>> USCO, Gerd Stern

"Mekas and Durkee agreed that many people were turned off by strobes, that some even felt them to be “evil,” that others feared “something incoming.” This sense of menace was mentioned by the reviewer for Harper’s, to whom USCO “seem fully aware of the potential threat that lies in the sophisticated manipulation of ‘total environment’ ideas.”[15] But if they had recognized that forging such a “digital trip” might harbor a dark underside, this ceding of the self to its environmental machinations was repeatedly cast as a mode of escape from congealed forms of representation and extant forms of power. In Mekas’s words, strobe had the effect of “dissolving all the points of hard resistance, both of matter and mind[.] So that every reality that is here like a rock is being atomized.” Reiterating the transformative effect, he argued: “To me evil is, in art or life, only what keeps us rotating in one place like a record that gets stuck in the same groove. But the intermedia shows, the strobe opens us.”[16]"

http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1739

"from USCO through Intermedia, 1962-1979" at Thorpe Intermedia Gallery, which opened on September 9, 1979, assembled by Michael Callahan, Gerd Stern, Zalman Stern, Lind Von Helwig (Sparkill, New York)