Night Flight - The Video Artist Season 2

"Night Flight - The Video Artist." In the 1980s the big three broadcast networks commanded most of the TV viewers in the USA. Those brand new cable network thingies would, of course, never compete with the real networks. (OK, bad call. Maybe not as bad as Decca not signing the Beatles, but still a bad call :-) The cable networks lack of money and viewers gave birth to programming that was a huge departure from what the broadcast networks were airing from MTV to a show called Night Flight, which showed up Friday and Saturday nights on the brand new USA Cable Network.

Curated by Stuart Shapiro, a NYC hipster with a PhD from Stanford, Night Flight played mad cool segments about art and culture and the 1980s downtown scene, including: New Wave Theater, Love That Bob (Church of the Sub-Genius) and The Video Artist - A segment covering artists working in the then-new world of video and computer graphics.

This episode from the second season of the Video Artist (1984) featured John Sanborn and me discussing two of our pieces: ACT III and Big Electric Cat. In addition to the on camera interviews, the show played both pieces in their entirety. You can find both of them posted on YouTube.

John and I were heading to Siggraph 84 in Detroit right after taping this to premiere ACT III. Each segment of these interviews, therefore, had to be recorded in one quick take. That either made them a little extra funny or a little extra stupid, Im not quite sure which. :-)

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Dean Winkler
• John Sanborn
• Dean358
• Stuart Shapiro
• Night Flight
• The Video Artist
• 1980s
• Teletronics
• 80s video art
• VCA Teletronics
• video layering
• video art
• art video
• yt:quality=high

[alsupra71]

Dean, this is unbelievable! Great post. Edit C in it's prime.

Please check the VCA Teletronics FB page for news about Sid.

Al

[dean358]

@alsupra71 Thanks Al -- very sorry to hear about Sid.

[willfreese]

Much has happened since then, but when USA Night Flight was on the air, this stuff was amazing. Thanks for posting this. Brings back happy memories.

[dean358]

yvw! I feel (slightly) less embarrassed about posting it now :-)

[atomicelroy]

Night Flight was the best show on TV at the time! I still have a studio rig with a switcher. It's fun to play with still.