that slowly the effects of the conference can be seen in the changing attitudes of the Americans to both INPUT and foreign programming: In the evolution of INPUT, the American participation was minimal. It was the Rockefeller Foundation and mostly the work of independents. Then, four years ago, SCETV (South Carolina Educational Television) got involved, and we began to have an American contingent on the board that would counterbalance the Europeans and Canadians. But for a long time, the lack of curiosity on the part of the Americans in the profession was appalling. Day comments that, "the greatest influence of INPUT is the way it stirred the imaginations of producers, the cross-fertilization process, which is hard to measure. It has given visibility to programs that would have been lost in major markets." The Rockefeller Foundation gave INPUT over $250,000 between 1978 and 1982 primarily to fund the transportation costs of producers from the non-host countries. As the foundation ceased funding, these costs were picked up by the United States Information Agency (USIA) and CPB, with the host country underwriting each conference. While INPUT can be seen to have continued the cross-cultural exchange conceived by Klein and Paik with Visa, it is more oriented to documentaries than to video art, which plays only a minor role at the conference. In the late 1970s, Klein saw the funding of video artists in different terms. * Periodically throughout his tenure, Klein stepped back and reevaluated the way in which the foundation supported a particular field. In 1976, for instance, he funded Johanna Gill, who had just completed a Ph.D. on video art at Brown University, to write a report for the foundation called Video: State of the Art, for which she traveled around the country and interviewed artists and people involved with media arts centers. The report, written in a casual, conversational style, was felt by many in the video community to evoke the Rockefeller's stand on who and what was interesting and fundable in the field. Indeed, it concentrated heavily on several Rockefeller funded programs, including NCET, the New Television Workshop, and the TV lab. Despite an anti-art bias, it was in many ways a balanced evaluation of most of the activity from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, and scrutiny shows that Gill discussed many artists who were not among the Rockefeller chosen. That her report can be seen as indicative of what the foundation had done for the field attests to the magnitude of the foundation and Klein's role in media. Klein's overall approach to funding can be seen as a delicate balance between initiation -->> next page |