Andrew Monks
I love General Motors as, in jonCates' words, "a cyberpsychedelic remixological roadtrip across the American imagination". But is it successful as a critical stand against General Motors? I'd say yes, but a year ago I would not have. I'll divide the piece into two main sections: the first half, wherein Phil says things about General Motors, and the second half, wherein Phil does not. At first, I had trouble with the second half. It's easy to dismiss: I love it: I love image processing, and Colorful Colorado, and all the equipment, but it doesn't seem to directly relate to the piece's pro-consumer thesis.
But the more I think about copy-it-right, the more it makes sense. In a conversation at SAIC off The Phil Morton Video Archive, Gene Youngblood said, "One value of these tools is that after using them for a while, and using them on a large scale, we could come to conceive of a viable anarchic society. It could work."
The video is a consumerist stand against General Motors, but it's not necessary that they see it. By spreading the distribution religion, Phil hoped on some level to systemically dismantle the conditions that allow General Motors to exist. Our plainest clue is at the end of the first segment, where Phil says, "it's not my concern what other folks do with my information, because, ah, mine's true, man. And it's available to the people on this planet, wherever they are." What is Phil's information? That "It's okay to copy!" That the agency to manipulate video (and ∴ television (∴ culture (∴ everything [see also: Television Delivers People]))) could belong with the masses.
By manipulating the image throughout the piece, and through Dan Sandin's and Tom DeFanti's demos of the IP and a Vector General graphics terminal, Phil shows the viewer how malleable video (&& tv && …) truly is. By including the beautiful Colorful Colorado, Phil shows why you might want to do it. Perhaps more relatably, Phil demonstartes that he knows some real facts about cars, and more importantly that he, mostly a regular guy, has the confidence and sense-of-agency required to use those facts. (I'll concede that in 1976 this might have been less significant, but today it's prescient with planned obsolescence and blackboxing and that whole conversation).
Phil's experience with video gave him foresight. He saw in its material the beginning of the copyability and distribution potential that would be multiplied by technology in the coming decades. U of I had the ARPAnet by 1974, I wonder whether Phil knew about it, or what he would have thought. An editors' note in the first issue of Radical Software, quoted in Lucinda Furlong's Tracking Video Art: "Image Processing" as a Genre, said,
Power is no longer expressed in land, labor, and capital, but by access to information and the means of disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) remain in the hands of those who would hoard them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed.
General Motors delivers those tools widely, beginning, we're lead to assume, to a selection of eight international governments. After that? The world.