USCO

USCO was an American media art

The founding members of USCO were poet Gerd Stern, electronic technician Michael Callahan, and ex-Pop art painter Steve Durkee (aka Stephen Durkee, later known as Nooruddeen Durkee).^[1][3][7] Along with photographer/weaver Judi Stern and sculptor/photographer Barbara Durkee, this core group became USCO.^[3] Barbara Durkee (later known as Asha Greer) ran the group's Intermedia Gallery.^[8] Judi Stern stated of her fellow members, "We dreamed collectively."^[3]

Among USCO's other members were the filmmaker and video artist Jud Yalkut.^[1][3][9] Yalkut created several films for USCO events in the mid-sixties, some in collaboration with USCO members, including Turn, Turn, Turn (for which USCO did the soundtrack), Ghost Rev, Diffraction Film, and Down By the Riverside.^[3] Yalkut works can be found in The Experimental Television Center Collection.^[10]

Michael Callahan was technical director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center when he met Stern in 1963 through the SF Tape Music Center's Morton Subotnick via Michael McClure.^{[2][3][12][13]} By 1963 Callahan was purchasing surplus IBM computers to use the parts for customized kinetic art.^[14][15] Callahan's experience working at the SF Tape Music Center taught him how to make do with whatever technology he could scrounge and build, due to lack of funds.^[2]

Steve Durkee, raised in New York, studied art at

The USCO group collaborated with artists, engineers, poets, and filmmakers. Influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, USCO used stroboscopes, oscilloscopes, projectors, closed-circuit television, computerized control systems, and audiotapes in their "multi-channel media mix" performances.^{[1][2][3][5][7]} They often reused and repurposed technology from surplus parts.^[2] To underline the community character of the project, USCO used the phrase "We are all one".^[1][5] They mixed film, tapes, slides, light, kinetic sculpture, and live actors in audiovisual performances in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and at university campuses across the United States.^[1][3][5][7] Judi Stern and Barbara Durkee developed innovative techniques for silk-screening USCO posters.^[3]

Verbal American Landscape/Contact

Callahan stated:

Our work was really drawn from McLuhan. We looked at McLuhan as the theoretician–and we were the practitioners...We had a mission to bring about public awareness of the impact that all this instantaneous communication was having and was going to have–to attempt to be prepared for it and to change it if necessary.

San Francisco Museum of Art, Stern instead staged a two-night performance in November 1963 titled Contact Is the Only Love, which involved sixty-four performers. The slides were shot by Stewart Brand. Callahan (in his late teens) assisted with audio, using equipment borrowed from the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Stern and Callahan created a four-channel mix of conversation, announcements, and popular music by simultaneously playing, mixing, and switching four pre-recorded tapes and live cut-ups of radio.^{[2][3][12][14]}

Contact Is the Only Love evolved out of Verbal American Landscape. Stern and Callahan built an octagonal kinetic sculpture for the show, seven feet in diameter. It featured flashing neon lights, loudspeakers, amplifiers, and tape loops. In the center were painted signs with words such as "Go," "Merge," and "Enter with Caution."[3]^[15][18]

Stern described the performance:

We had transparent isolation booths onstage in which each of them--there were four people all together--you know, Herb Caen, Allen Ginsberg, et cetera, et cetera--we were able to broadcast and switch the signals from the various booths onto a series of speakers. In the meantime, we were projecting a series of slides which came from the Verbal American Landscape. Those had been chosen by me--I didn't do the photography; Ivan and Stewart Brand did the photography. We borrowed some closed-circuit television equipment, so there were television images. We were able to switch the whole thing. There were people in costume--it was a very elaborate affair.^[12]

At the museum, M. C. Richards gave Stern her copy of John Cage's manuscript of McLuhan's Understanding Media, which Stern described as a report that McLuhan had written for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) while still in Canada, and then had turned into Understanding Media with very little, if any, editing.^[2][14] Stern recalled, "I read it, and it was a revelation; I understood immediately that his perceptions were seminal for my development. Particularly things like his statement that what you need to do is pay attention to the effect rather than the content."^[19]

Stern and Callahan were then invited to Vancouver, by a University of British Columbia gallery director who had also been at the San Francisco Museum of Art show, to do a performance with a lecture by McLuhan.^[2][3][20] The gallery director had noted the inclusion of McLuhan's ideas in the San Francisco performance, from a quote by McLuhan in the performance handout.^[20]

Psychedelic Explorations and Expanded Cinema

In early 1965 USCO became interested in replicating the

In November and December 1965, filmmaker Jonas Mekas curated the New Cinema Festival (later referred to as the Expanded Film Festival) at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City. The festival featured two nights of an USCO collaboration with Carolee Schneemann, as well as other emerging psychedelic light show artists. Program Manager John Brockman, who coined the term intermedia, helped create the festival as a series of multimedia productions in which participants combined cinema images and projectors with live actions and music.^[22] According to Gerd Stern, USCO was asked to participate because "they thought that our multimedia performances were kind of simulations of psychedelic experiences."^[23] Callahan explained USCO "took incandescent lamps out of slide projectors, and replaced them with intense strobe bulbs, so the projected image itself would flash on the screen."^[2]

In addition to USCO, participants in Mekas' New Cinema Festival (Expanded Film Festival) included

Mekas presented another multimedia event by USCO the following month, for a week in January 1966. Titled Hubbub, the event was promoted in the

USCO became a client of Nina Graboi's Third Force Lecture Bureau in early 1966. Graboi became director of the League for Spiritual Discovery's New York Center, which she co-founded with Leary, later that year.^[25] Back in San Francisco, Stewart Brand co-produced the Trips Festival with Ramon Sender and Ken Kesey in January 1966.

The World

USCO participated in, and helped design and produce, New York DJ

USCO's leftist politics were expressed in terms of relations rather than direct political action; they thought they were "beyond politics."[2] Judi Stern didn't see a separation, explaining, "Most of our work was involved in two things: Changing consciousness...and changing the world." For example, USCO added to their slide mix sympathetic photographs of people in Vietnam, due to the disturbance USCO felt about the Vietnam War. Brand, on the other hand, thought USCO's work had "zero political elements."^[3]

In 1966 USCO exhibited at the

At the end of 1966 Steve and Barbara Durkee left Garnerville, and lived with Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). For a short time period, Steve Durkee lectured with Alpert on "LSD: Illusion or Reality?" before Alpert left the U.S. for study in India.^[28]

In 1967 the Durkees formed the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico north of Taos with Jonathan Altman, and assistance from Alpert.^[3][29][30] They created a spiritual community on land purchased by Altman, with its main structure built with others in 1968 in the shape of a dome.^[31][32] Barbara Durkee stated, "We came to get away from the conservative world that was pretty tight and boxed-in, non-diverse and not very spiritual."^[31] At the time, Lama was one of approximately thirty communes in Northern New Mexico.^[30]

After the Durkees' departure, the other members of USCO in New York continued to produce and exhibit work under the USCO name through 1968.

In 1969 Stewart Brand connected Steve Durkee with Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford University and the development of early Internet culture.^[35] Around the same time, the Durkees helped Ram Dass with Be Here Now, which was published by the Lama Foundation in 1971 and became a best-seller.^[31][32] Its original title was From Bindu to Ojas, with illustrations by Lama community residents.^[30]

In 2005 Gerd Stern and Callahan worked together on an USCO retrospective at Anthology Film Archives.^[3]

In 2015 the Walker Art Center in

In 2015 Seton Hall University featured a solo exhibition of USCO in the Walsh Gallery WhenThen curated by Jeanne Brasile

In 2016, the Garnerville church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[37][38]

In 2019, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. organized an USCO program, USCO - Films, Performance, and Conversation with 1960s Multimedia Pioneers, curated by Paige Rozanski.^[39]

References