EZTV and LA’s Digital Underground

EZTV is a community-based, artist-run organization in Los Angeles that is among the first independent art spaces dedicated to video and digital art. It is also a focal point for the independent video revolution that began in 1979. Since its early days in West Hollywood, EZTV has advocated for a number of different artistic communities in the city, through its transition years in Hollywood (including five years housed at LACE) and, since 2000, as an organization-in-residence at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Always a champion for the underrepresented and disenfranchised, EZTV has curated, produced, and offered low-cost services to those locked out by traditional fine art and Hollywood institutions.

One of the fundamental differences [between] EZTV and the rest of the industry, in this city anyway, is that EZTV doesn’t take no for an answer, doesn’t recognize limitations, doesn’t recognize biases or standards that have, basically, caused more things not to happen than to happen. (Michael J. Masucci)‍

In 1986, founding member Michael J. Masucci created the West Hollywood Sign, originally as a joke. But it became an instant hit and was embraced by the diverse West Hollywood community, including the city government. In 1992, as a subspace of EZTV, Michael together with Patric Prince founded CyberSpace Gallery with the help of artists Victor Acevedo, ia Kamandalu, Michael Wright, intern Lisa Tripp, and others. CyberSpace was among the world’s first galleries dedicated to digital art and, in 1995, launched one of the very first websites exhibiting digital art. That website became an early Yahoo! “Site of the Day,” and was among only a handful of websites focused on digital art included in the early internet book, Yahooligans!: Way Cool Web Sites (1996).

Following the death of EZTV’s founder John Dorr in 1993, Masucci became Director and, in partnership with Kate Johnson (1969-2020), transitioned the space in a way that allowed for its survival and continued preservation. Here he charts a history of cultural pluralism in California with Dina Chang.‍‍

‍Dina Chang: How did EZTV start?

‍Michael J. Masucci: John Dorr, the founder, was an openly gay man at a time when that was career suicide. He was one of the people behind the Yale Film Society that began presenting European New Wave cinema on college campuses very early on. When it was time to go to grad school, he got into UCLA film school where his dream was to be a screenwriter, if not a director.

He chose not to finish because it was pretty clear that there were a lot of closed doors. He had some scripts optioned, a lot of: “we’re getting close,” [but] nothing ever happened. I don’t think that was specifically because he was gay. That’s just what happened. But it’s what happens to nearly everyone. Hollywood was and still is a very hard nut to crack.

His friend repaired security cameras and had a Betamax deck [early home video recorder], which he brought home one weekend. John realized that you could “make” a film with a cheesy microphone, black-and-white security camera, and a home Betamax deck. He realized it was easier to produce a video film than it was to produce a play, and created his first feature film, Sudzall Does It All! (1980).‍

John shared that VCR with a number of other people, creating a queer video cinema aesthetic local to West Hollywood. Over the years, half a dozen people produced bodies of work on that Betamax deck, which also became the production and playback tool for several screenings at the West Hollywood Community Center. Then, lo and behold, John received an inheritance of $25,000, which, in 1981, was a lot of money, and rented a 700-square-foot room in West Hollywood that would become a public video gallery — EZTV’s video gallery — and basically a full-time community center by 1983. He lived on avocados he would steal off his neighbor’s house and the occasional paid gig as a house painter.‍‍

‍DC: That is crazy. What we’re really talking about is an unbelievable generosity and sharing of resources.

‍MJM: John was a hippie in the best sense of the word and, yes, he was generous to a fault. He was generous to his own impoverishment and drove around a very old, beat up car. He never had any finery in his life, but he created something that serviced literally hundreds of people … a number of whom went on to win Academy Awards, Emmys, [producing work that] ended up in museums. People got to make their projects very cheaply, or even for free, while John lived in a converted garage … Some of the initial articles about EZTV are about this utopian visionary, John Dorr, who is going to change the world making videos for nothing and, in a sense, he did. 

EZTV’s initial group were largely gay men, a smaller group of women, and then some straight people. But, over a few years, I would say by 1986 or ’87, the demographic had changed dramatically because a lot of people disappeared because of the AIDS crisis. 

One of my deep regrets in life is that, although we became like brothers the nine years we knew each other, I never asked John why he called it [EZTV]. Initially, I didn’t like the name, which isn’t my style. I’m a much more pretentious, artsy fartsy guy. I probably would have gone with something like the Institute of Contemporary Media. 

I’ve come to believe that the name was a euphemism: a self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. There is nothing easy about making a good video and back then it was insane. 

There’s also a very interesting context to it. We were all very self-effacing at that point, and I was rough around the edges, but we would always make fun of ourselves and the idea was a play on punk rock. “Punk” is a very derogatory term in the prison system … the lowest status you can have. Musicians of the time like Handsome Dick Manitoba of The Dictators just said, “look, everyone’s going to hate our music. We’ll just call it punk rock. Now that we’ve already called ourselves the worst thing you can call us, we’ll just go for it, man.” It was something like that with EZTV.

‍DC: What was the vibe in LA for art at that time?

‍MJM: Pluralistic to say the least. You had the Light and Space artists; you had the rich ethnic diversity and all its own cultural communities and movements, fetish clubs, early dance clubs and raves, performance art, indie cinema. But they were all silos [and] there was very little interaction between the constellation here in LA.

‍DC: It sounds as though the scene at EZTV circled the John Waters camp a little bit.

‍MJM: It did and Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) was part of that, as were The Blasters and Los Lobos. You had Pee-wee Herman and that whole troupe … Andy Kaufman did shit at EZTV. But then the next evening you would have an event focusing on contemporary art masters like David Hockney, Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, Jim Shaw, Barbara T. Smith, and so many others in the so-called “fine art world.”

Most spaces were far more specialized. There’s an art space downtown called The Hive which was goth and kind of cartoonish. In Los Angeles, there was that art world and then there was the Ed Ruscha art world, and never the twain met. 

I described EZTV’s approach to programming years ago as “non-genre specific.” We really were ground central for dancers experimenting with media as well as indie directors scrounging together resources to finish their first feature. There were Balanchine-trained ballerinas who were paying bills by being in these movies and also working with experimental unknown artists who also somehow found us. I used to call EZTV a Cuisinart. We did wall show-style art exhibitions, live multimedia, performance art, and music, as well as traditional sit-down video screenings. 

Those screenings were in fact one of the key early differences between what we were doing, and say, the Long Beach Museum Video Annex or LACE. Most video art was exhibited in an art gallery setting, with videos playing on loop on a monitor along with other artworks. John Dorr realized that video deserved to be watched just as cinema was watched, as a sit-down theatrical experience. It was the beginning of what later became known as microcinema.

‍DC: And there was Hollywood.

‍MJM: Hollywood was the gold ring for some of us. Not me, my goal was never Hollywood. Sure, there were some people who viewed EZTV as a stepping stone to Hollywood. I looked to the art world as my nirvana. Surprisingly, there was room for all of us. We all operated independently as producers within the EZTV system, and somehow it worked. Years ago, there was a quote in LA Weekly: “EZTV is cultural pluralism to the max” and that’s a good thing. 

‍DC: What do you mean by cultural pluralism? ‍

‍MJM: Well, the same piece of editing equipment was being run 24/7. A performance artist would come and edit her performance on that editing system, while the next person could easily be a comedian doing a stand up demo to get a gig, then perhaps scientists documenting their experimental trials, or a grassroots politician finishing a TV spot. Another might easily be a producer making slasher or cult B movies. Exploitation. Pulp. There was a whole scene. 

We accepted that there was going to be a lot of work that we actually didn’t like or even endorse. But it deserves the right to be made. Decades later, when I was tasked along with my late partner, Kate Johnson, with preserving what remained of this massive volume of media, we had the difficult decision to preserve projects even we felt were transgressive, or even politically incorrect. Because that’s what history should do: preserve without prejudice, thereby allowing historians to critique and comment afterwards. Of course most people making these projects never made a dime.

The first people to make money in any serious way with video, other than porn, were the B-movie people, [making movies that] went straight to video. Back then the term “straight-to-video” was a put down — films that never got into a theater but went straight to VHS. Hollywood is a bifurcation of high- and low-end.

‍DC: It’s still a put down.

‍MJM: Yeah, it is. But there were a bunch of people who said, “I’ll take that,” and there was an industry of people making five, ten, fifteen-thousand dollar exploitation films who would flip it and make 40 grand. Alright, they didn’t become rich, but they made a living making four or five every year. We were also entering the age of tape duplication becoming something anyone could do.

‍DC: But tape duplication created a space for the democratization of culture.‍

MJM: That’s right. There were a number of brilliant, ambitious women who originally wanted to be Hollywood stars, who realized there was too much competition and settled with being B-movie queens. Brinke Stevens had a masters in marine biology. But, as she puts it, her claim to fame is that she’s done more nude shower scenes than anyone else in history — a brilliant woman who just totally owned it by saying: “I can make a living making five or six of these stupid movies each year where I just run around naked screaming, [while] being chased by some guy in a bad rubber monster suit.”

EZTV self-distributed its own catalog of VHS tapes — it was always a niche market, selling at best in the low 100s of copies. The two best-selling videos could not have been more different: the video art non-narrative short piece, Lemuria (1986), which I made in collaboration with Kim McKillip (aka ia Kamandalu), known collectively as Vertical Blanking, and James “Dillinger” Baker’s transgressive feature-length video-movie Blonde Death (1984). Lemuria was EZTV’s best-selling VHS, giving some credence to the idea that the public would purchase expressionistic and largely abstract video art.

I see a similarity between the analog VHS distribution model, which democratized the availability of ideas and works, and today’s articulated Web3 ethos. Both seek better ways to enfranchise, allow greater economic independence, and open new and innovative distribution channels.

Tapes were mailed across the world, not via the internet, but by snail mail. And yet they still eventually arrived at their audience’s door — slow, to be sure, but an advance on the days of sitting in a movie theater or watching a TV program. It was both democratizing and decentralizing. If the first days of the World Wide Web were Web1, then perhaps VHS was a type of Web.05.‍‍

‍DC: EZTV sounds like a meeting ground for people excluded from mainstream Hollywood and the art world.

‍MJM: That’s correct, [but] the first drafts of the canon — what little exists — consist of maybe only four or five articles of scholarly note that have focused on narrative feature-length [work]: the thing closest to traditional filmmaking. There was a ton of mainstream press, but that’s all been forgotten. 

It only occurred to me in the last year that one of the reasons the computer art history of EZTV never got documented until later on was that there were no art critics. It was mostly film critics interested in the videos that looked like films.

So much of the art aspect, especially the digital art aspect, went unnoticed by the press until the early 1990s when we created CyberSpace Gallery. At that point, there was some mainstream press recognition.‍‍

‍DC: Who was making computer art?

‍MJM: A number of people centered around SIGGRAPH were what I considered the core community: independent artists, university-affiliated people, and those lucky enough to have access to serious computing power. But, of course, there were other, mainstream artists who dabbled in this new territory. It is now widely known that Andy Warhol experimented with computer art. There are some very famous pictures of him making a digital portrait of Debbie Harry from Blondie. I believe that Warhol was not happy with his own computer art, and he moved on. But recently they were put on the auction block for millions.

At a time when a lot of people were having trouble paying their phone bills, there were others who had access to expensive toys who just got very fetishistic, I felt, about anything they produced. There was a techno-bias and I believe there still is, but not to the same extent.

‍I believe that there were a lot of people in the art world who weren’t inclined to accept something made on a computer. I get that. On the other hand, I saw what happened when musicians started using computers — they started having hit records. 

I would like to live in a world where it doesn’t matter if you’re famous internationally or only respected by a small group. What matters is that you do something that means something to people. A lot of the early computer art that I saw left me cold. It had great engineering, but often the great ideas I was seeing in art were still coming from artists working traditionally.

I may be absolutely wrong, and I know there are scholars and historians who are going to vehemently disagree with me. I don’t have a PhD and I’m not a historian, so what do I know? Maybe someday I’ll have a piece of paper saying I know what I’m talking about. But I do know this: people from many communities and educational backgrounds can come together to reinvent the present and influence the future. EZTV was a part of that.

‍DC: How do you feel about Web3, blockchain, and how early digital art is currently being presented? Words like “art and tech” and “pioneer” are being used a lot.

‍MJM: Everyone understands that blockchain and Web3 are going to be what ultimately brings this into a mature space, no question. Still, I refuse to take full advantage of what seems like a golden opportunity to brand myself as a “crypto maxi.” I’m conscious that I have been slitting my own throat from a career perspective my whole life because I hate silos. I was born in a ghetto. I come from the South Bronx [and] I know what it’s like to be categorized. Because I was white, I had a chance of getting out of a neighborhood where 93% of the people don’t look like me. 

‍I don’t want to be known as a digital artist. I don’t want to be known as a video artist. I don’t want to be known as anything but an artist because I will use whatever tool solves my problem. ‍

‍Tools to me are merely solutions to problems and, yes, almost always it’s a computer. But when there is something that does what I want better, I am going to drop computers like yesterday’s news. 2024 marks the 45th anniversary of EZTV and 40 years of us collaborating with LA ACM SIGGRAPH, and especially with Joan Collins. But it’s also the year that the Getty staged its region-wide initiative, PST ART: Art and Science Collide! Personally, I don’t think art and science collide. Art and science inform each other, inspire each other, and make love to each other. Or, as I say in certain circles, I think art and science fuck each other’s brains out. 

“Art and tech” is a phrase I despise because there was never a time when it wasn’t part of a branding strategy being used by a lot of marketers as if they were something new. Maybe they should call it “art and electronics” or “art and computing,” but not art and tech.

‍DC: Do you feel that the word “tech” is being used to sell a certain type of computer art?

‍MJM: I think they’re trying to sell art, sure. But they’re upping the value of the technological aspect to skim over the art. It’s not about how the art is made — I want to know the story.

I’ve pissed off a lot of people of my vintage by saying: “Don’t tell me how you made this piece of art; tell me why.” After decades of knowing some of these people, I still don’t know what the piece is about and I’ve come to suspect — I hope I’m incorrect — that it’s not about anything, just what they could make with the tool. To me, that’s not art. To me, that’s proof of an engineering concept.

‍DC: There’s a comment you made about early computer art that I can’t get out of my head: “If it was going to do something, it would have been something.”

‍MJM: My God, for the better part of 20 years I would ask my friends in the SIGGRAPH community: “what are the ten essential pieces of computer art or digital art from any time period?” No one can answer. 

Artists exist in communities, not in vacuums, [but] we are now reverse engineering a narrative of an artistic community that was largely, from my recollection, a bunch of siloed people at very elite, prestigious facilities like JPL, UCLA, and CalArts that were off limits and inaccessible to 99% of the world. The great artists of all time have used a variety of tools. One day they were a painter, another day a sculptor. One day they wrote plays or [produced] scenic designs or costumes, or they played the violin. Artists have always been more than one-trick ponies. What we’re doing right now is hard selling the one-trick pony.

I think that a lot of people appreciate early digital art because of the technical achievement of its coming into being. To me, it is absolutely an achievement in the history of engineering and science. What it did for me was overcome a cerebral hurdle and crazy bias, opening up acceptance to a new genre of art. 

‍[…] But just because somebody received first access to esoteric equipment doesn’t mean they did anything profound with it. It should be remembered and go in the timeline, but it doesn’t necessarily have to go at the top of the canon.

DC: Where is EZTV now?

EZTV continues to be different things to different people. A handful of scholars are only concerned with the very early days, and, even then, only about the narrative works. That of course is their right. Others are concerned only with our early digital exhibitions. What remains of EZTV is a huge body of work, videos, writings, photographs, etc., in the One Archives at USC. The One National Gay and Lesbian Archives is the world’s largest archive of queer material.

‍I am proud that my work is being preserved in a queer archive because my art community was the queer community. That was my people and they allowed me a venue and a voice to expand to the slightly larger audience I have today. 

For my own work, I am actually more productive now than I’ve been in years. In the last five years, along with Joan Collins of LA SIGGRAPH and Victor Acevedo, I’ve been working toward celebrating EZTV’s 45 years and 40 years with SIGGRAPH. It began as a single art exhibition before more partners came together, including Robert Berman, Jeff Gordon, Santa Monica College, and 18th Street Arts Center, forming DNA Festival Santa Monica. It quickly became the largest festival of the year in our city. 

As part of Getty’s PST, I reintroduced a curatorial theory I developed in the 1980s called “Curatorial Collaborations,” where I select artists to create videos together. For PST I curated a series called “The Analog Brain” in which five artists, all very courageous and talented  women — Alina Kalinouskaya, Nikolina Lawless, Cally Lindle, Makani Nalu, and Edith Sööt — bravely confront issues of their past including, in some cases, attempts at suicide and self-mutilation, questioning reality, exploring esoteric spirituality, and finally, being diagnosed autistic as an adult. I’m also doing holographic experiments with Alina Kalinouskaya and Dr Gregory Carpenter in collaboration with the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s holographic theater. 

‍DC: Where do you situate yourself in the story of EZTV?

‍MJM: EZTV doesn’t fit well into a sound bite. It’s too diverse and complex. At the moment, my work (and story) is still largely unknown. If by any chance I do get a footnote in some art history, it will probably be as someone involved with EZTV, instead of as an independent artist in my own right. But I actually had a life before that as a musician, photographer, and photo muralist.

EZTV became my life and, for so long, it has been an obsession for me and my late partner, and then, after she passed, to include her in this story along with many voices of other people that I call exemplary. Of course, this is not all that I do. In addition to my practice as a working artist, I’ve given talks at information security conferences, at transhumanist conferences, and, of course at art and art history conferences. I’ve also been an Arts Commisioner in Santa Monica while teaching for a few years at Otis College.

People need to know that people like this exist because in our star-making and hero-making process, they don’t tell stories about people like Zina Bethune, Kate Johnson, Mark Gash, or John Dorr, or other people who aren’t just in it for the money, fame, sex, drugs, or rock and roll. They want all that too, but that’s not the main motivation. 

A world that doesn’t know about these people is a lesser world and if there is any shot I have, it’s to get them remembered. 

Arguably, EZTV did, and still does, constitute a legitimate art movement unique to Los Angeles — as real and important as Fluxus or any other contemporary art movement — that bridged the transformation from analog to the digital.