Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

Trained as an architect, Chip Lord was a founding partner of Ant Farm. With this collective, he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the public sculpture Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, and the House of the Century, outside of Houston. Lord grew up in 1950’s America, a place that has been a sometimes source of inspiration in his work as an artist. His work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Centre, the Pompidou Centre, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film & Digital Media, U.C. Santa Cruz.

For twenty five years, Steve Seid was a Media Curator at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. During that time, he presented almost a thousand public programs, featuring experimental media, forgotten film genres, and a sampling of international cinema. He recently worked on the restoration of Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress (1971) and poet Ruth Weiss’s only film effort, The Brink (1961). Seid has published Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, co-edited with Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz;Ant Farm 1968-1978, co-edited with Constance Lewallen; and his recent solo effort, Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of An Image.

Curator and writer Constance Lewallen (1939-2022) was Adjunct Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she curated many contemporary art exhibitions, including Ant Farm (1968-1978), 2004 (co-curated with Steve Seid), A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, 2007, and co-curated Stephen Kaltenbach: The Beginning and the End for the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis. She is the author of 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House and co-author with Dore Bowen of Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters, both published by UC Press. She was an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.