Video Preview

Please click on any point in the description to jump straight to that segment. (Clipstream version only).  

Media Burn by Ant Farm, 1975 edit Date: 07/04/75 | Running Time: 26 min. Add Media Burn by Ant Farm, 1975 edit to playlist Nominate this video
My Clip Video Editor

Bookmark/episode description

Original version of Ant Farm's classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On July 4, Independence Day, 1975, what a TV newscaster described as a "media circus" assembles at San Francisco's Cow Palace Stadium. A pyramid of television sets are stacked, doused with kerosene, and set ablaze. Then a modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, piloted by two drivers who are guided only by a video monitor between their bucket seats, smashes through the pyramid destroying the TV sets.

Preceding the event are clips from various TV news broadcasts that covered it (many of the TV reporters make the comment that they "didn't get it"). The tape includes interviews with invited guests, a speech given by Doug Hall as President John F. Kennedy explaining the message of Media Burn, the dramatic unveiling of the Phantom Dream Car, several sequences of the car smashing through the TV sets, and its triumphant return from the end of the Cow Palace parking lot.

Main Credits:

produced by Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, and Uncle Buddie) ; executive producer, Tom Weinberg ; artist-president, Doug Hall ; other producers, Dan Calderwood, Marie Ford, Ceil Cruessing, Diane Hall, John Hilding, Phil Makanna, The Residents, Edmund Shea, Starr Sutherland, T.R. Uthco, and Judith Williams

Additional Credits:

edited by Chip Lord, Skip Blumberg, Doug Michels, and Tom Weinberg ; video production, Optic Nerve (Lynn Adler, Jules Backus, Jim Mayer, Sherrie Rabinowitz, John Rodgers, and Mya Shone), Marin Community Video (Burt Aronowitz, Robt. Keller, and John Gillette), California Video Resource project (Craig Schiller, Will Hoover, Jay Braunstein, E.C., and John Hunt), T.L. Morey, David Cort, William Farley, and Chuck Koteen

Media Burn event program.  Contains Ant Farm artwork and full text of John F. Kennedy's (Doug Hall) speech.  Also contains feedback forms and photographs of the Phantom Dream Car.

List of comments


You need to be registered user to post comments. Please login or register. Click here to login

To save your bookmarks from 'My Clip Video Editor' in our database, you must login or register. Otherwise it will be available until you leave this page. Click here to login