Sam Whiting January 7, 2021Updated: January 10, 2021, 6:21 pm
The moment of impact at “Media Burn” in 1975 as a Cadillac rammed a mountain of TVs was just part of the goings-on around the art event in the Cow Palace parking lot. Photo: John F. Turner
Driving a finned 1959 Cadillac Eldorado through a stack of TV consoles in the Cow Palace parking lot was the easy part. Producing a book on the explosive public art intervention is what took 45 years to complete.
But art curator Steve Seid could not let go of the legend of “Media Burn,” the event staged July 4, 1975, by a pioneering San Francisco collective called Ant Farm. So after Seid retired from a career at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives in 2016, he went encyclopedic on Ant Farm and its signature event a crash of machines that beat both Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories and Burning Man by 10 years or more.