Radical Software, organized by Will Bradley, puts together the Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground. After an initial viewing I wanted more time, so I came back for second look.

The show is free form, allows the viewer to dive into the material, and gives the viewer few opportunities to be told what to do. “Information wants to be free“ RIGHT ON? LEFT ON! Okay take back the RIGHT. RIGHT ON! However the trade off for me, the viewer and a member of this Bay Area Art scene, is that I want to dig deeper. This was a treasure room of underground politics, activism, and videos and if supplementary information was not included in the exhibition, then I would like the exhibition to lead me to more resources outside of it.

Back to the Treasure room: Getting to see original San Francisco Mime Troupe Posters, Ant Farm Periodicals (which I have seen before in the Ant Farm retrospective at BAM), and other original periodicals including information on Collective Memory in the Bay Area, which lead to the sharing of information that we now know of on the Internet. Some of the Contemporary Artists include Amy Balkin, Josh On, and SuperFlex all of whom are making strong Art/Work that is figuring out present day strategies for navigating our current social political climate. Here in this show their work gets overloaded with the experimental film and video, documentary which material blows my mind.

Highlights:
Interviews including one with Abbie Hoffman at the time of the Chicago 7 Trial, people on the streets in the early 70’s, Protests and Rallies, more expansive Ant Farm inflatable footage, Pregnancy Massage videos, psychedelic videos. As an artist making videos, I want to know who or what group made which videos. Post these videos on UBU.web afterwards, make them free. I haven't seen these videos before and this was a one of kind experience, even though headsets were mis-wired.

Timothy Leary/Electronics Arts, Mind Mirror video Game on a Commodore 64 CPU system, never thought I would run a program off a real floppy disc ever again.

Most of All:
Ferdinand Kriwet’s 'Apollovision' 1969-2005 and 'Campaign' 1972/73-2005. Kriwet born in Dussledorf in 1942, a multimedia artist and poet who has produced many seminal films and sound works for radio and television, in particular throughout the 1960's and 1970's.

Digging Deeper on line:

Apollovision' created while in America at the time of the moon launch, “his aim being to compose a work of perception derived from all information he gathered on radio, television and newspaper about the Apollo 11 launch.” He describes these films as "Bild-Ton-Collage" sound-picture-collages, and in parallel Kriwet developed concrete poetry, radio pieces composed of noise and sound bite samples and publications. Kriwet's works are an attempt at communicating an idea of listening to something that constantly surrounds us on short, medium and long wave frequencies. His politically engaged and avant-garde approach was influenced by aesthetic and Conceptual currents in Constructivism, New Music, Beat Generation and Pop.

Adding to this I am currently in the midst of constantly revisiting the campaign of 2004 and its social/ political impact not only on the country but specifically its divisive tactics that are involved within my own family. After reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign of ’72 and getting an in depth articulate shifted perspective of this Presidential Election, Kriwet’s 'Campaign' 1972 condenses the entire 1972 presidential election into a 15 min richly saturated video collage.

Apollovision and 'Campaign' 1972 are explosive, the edits are quick, include great fonts showing Dates and Times changing rapidly, and segments are repeated to create richly layered collages. Medium Cool 1969 and Parallax View 1974 (two films I greatly admire) both have richly saturated montages of "America" in them, Kriwet’s videos take the Cake. The repetition of images in America, from our Race to Space, Baseball, Presidents, News, Sound Bites, all come together to break down the IDEA "AMERICA" in the MEDIA. These video works show the over saturation of media in 1969 and 1972, but most of all what is to come.

Contemporary Artists in the show you should check out:
Amy Balkin:
Several projects listed here:
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2005/balkin/index.html

Josh On:
http://www.theyrule.net/
http://www.futurefarmers.com/josh/

SuperFlex:
http://www.superflex.net/

Look up more artists and Groups from the show here:
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/software/