access idea came from. These processes that were happening in Canada and Britain were then brought to Australia through several paths so that, both deliberately and incidentally, the ideas behind video access got to Australia and moves to make it happen here began.

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Endnotes

1 John “Hoppy” Hopkins, Edited LCVA interview, Interviewer: Heinz Nigg.

2 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, Luton, UK, University of Luton Press, p.26

3 Simon Rycroft, (2011), Swinging City: A Cultural Geography of London 1950 1974,
See also: Interview with Barry Miles, founder of the International Times, The London Magazine, Sept 28, 2017, and
Wikipedia on the International_Times.

4 John Hopkins - Hoppy, Video Pioneer Interview with Hoppy Hopkins by Malcolm Dickson at c.13mins in.
See also Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit. p.26.

5 This quote is a pastiche of two comments from Hopkins in which he more or less says the same thing in two different ways. From the interview with Jackie Hatfield, Artists' Video in the 70s & 80s , op.cit. p.13.

6 Hopkins in the interview with Jackie Hatfield, Artists' Video in the 70s & 80s, op.cit, p.13.

7 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit., p.27.

8 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit., p.27. I have not found any indication as to who the investment corporation were.

9 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit., p.27.

10 Sue Hall in an interview with Chris Meigh-Andrews.

11 In 1973 Kirk returned to Australia to join up with Nush Video, the group of local media activists who were about to set up a video resource centre at the May 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival and whom later became Bush Video.

12 Hatfield, Jackie, Interview with Sue Hall, John Hopkins, Rewind: Artists' Video in the 70's & 80s , audio interview.

13 Bradley Martin was a name William Burroughs used in much of his writing. William Burroughs reading on Mr.Bradley Mr.Martin

14 According to Tony Dowmunt: “Su Braden was starting this video project on the Aylesbury Estate in South East London, but she didn’t have any video gear, and by that time I’d got the Portapak. So we teamed up and started working on the Aylesbury Estate. It was a community arts project, not just a video project and the fundamental sort of rationale of the project was that we were going to occupy spaces on the estate, which we’d got council permission to do, which were originally designed as possible places where people would have laundrettes, or community spaces. But none of them were used, so we said, well, OK, we’ll go in there and we’ll start opening them up and using them.”
See: Heinz Nigg, Channels of Resistance, Portrait of Tony Dowmunt. Community Video Activist>

15 This would have been the record only Sony "Video Rover", model DV-2400. It was the very first portable video tape recorder available to the general public. The DV-2400 portapack VTR and DVC-2400 vidicon camera, was introduced in 1967. For playback you had to rewind the tape and play it on a Sony_CV-2000D

16 John Hopkins, Bradley Martin reporting: date-line June 3, 1969, London. International Times, Issue: 58, pp 6-7.

17 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit., p.27.

18 Ibid.

19 Hopkins in International Times (quoted in Knight, Julia, Diverse Practices, Luton. U.K, University of Luton Press, 1996.) Actual IT volume/issue number yet to be determined.

20 John Kirk in conversation with Stephen Jones, March 20, 2010.

21 Letter dated 12 Dec 69 to Andrew Page, Arts Council of Great Britain.MEMORANDUM RE: VISUAL RECORD OF EVENTS [from a photocopy of the original typescript that is not clearly readable.]

22 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit., p.27.

23 Brice Howard, Videospace, (1972) National Center for Experiments in Television, San Francisco, Calif.

24 Knight, Julia, (ed.) (1996) op cit., p.27.

25 Hatfield, Jackie, Interview with Sue Hall, John Hopkins, op cit., p.5.

26 Brice Howard, Videospace, (1972) op cit.

27 Ibid

28 Hatfield, Jackie, Interview with Sue Hall, John Hopkins, op cit, p.120.

29 John “Hoppy” Hopkins, A Song of Long Ago, Hoppy Hopkins on video in community development (11:59), interview by Heinz Nigg, edited, London Community Video Archive,

30 John Hopkins, Cliff Evans, Steve Herman, John Kirk (eds.), “Video in Community Development”, (1972), London, Centre For Advanced Television Studies.

31 John Hopkins, Cliff Evans, Steve Herman, John Kirk, “Video in Community Development”, Centre for Advanced Television Studies, Journal of the Centre for Advanced Television Studies, vol, 1, no.1, January 1973.

32 Hopkins; Song of Long Ago

33 It later became the City Art Institute, then The College of Fine Arts at the UNSW and now UNSW Art and Design.

34 John Kirk in conversation with Stephen Jones, March 20, 2010.

35 Ibid.

36 Gould's Book Arcade in Liverpool St. Sydney.

37 John Kirk in conversation with Stephen Jones, March 20, 2010.

38 Schoolkids OZ was No.28 of OZ magazine. The issue was, on a special occasion, edited by 5th and 6th-form children. It was the subject of a high-profile obscenity case in the United Kingdom from June 1971 to 5 August 1971, the longest trial under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act
See Schoolkids OZ

39 John “Hoppy” Hopkins, “Real Time Television”, International Times 74, February 27, 1970.

40 Hopkins in the interview with Jackie Hatfield, Artists' Video in the 70s & 80s, op.cit. p.5.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., p.6.

43 Knight, Julia, Diverse Practices, op cit.

43 Knight, Julia, Diverse Practices, op cit.

44 John Kirk in conversation with Stephen Jones, March 20, 2010.

45 1970 Frostbite

46 Hoppy Hopkins talks: A Song of Long Ago

47 The Bath Festival. A little of the video by TVX: is on You Tube

48 John Kirk in conversation with Stephen Jones, March 20, 2010.

49 Article on TVX and John “Hoppy” Hopkins.

50 See, among other things: Lux artists' moving image Blog/Community Video #4: The Video Show - Video Art and Community Video and Blog / Community Video #2: Community Action Ccommunity video 2: community action and at Chris Meigh-Andrews interview with John Hopkins and Sue Hall.

51 Fantasy Factory Video Ltd, List of Completed Video Production 1969-79.,

52 Sue Hall describes how the tape was shot in Hatfield, Jackie, Rewind: artists' Video in the 70's & 80's. Interview with Sue Hall and John Hopkins, 17 November 2004. Fantasy Factory Compilation No 1, 60 mins, 1974-80. . The unedited, brutal arrest of a black youth in London's Kentish Town. This single shot created the precedent for videotape to be used as defence evidence in an English court. Ben was acquitted. A classic example of community video. Apart from the police all persons shown are squatters. The actual sheet from which this reference is taken is a description of a compilation tape once held at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op.

53 See: Rowan_Ayers

54 See Community Programme Unit

55 John Kirk in conversation with Stephen Jones, March 20, 2010.

56 Ibid.