Media Burn Archive

Media Burn is a nonprofit dedicated to video’s overlooked histories and its most fiercely independent voices, from the 1960s to today. Our mission is to create positive social change by amplifying underheard voices, both in contemporary dialogue and the historical record.

Media Burn is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in Chicago. Since its founding in 2003, Media Burn has saved more than 10,000 videos, which are available to watch and share for free on our website.

Media Burn was created by longtime independent videomaker Tom Weinberg to reflect the ideals of the “Guerrilla Television” movement of the 1970s, when portable video cameras mobilized a new generation of documentarians, artists, activists, and journalists to bypass the film and TV industries in order to tell their own stories and the stories of their community.

In 1975, Weinberg was executive producer for artist collective Ant Farm’s now-legendary Media Burn performance and video. An act of hilarious absurdism, the performance consisted of a Cadillac, elaborately modified to give it a retro-futuristic look, crashing through a flaming pyramid of television monitors. In the words of “Artist-President John F. Kennedy” (Ant Farm member Doug Hall), who introduced the event: “Let me say this finally about Media Burn, the world may never understand what was done here today, but the image created here shall never be forgotten.”

Media Burn – the archive – was founded in that same spirit of irreverence toward the media industry. It provides a home for the videomakers who provide an alternative to the mainstream of commercial media – fiercely independent voices, outsiders, and ordinary people. Media Burn features the extraordinary work of globally renowned artists and videomakers but also that of community members, students, and activists taking cameras into the streets to chronicle the people and the places most important to them.

The videos in the collection have been watched by people around the world more than 20 million times. They have been written about in dozens of books and articles. Our footage has been featured in Oscar-nominated films and Emmy-nominated TV shows. It’s been taught in hundreds of classrooms and cited by researchers in a huge range of fields: film, TV, and art, but also sociology, architecture, urban studies, political science, medical history, technological history, ethnography, and more.