Beryl Korot

Beryl Korot co-founded Radical Software in 1970 with Phyllis Gershuny and Ira Schneider, launching the first publication devoted to the creative and civic possibilities of portable video at the moment the Sony Portapak made independent production newly available. Radical Software ran through 1974 and became the primary exchange point where artists, activists, and community makers shared ideas about video as a tool for local storytelling and an alternative to broadcast television, directly influencing the generation of people who built the community video and public access movement. In 1972 Beryl produced one of the first community cablecasts in Saugerties, New York, connecting experimental video practice to public access infrastructure at its earliest moment.

Her video art work, including the multi-channel installation Dachau 1974 and collaborations with composer Steve Reich, established video as a serious medium for public expression and has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. That work and the publication that preceded it are part of the same argument: that the camera and the channel belong to communities, not networks.

Radical Software circulated ideas that community media practitioners were simultaneously putting into practice, and Beryl's role in founding and editing it places her at the intellectual origin of the field.