Quasi-documentary—some reenactments—in an East Village watering hole circa 1990. Best Editing, Art of Brooklyn Film Festival

Spamwalk is a video I put together in 1976. It was shot on a Sony Porta Pack, one of the first consumer video recording systems. It used half-inch tape (the same size as VHS and Betamax) but in a reel-to-reel format: users threaded the tape around the helical scanning head by hand.

Several years ago I donated all the tapes made by our media arts collective We're Just Like You to the Media Burn archive in Chicago; they rescanned the original reels and posted them online. This gave me the opportunity to revisit Spamwalk. I did everything I could with current consumer tech to clean it up and repair some damaged segments, mainly at the start and end of the tape (any credit in red is a recreation).

Spamwalk is not just a parody of what we were calling a process piece in the mid-seventies; it is a process piece itself. It was shown at a festival or two and the Contemporary Arts Center, the home of the small video art scene happening in Cincinnati. We're Just Like You was also featured in the Nine in the Ninth series put on at the CAC in 1978 alongside luminaries like Cecil Taylor, Albert Maysles, and Terry Riley. The WJLY segment showcased a new video extravaganza called Dinner Without Will at Dot and Bill's Video Grill and a performance by The Ed Davis Band, Cincinnati's first so-called punk outfit.

A five episode soap-opera shot in and around the East Village circa 1991. Though originally designed for public access on Manhattan cable, profound editing problems on an Amiga Toaster pushed it right off the air. I paid to have the original tapes rescanned during the pandemic and finally got an acceptable version put together in 2023. A half-hour edit combining all episodes is also available on my YouTube channel.

An examination of the deterioration of analog sorce material after twenty-five years, plus some music.

Why am I crying here? A brief and intense segment from the Enright family 8mm archive.

The original three-segment version of Spamwalk posted to YouTube in 2006 while there were still length restrictions in place. In that twenty-year timeframe the piece has averaged about forty hits a year.

The most boring among us fear boredom most. If this piece proves nothing else, it's that I'm not afraid or boredom. This was the second video I ever made; the first was a carefully-assembled essay I shot for the EPA on a gas chromatograph. I had a summer internship, and used their early chyron device to put the credits on videos I made in 1975-76.