Dirty Dishes, Part 1 (1968)
By Ant Farm
Ant Farm's Dirty Dishes is a freewheeling portapak time capsule that captures the collective spirit of Ant Farm's life and work in California in the early 1970s. The original half-inch open reel tape was also the first work to be indexed in EAI's video collection, and holds the number "001" in the EAI library. Ant Farm member Chip Lord writes: "It's an anthology of clips from the first year of living with a portapak and it gives a fairly good representation of the way we lived in those days - collectively, loosely, improvisationally. The year was 1970 and Ant Farm, recently relocated from a foray in Texas and expanded to include new members, partners, and frequent visitors, settled into a metal warehouse building on the waterfront in Sausalito, California to pursue the practice of 'underground architecture.' This involved building geodesic domes and inflatable structures, mostly prototypes, which were demonstrated at ecology fairs or campus visits. The Sony portapak AV 3400 video rover had recently been introduced, and Joe Hall went out and bought one. Over the next two years this device became an interactive tool within the dynamics of the group - used to document our work, but…
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