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VIDA: Terry Flaxton, Antony Cooper, Penny Dedman 1977
I made my first 16mm film and came across photography as an arts practice at Wimbledon College of art in 1971. Between that time and 1976 I learned more about sound and mixing and recorded an album on 2 inch tape and performed many sound experiments. I came across video in 1976 and edited Opening Up then and formed Vida with Antony Cooper and Penny Dedman in early 1977 (that's me on the left). We realized that we needed a 'face' for the world. I knew that vida meant 'life' in Spanish but also Video meant 'to see' in Latin - so Vida also became an imperative: 'look at this'. 

​Over the next 4 years we made work and presented these works at over 150 shows which we arranged and hosted. 
Music & Sound 1969 - 1970, A variety of projects
VIDA 1976 - 1981
'The Past' is spilt into 9 areas:
1: Vida                                     1976 - 1981
2: Transition                            1981 - 1982
3: Triple Vision/Videomakers  1982 - 1985
4: Triple Vision & Channel 4    1985 - 1992
5: A Trip Sideways to the BBC 1988 - 1990
6: Cinematography & Scripts   1992 - 2006
7 Academia                              2007 - 2016
8. CineFest                               2015 - 2016
9. Sedition Art                           2015 - 2023
10. Makersplace & NFT's         2019 - 2022
11. 2025 and Beyond?​
Pieces created from 1976 - 1981 I edited most of this work:
​1976 Opening Up, (Flaxton Edits)
1976 PRESENTIMENTS
1976 U238 (Cooper composes) 16mm/low band video
1977/78 Talking Heads
1978 Inside Comics
1978 THE FASHION SHOW (with Theo Eshetu joining in on camera)
1978 Gong
1979 Chinese Comics (Dedman directs)
1979 Eisenstein: Programme of Attractions (6 projector Tape Slide, converted to Video in 1983)
1979/1983 Money Talks 40 minutes
My favourite exhibition from that time was at the 1979 Birmingham 'Comicon', where we showed our documentary 'Inside Comics' featuring the story of Neil Adams suing DC Comics for the pensions of Siegel and Shuster who he found being doormen at DC (whilst he was drawing the angry phase of Superman). When we showed this it was on a 28 inch tv set to 400 wildly interested fans. BBC2's Arena, though feigning disinterest when I showed them the doc, then quickly flew to New York and made their own documentary on that subject. This episode taught me not only about ownership and intellectual copyright, but if people have a vested interest in a subject, then they'll go through a lot to realise that interest. Also, in 1977 I became involved with London Video Arts (now Lux) and organised exhibitions for a year with Dave Critchley and Chris Meigh-Andrews at the Air and Acme Galleries. 

​As we had sued our University and won for not delivering on our degree (we had called in the CNAA as some people had failed within a system of continuous assessment and the CNAA said we should be up to degree standard within our Communications Design degree in all 5 subject areas - which common sense dictated a 15 year course to achieve that) the upshot was we were given an extra term to achieve the degree and by January 1980 we had all finished (some of us had to give up their firsts as part of the settlement - go figure!).

So having finbished in December 1979, as the new year of 1980 came around we decided to all three get jobs and the fastest route was as sorters in London's Stock Exchange (drawn there to understand the Beast inside Capitalism as we had investigated the the ideas of 'money, exchange and capital'). So by April 19809 we had saved some money and went to the USA to shoot something about the idea of Intuition' which we decided would be revealed though a search which would become a road trip across America. This was to become Towards Intuition: An American Landscape.         ​
EXHIBITIONS, 1978 onwards
​In 1978, the Fashion show, (made in 1977) was exhibited at the Long Beach Museum by Kathy Rae Huffman, (curator of moving image work). Next came the Fourth Tokyo Video Festival where Flaxton, Cooper and Dedman's piece (written by Flaxton) Talking Heads, won a prize. From then on Flaxton's work was shown at many festivals, notably the Worldwide Video Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands, but many, many other places including Moscow, Tokyo, Algiers, San Francisco, Locarno, Montbeliard, Paris, Milan, Rome, Seoul, Amsterdam - and many other places around the world. In 1986 the British Film Institute as well as Channel 4 asked Flaxton to Shoot “Out off Order” the 3rd electronically produced and released on 35mm ‘film’ in history (after “Harlow” starring Ginger Rogers, 1965 and 200 Hotels, 1972). Though travelling as a cinematographer and occasionally exhibiting between 1992 and 1998 there was a hiatus in Flaxton's work between Zagorsk (1992 and Skin Deep (1999) Flaxton in fact worked on many artists pieces and brought a high level of lighting to many people's work.

Having come across HD in 1990, between 2000 and 2007 Flaxton concentrated on HD as a developing production form and tested cameras for Panasonic and Sony and by 1999 he had shot an HD work in the US which was mastered as a 35mm output at Du Art Labs in New York - and from then on spoke at many seminars including the NFT to speak about the transition form Standard Definition (720 x 576 pixels) to the then low level HD Standards of 1280 x 720, the faux HD of 1440 x  1920 and finally the full 1920 x 1080 standard that we all know today (2023). So in eventually entering academia in 2007 with an AHRC Creative Research Fellowship - where the candidates charge was to discover how technical and creative innovations feed upon each other, Flaxton then began a second wave of production as an artist - where, having spent many years on moving camera cranes and dollies - Flaxton chose to use HD and the camera itself as a window, a portal on, not only the world - but importantly on the very thing that looks: the self. By 2015 Sedition Art had arrived and was a perfect fit for what Flaxton later called his 'Chamber Works’. Flaxton also began producing long form moving image artworks during this period characterised by “Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age” (began in 1992 and finished in 2018) , “To Sand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape” (2011 to 2018) and latterly “Mexico: Landscape of the Heart” (2023).
U238 1976 2 minutes

This is for fun: Antony Cooper suggested we took our occasional band (called 'The Vomettes'  - we were young, it was a gesture) and Antony had written a song concerning Plutonium called U238. Tony sings, Oswaldo the politcal refugee from Chile backing vocals and I was on guitar - Tony had already started experimenting with Super 8, video had just arrived and I had started editing - we both recorded the performance as it was shot and suddenly we had the ability to put all of this together: So we did. In America this might have been an 'art gesture' in the sober UK it was mucking about. However, the politics are prescient of what is happening 48 years later...
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​NEXT 2: Transition 1981 - 1982
I collaborated with a fellow student on Opening Up in 1976 - I hand rolled the receiving portapak back 5 seconds and then the play back tape 5 seconds and pressed play on both - at the edit moment I pressed the record button on the receiving portapak. - and that was "an edit" (providing I got everything correct wth regard timings - if not: Do it Again. I even tried an early freeze frame which sort of worked. We had to wait until about 1983 before we could do that with ease.
One of our first long form pieces was Presentiments from 1977. Recently in 2023, 46 years later I revisited the footage and next year I shall release that new work Presentiments II on Sedition
Our first Festival work was The Fashion Show (below) which was shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1978
Inside Comics - our first tale of success - and woe. I had started collecting comics from the age of 8 - I even had Fantastic Four Number 1 (which had been stolen when I was 12) - but I loved the freedom of US comics, whilst enjoying the intellectual stimulation of English Comics like TV 21 which was an inheritor of the mantle of The Eagle.
Talking Heads (below) won a prize at the 1979 Tokyo Video Festival