In 1971 a group of young radicals moved out of their SoHo loft and to Maple Tree Farm, a rambling 27-room boarding house in Lanesville, a tiny town in Upstate New York. They called themselves the Videofreex, and they operated as a collective, collaborative media-production unit.

Approximately forty-eight years after the Videofreex arrived in Lanesville…the Videofreex convened a reunion in the original Maple Tree Farm building in Lanesville. The town, which is fairly close to Woodstock, was bustling with boomers due to the simultaneous fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival. The former ramshackle boarding house is now a well-appointed Airbnb, complete with in-ground pool.

I was invited, along with a few other “new generation” mediamakers, curators, and activists to contribute to “Maple Tree Farm Report: Participatory Media Roots & Branches,” a report devised by Blumberg to compare “early” independent video production models with contemporary digital media production. The intent of the “Maple Tree Farm Report: Participatory Media Roots & Branches” convening and report was to look back to the “work of the first indy video pioneers, focusing on Videofreex as an example of the several earliest production groups and artists using video as an artist's and activist's tool in the very beginning of the medium” and turn to the contemporary media-makers and activists present to relate that work to “the current media situation and forecast the future of participatory media.”

The full article is available in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.
Afterimage (2020) 47 (1): 19–33.