Bellagio - May 1977

"The setting could not have been more remote from the nature of our purpose. The Villa Serbelloni's seductions were enough to cloud the reason and render serious thought irrelevant. Until our arrival, the Villa had never been shadowed by the blue-gray beam of the television tube. But as our small band of unarmed televisionaries gathered in the baronial conference hall of the Villa, we were determined to defy the seductions and focus our thoughts on the problems of program exchange. And the possibility of planning a larger conference to foster exchange.

We were 15 in number, half chosen by CIRCOM, the other half by Rockefeller: Jacques de Jouffroy and Agnes Vincent from France; Sergio Borelli and Salavatore Bruni from Italy; Kjeld Veirup from Denmark; Hans-Geert Falkenberg from Germany; Robert Stephane from Belgium; and from the United States, Chloe Aaron (PBS), Eugene Kalt (CPB), Fred Barzyk (WGBH), and Nam June Paik and Bill Viola (Video Artists). Russel Connor and Howard Klein cochaired the meeting. I was present not to represent an institution but much involved with international program exchange through the organization I once headed, National Educational Television (NET), the predecessor network to PBS."

From "INPUT at 20" by James Day.