Reporter Volume 25, No.13 December 2, 1993

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

Tony Conrad has lived his life on the cutting edge both of technology
and the arts.
	Conrad, a professor in the Department of Media Study at UB
since 1976, has long been interested in the way changes in technology
affect the arts. His own career has changed as new technologies, and
the new ideas that go hand in hand with those technologies, have
become available to artists and theorists of art.
	"I've traveled a path from music to film to video, and from
that to community networking through public access television," he
says.
	Conrad began his artistic career as a musician, working with
such well known minimalists as John Cale and Lamonte Young. But
through significant stretches of the 1960s and '70s he worked as a
computer programmer and with other electronic instruments, and his
ability to work with the latest technologies became a crucial part of
the films he began making in the mid-1960s.
	"In the rough and ready environment of underground film, my
level of technical understanding of such things as arithmetic and
electronics really helped mobilize a lot of things," Conrad says.
	His first film, The Flicker (1966), gave Conrad a reputation
as an avant-garde filmmaker, and it became what he calls "an icon of
the structural film movement"Qa movement concerned with questioning
the way films were typically put together, and with finding new ways
to structure and present films that would make audiences more aware of
how films were made.
	"The Flicker opened a lot of opportunities for me to show my
work, and to teach," Conrad says. "My work in film had been
interactive with things like underground film, and pop culture and
art, as well as those areas of fine arts like music and painting that
are traditionally thought of as 'serious.'"
	For Conrad, who has received numerous grants from
organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State
Council on the Arts, the American Film Institute, and the National
Endowment for the Arts, the possibilities for art to be interactive
and interdisciplinary, to cross such boundaries as the difference
between high and popular culture, between music and the visual arts,
have always been crucial to his work.
	It was, in fact, his interest in interdisciplinary art that
attracted Conrad to the UB Department of Media Study in the first
place.
	"In the mid-'70s, there was no stronger working group of media
artists in a university setting than there was at UB," he says.
"People like Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, many others. I was
delighted that they invited me to teach video here in 1976, even
though my background was in film.
	"People who were interested in forms of entertainment, like
television and movies, but who also wanted to do serious artistic and
cultural work were the ones who established and set the media arts on
its course. They were affected by popular culture on the one hand, but
also had a serious commitment to ideas and to dignifying their own
methods and work."
	Conrad has produced a great deal of both film and video, and
has been very active in numerous arts organizations in Western New
York. He is on the board of directors at Hallwalls Art Gallery, the
Media Alliance, and Buffalo Media Resources. Much of the work he has
been associated with has been controversialQhe provided the sound for
Jack Smith's 1963 film Flaming Creatures, which, he says, became a
notorious censorship case.
	Conrad's work over the last five years has been primarily with
public access television, he says, and with the questions about
community access to television and other media materials that public
access television raises.
	"Recently I've been working to achieve open public access to
television," he says. "This raises a lot of questions about First
Amendment rights and freedom of speech."
	One of Conrad's most successful public access projects, he
says, has been the television program "Studio of the Streets,"
co-produced by UB student Cathy Steffan. The program began in 1990 as
a series of interviews conducted on the steps of Buffalo City Hall to
protest the lack of public access media facilities in the city.
	"It quickly became a chance for the person on the street to
have access to television," Conrad says. "We put about a thousand
people on television, and lots of people in Buffalo watched it every
week. It has also been shown at the Albright-Knox, and at the
Documenta Arts Festival in Germany, among other places.
	"I was also involved, last year, in developing a cable
program, run with UB interns, for Buffalo Learning Television. We used
crossovers between video and computers, so that video could help
improve education access. But there was, unfortunately, some
resistance to new technologies. Teachers are sometimes terrorized that
the kids know more about new technologies than they do."
	For Conrad, the UB Department of Media Study continues to be
an excellent place for working on and distributing information about
those new technologies. "Media studies, which is inherently
interdisciplinary, encourages students to cross traditional boundary
lines," he says.
	More than simply a place to provide students with information,
the Department of Media Study offers students hands-on experience, and
a wide variety of working opportunities, Conrad says. "The Media Study
curriculum is so interdisciplinary and loosely structured that a lot
of what students do depends on their own interests, along with the
guidance that we give them. We don't offer training so much as
opportunity. Now, I learn from my studentsQI don't even like to think
of them as my students.
	"One can get more experience about the relation between media
and education here in Buffalo than almost anywhere else in the
country," he says.
	"My career has run on a tangent to the fine arts as they are
traditionally conceived of," Conrad says. "I've woven a course in and
out of museums and pop culture, over a long period of time." Education
mediates between the many cultural traditions of our society and the
rapidly changing world around us, he says, and so "it was natural, I
think, for my career to end up in a university situation."