Raindance Corporation

Frank Gillette, an artist and radical media activist, conceived the Raindance Corporation in New York during the summer of 1969. It was Gillette's intention to found an alternative media think tank; a source of ideas, publications, videotapes and energy providing a theoretical basis for implementing communication tools in the project of social change.

To make his point, Gillette chose the name Raindance as an ironic reference to the Rand Corporation, then and now an establishment think tank advising government and industry. (...)

Gillette, Shamberg, Jaffe, and Gillette's friend Marco Vassi, registered Raindance as a Delaware corporation in October of 1969. (...)

In June of 1970, Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny sent the first issue of Radical Software to the printer. It was printed in quarter-fold format in blue ink, with a computer-derived image on the cover. The order was for 2000 copies. On the masthead Michael Shamberg as co-Originator, and Korot and Gershuny as Editors. The Raindance Corporation was also listed as publisher. (...) It was an impressive first issue. Most were given away, about 700 were sold for $1 each. Costs for printing and mailing came to about $2,000. Korot and Schneider drove across country and distributed the issue to bookstores.

November 1971: Shamberg's Guerilla Television), using central antenna systems in apartment buildings, video in meditation and therapy, setting up of a videocassette network, use of cable television." (Tjebbe van Tijen)

Resources:
http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/history.html
Tjebbe van Tijen: A context for collecting the new media, Amsterdam, 1993.
http://www.iisg.nl/image_sound/n5m/histintro.html

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