Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad at the DeStijl/Freedom From Festival in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in October 2003.
Born	Anthony Schmalz Conrad (1940-03-07)March 7, 1940 Concord, New Hampshire, U.S.
Died	April 9, 2016(2016-04-09) (aged 76) Cheektowaga, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	Filmmaker, musician, composer
Website	Tonyconrad.net

Anthony Schmalz "Tony" Conrad (March 7, 1940 – April 9, 2016) was an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both structural film and drone music. He performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career, most prominently the 1960s New York experimental music collective Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as The Dream Syndicate.

Conrad was born in Concord, New Hampshire to Mary Elizabeth Parfitt and Arthur Emil Conrad. but raised in Baldwin, Maryland and Northern Virginia. His father worked with Everett Warner during World War II in designing dazzle camouflage for the US Navy. Conrad graduated from Harvard University in 1962 with a degree in Mathematics. While studying at Harvard, Conrad was exposed to the ideas of John Cage and . After graduating, Conrad went to Copenhagen to see a friend, who was a research mathematician working on a computer project at the Physics Chemist Institute. That computer was the only computer in Denmark at the time, with a memory of 8 kilobytes. Conrad worked on it in machine language during the summer, which helped build his computer skills. He also did work as a computer programmer for a year when he came back to the United States.

After working as a computer programmer, Conrad got into the experimental music scene in New York City.

In an interview with Tony Oursler, as part of Oursler's Synesthesia: Interviews on Rock & Art, Tony Conrad said he moved to New York in the early 1960s and entered into the art picture because of his interest in music, but went to film because it was "too boring" in music. At the time, film was institutionally unattached, which drew Conrad towards the community of New York filmmakers. In 1966, he made his first film, The Flicker, said to be a "landmark in structural filmmaking." Conrad said, "Since other filmmakers were making films at the time that dealt with structure as a foregrounded principle, and this seemed to be built around mathematical principles, it was adopted as a kind of flagship film for the structural film movement, where it dealt with abstract light-organizing ideas." The film consists of only completely black and completely white images, which, as the title suggests, produces a flicker when projected. When the film was first screened several viewers in the audience became physically ill. (Rapid flashes produce epileptic attacks in a small percentage of population.) Conrad wished to generalize the whole technology of film.