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The Riot Tapes

Ilene Segalove

1984 00:30:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono
Tags:
Autobiography, Politics

Description

“The Riot Tapes is a video biography of Segalove’s political involvement in college, of her boyfriend (who became anorexic while dieting to evade the draft), and of her discovery that art could give her a voice and a forum for her political views. It is her first real political work. Segalove says, ‘I’m trying to comment on the state of things. A lot of my peers spend a lot of time in a state of disbelief, but I’m tired of disengaging myself from the world by doing that.’”

—Gloria Ohland, “Segalove’s Latest Is a Riot,” L.A. Weekly 6:22 (27 April 1984)

About Ilene Segalove

Ilene Segalove was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. She studied communication arts at Loyola University and received a degree in fine arts from the University of California in Santa Barbara. Working in video since 1972, when she bought a Portapak from Nam June Paik's girlfriend, Ilene Segalove was initially, "offended by [video's] invasive quality and seduced by its power." A self-described "child of Beverly Hills," Segalove began pointing the camera at "familiar things," producing quasi-documentaries about her family (The Mom Tapes, 1973-75) and American TV culture (TV is OK, 1976).

Segalove was a member of the group Telethon, with Billy Adler, John Margolis, and Van Schley, which designed installations featuring  commercial TV collages, and guest edited an issue of Radical Software, "The TV Environment" (2:2, 1971).