Liza Bear

Liza Béar is a New York-based filmmaker, writer, photographer, and media activist who makes both individual and collaborative works. Béar co-founded two early independent art magazines Avalanche and Bomb. Since 1968 she has lived and worked in New York City.

Béar was raised in France and England. She studied Philosophy at the University of London.

In 1968, Béar co-founded and edited Avalanche magazine with Willoughby Sharp, producing thirteen issues between 1970 and 1976. It explored conceptual art and other new forms of art making, such as performance art and land art, from the artist's perspective and featured interviews with artists done by either Béar, Sharp, or both of the editors together, documenting artists' work and news and avoiding criticism as a matter of editorial policy. Among the artists featured in early editions of Avalanche magazine were Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Beuys, Gordon Matta-Clark and Yvonne Rainer.Avalanche was also influential in its design. Béar was especially attuned to the possibilities of the interview as an artistic form in its own right. For example, in her interview with Joel Shapiro in Avalanche 12, she conceived of the conversation through the narrative and formal devices of film.

In 1977 she collaborated with Keith Sonnier and several other artists to stage the two-day project Send/Receive Satellite Network, an interactive video link set up via a NASA satellite between participants in New York City and San Francisco. The live feed was relayed directly by infrared link to via Manhattan public access cable in New York, and to a Bay Area public access station.

In 1978–79, following the Send/Receive project, Béar pioneered the use of Slow Scan and QWIP technology as a means to continue interactive visual exchanges between individual artists and artist groups, but using the phone lines rather than a satellite connection. The largest of these demonstrations included eleven cities in the United States and Canada. Among the participating artist groups in New York City was Collaborative Projects (originally named the Green Corporation) of which Béar was a founding member with forty to fifty other artists.

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