The collection consists of personal and business papers related to Beck's artwork, exhibitions, and commercial electronics; photo documentation including slides, positive prints, and negatives of videos and gallery installations; schematics and drawings related to artworks and commercial ventures; papers related to Beck's teaching and academic pursuits, including his published research articles; brochures, posters, and other ephemera related to Beck's exhibitions; published and unpublished writings about Beck; as well as special materials such as the Star Wars board game, a video game cartridge, and floppy disks with Computer Assisted Drafting files.

Stephen C. Beck (born 1950) is an artist and electrical engineer who has been making groundbreaking experimental video and film works, as well as electronic toys, in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1960s. His achievements as a pioneering video artist in the early 1970s included designing and building custom video synthesizers, and he was a core member of the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET), a video art lab based out of KQED in San Francisco between 1967-1975. In the late 1970s and 1980s he started a company that designed and licensed electronic toys and video games, including a talking game tie-in for Star Wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_A7jNA9IeE) and an Atari game benefiting Greenpeace called "Save the Whales."

19 boxes

Property rights reside with the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Literary rights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. For permission to reproduce or publish, please contact the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Film Library and Study Center.

The collection is open for research.