Paul Ryan (video artist)

Paul Louis Ryan (1943–2013) was an American video artist and communications theorist. His video art encompassed water studies and demonstrations of what Ryan called “a yoga of relationships” or Threeing, culminating in his theoretical development of the Peircean relational circuit and Earthscore notational system.

Ryan was born in 1943 in The Bronx, New York and was raised in northern New Jersey. In 1960, he joined the Passionists, a monastic preaching order of the Catholic Church; in 1962, he earned an A.A. degree from the Passionists Monastic Seminary System. After pursuing an additional three years of independent philosophical and theological studies with the order, Ryan returned to secular life in 1965. He enrolled at New York University on a full tuition scholarship, where he studied under H.W. Janson and Walter Ong before receiving a B.A. in English in 1967.

He partially fulfilled his alternate service requirement as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War by assisting Marshall McLuhan as a "McLuhan Fellow" during the media theorist's 1967-1968 term as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at Fordham University. He completed his service requirement at Fordham during the 1968-1969 term, "exploring video as a medium in McLuhan‟s terms" with early Portapak cameras. He considered this combination of "theory and practice" to be equivalent to a Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1969, he exhibited in the seminal TV as a Creative Medium show (widely regarded as one of the birth pangs of video art) at the Howard Wise Gallery and cofounded the Raindance Foundation with Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg and Ira Schneider. While McLuhan depicted World War III in 1970 as a "guerrilla information war," in the same year Ryan wrote "Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare" for Raindance's Radical Software journal, anticipating the subsequent development of guerrilla television in 1971.

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