USCO
[1][2][3][4][5] USCO exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is considered a key link in the development of expanded cinema, visual music, installation art, multimedia, intermedia, and the Internet.
[1][3] Other peripheral members included Lois Brand, California painter Dion Wright, tie-dye artist Bob Dacey, and light artist/architect Paul Williams.
[14][15] Callahan's experience working at the SF Tape Music Center taught him how to make do with whatever technology he could scrounge and build, due to lack of funds.
"[3][15] In 1964 Steve and Barbara Durkee bought an old church to use as a studio, located in Garnerville, Rockland County, New York in the Hudson Valley.
[3][16] Steve Durkee started making Super 8 movies, and the group began experimenting with him to develop image banks to Stern and Callahan's performances.
[1][5] They mixed film, tapes, slides, light, kinetic sculpture, and live actors in audiovisual performances in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and at university campuses across the United States.
"[19] Stern and Callahan were then invited to Vancouver, by a University of British Columbia gallery director who had also been at the San Francisco Museum of Art show, to do a performance with a lecture by McLuhan.
[2] USCO collaborated in July 1965 with Leary and Alpert's Castalia Foundation, a precursor to the League for Spiritual Discovery, to reproduce the LSD experience in an "audio-olfactory-visual alteration of consciousness" psychedelic art event in New York City.
[21] A 1965 review of the show for The Nation by Howard Junker described USCO's event as an attempt "to stimulate multiple levels of consciousness by audio-visual bombardment.
Program Manager John Brockman, who coined the term intermedia, helped create the festival as a series of multimedia productions in which participants combined cinema images and projectors with live actions and music.
"[23] Callahan explained USCO "took incandescent lamps out of slide projectors, and replaced them with intense strobe bulbs, so the projected image itself would flash on the screen.
Other participants included well-known and emerging figures such as:[22] Mekas presented another multimedia event by USCO the following month, for a week in January 1966.
"[6] USCO's strobe environments, which relied on electronic modulation of fluorescent tubes, invoked the more complex emerging technology of the digital computer.
[25] Back in San Francisco, Stewart Brand co-produced the Trips Festival with Ramon Sender and Ken Kesey in January 1966.
USCO participated in, and helped design and produce, New York DJ Murray the K's psychedelic multimedia event The World, which took place in an abandoned Long Island airplane hangar and was dubbed the first discothèque.
[27] Music acts that performed included The Young Rascals, The Hollies, Del Shannon, The Isley Brothers, and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.
[28] In 1967 the Durkees formed the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico north of Taos with Jonathan Altman, and assistance from Alpert.
[1] Stern and Callahan co-founded Intermedia Systems Corporation in 1969, the year the company handled some management and administrative details for the Woodstock festival.
The company, based in Winchester, Massachusetts initially made electronic devices that allowed museum patrons to use video and interactive exhibits.
[33] In 1969 Stewart Brand connected Steve Durkee with Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford University and the development of early Internet culture.
[3] In 2015 the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota included four major USCO works in their exhibit Hippie Modernism: The Struggle Toward Utopia.
[36] In 2015 Seton Hall University featured a solo exhibition of USCO in the Walsh Gallery WhenThen curated by Jeanne Brasile In 2016, the Garnerville church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
