Portable video as a tool of liberation
The Portapak suddenly made anyone a broadcaster — a genuinely revolutionary feeling.
02 Transmission log
The tape deck as printing press
Radical Software and the Raindance video collectives were the media-cybernetics wing of the American counterculture: a Manhattan network of artists, dropout engineers, and self-styled “cultural engineers” who seized the newly portable Sony Portapak — introduced 1965 — to build a working alternative to network television. They braided Norbert Wiener- and Gregory Bateson-style cybernetics, Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology, and Buckminster Fuller’s systems utopianism into a single working proposition: television could be rebuilt as a feedback loop rather than a one-way broadcast.
03 Unifying signal
Cheap portable video is a cybernetic tool to decentralize media power — a guerrilla television that breaks the broadcast monopoly and lets communities see and organize themselves.
— the working proposition held in common
04 Standing wave
Motifs
Four images the scene returned to, again and again, like a monitor pointed at its own screen.
M.01
M.02
Guerrilla television against the broadcast monopoly
A decentralized signal set deliberately against the one-way tower.
M.03
The video collective and the feedback loop
Television reimagined as a two-way circuit, not a channel you receive.
M.04
Information ecology & decentralized media
Media understood as an ecosystem to be tended, not a pipe to be filled.
05 Why it caught
Memetic forces
F.01
A camera in every hand
Cheap portable video suddenly made anyone a broadcaster — a genuinely revolutionary feeling.
F.02
A heady intellectual frame
Cybernetic and McLuhanite theory gave the practice its language and its stakes.
F.03
A shared organ
A common journal and the collectives forged a movement identity out of scattered tapes.
06 Feedback / interference
The engines
What pulled the signal together, and what scattered it.
Convergent · pulling together
- The journal Radical Software as connective organ
- Video collectives — Raindance, the Videofreex
- A shared cybernetic / McLuhan theory of media
Divergent · pulling apart
- The fragility of underfunded collectives
- The gap between utopian theory and small audiences
- Absorption into video art and public-access TV
07 From the record
RADICAL SOFTWARE ELEVEN ISSUES · 1970–74 · NEW YORK
The journal
Formally incorporated as the Raindance Corporation in October 1969 by Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Paul Ryan, Ira Schneider, Louis Jaffe, and Marco Vassi — a name that mocked the RAND Corporation it was structurally imitating — the scene found its voice in the journal Radical Software, eleven issues across 1970 to 1974.
It was edited by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny out of a prior Video Newsletter, and reached a circulation of roughly 5,000. Paul Ryan’s “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare” and Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television gave the movement its slogans and its theory alike.
The proposition ran straight through every page: the tape deck could be the new printing press, and a community that could record itself could finally begin to organize itself.
08 The collective
Figures on the tape
Beryl Korot
Michael Shamberg
Ira Schneider
the Videofreex
Raindance was incorporated in October 1969 by Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Paul Ryan, Ira Schneider, Louis Jaffe, and Marco Vassi. The wider network drew in allied collectives — the Videofreex, Global Village, People’s Video Theater, and Ant Farm / TVTV — bound less by a headquarters than by a shared conviction and a shared journal.
09 Format & type
Mediums & archetypes
The channels the scene worked in, and the deeper patterns it enacted.
10 Dossier
Dynamics, impact, fate
Internal dynamics
A loose movement of video collectives linked by a journal and a cybernetic theory of media — chronically underfunded and idealistic.
Scenius signature
A journal plus collectives turning cheap portable video into a theorized movement to democratize media.
Impact on society
Founded video art and the guerrilla / community-media tradition, prefiguring public-access TV, camcorder activism, and the participatory-media ethos that the internet would later scale.
Fate
The journal ended in 1974 and the collectives dispersed, but their ideas flowed on into video art, public access, and later citizen media.
1965Portapak
1969Raindance inc.
1970Issue No. 1
1971Guerrilla TV
1974Signal ends
11 Provenance
Sources
Coded from public web sources, Wikipedia-led. Confidence: medium — not yet independently verified.
- “Raindance Foundation,” Wikipedia (accessed 2026).Founding date, founders, RAND-parody naming, and network overlap with countercultural media circles.
- “Tale of the Tape: Radical Software,” Artforum.Journal history, editorial roles of Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny, cybernetics / McLuhan / Fuller influences, circulation figures.
- “Guerrilla television,” Wikipedia (accessed 2026).Paul Ryan’s “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare,” Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television, and the broadcast-vs-decentralization opposition.
- “Preserving Guerrilla Television,” BAMPFA (UC Berkeley) resources & essays.Portapak technology context, allied collectives (Videofreex, Global Village, People’s Video Theater, Ant Farm / TVTV), and archival framing.
No photographs are reproduced here; this page is a typographic transmission. All quoted facts derive from the sources above.