Peter Sachs Collopy

My primary research project concerns how people used the medium of videotape to experiment with consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the main methods for such experimentation was mediated self-observation, the practice of recording and then watching oneself. Such techniques appeared decades earlier in ethnographic film, including in the work of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali and New Guinea in the 1930s. Mead and Bateson went on to be part of the group that developed the new science of cybernetics, which became the framework in which many of my research subjects in the 1960s and 1970s conceptualized the videotape as a new tool for individuals and communities to engage in feedback loops, observing themselves and learning from the experience. Bateson in particular was actively involved in the communities of experimental videographers that emerged in both psychotherapy and the art world in the 1960s, bringing the methods of his cybernetic anthropology to practitioners of other disciplines.