Electronic Arts Intermix

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a leading international resource for video and media art. A pioneering advocate of media art and artists since 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. For 40 years, EAI has fostered the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.

EAI supports artists through the distribution, preservation, exhibition and representation of their media artworks, and works closely with educators, curators, programmers and collectors to facilitate exhibitions, acquisitions and educational uses of media artworks. EAI provides access to video art within an educational and cultural framework.

EAI was founded in 1971 as one of the first nonprofit organizations in the United States dedicated to the support of video as an art form. As one of the earliest organizations in the emergent video art movement, EAI was created to provide an alternative system of support for this nascent art form and the artists engaged with it.

EAI was founded by Howard Wise, an innovative art dealer and visionary supporter of video as art. From 1960 to 1970, the Howard Wise Gallery on 57th Street in New York was a locus for kinetic art and multimedia works that explored the nexus of art and technology. The gallery featured several groundbreaking exhibitions, including On the Move (1964), Lights in Orbit (1967), and TV as a Creative Medium (1969). Seeking to create new paradigms to support artists working in the nascent video underground, Wise closed the gallery in 1970 to found the nonprofit organization Electronic Arts Intermix. The founding mission was to support video as "a means of personal and creative expression and communication.

In 1972, EAI began the Editing/Post Production Facility in response to a need for a creative workspace and equipment access for artists. This facility was one of the first nonprofit services of its kind in the U.S., and enabled the creation of many seminal video works, by artists including Mary Lucier and Joan Jonas. The facility has served thousands of artists and organizations with low-cost access to analogue and digital technical facilities.

In 1973, the Artists' Videotape Distribution Service was founded to answer a need for a new paradigm for the dissemination of artists' video works, apart from the conventional gallery system. Many artists of that time were drawn to the utopian notion of a medium that was easily reproducible and therefore democratic and widely accessible. Videotapes were distributed in unlimited editions at relatively low prices. Created around a core of seminal video artists, including Peter Campus, Juan Downey, and Nam June Paik, this service remains the oldest existing distributor of artists' video. In 1986, the EAI Preservation Program began as a way to facilitate the restoration and archiving of works in the EAI collection.

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