ALAN WATTS ORG
WHO WE ARE
Alan Watts Org has its roots in the early seventies as the Electronic University, where it began as an outreach project by Alan Watts and his son Mark. Over the past 50 plus years, we have curated and distributed collections from the hundreds of hours of talks originally recorded on vinyl disks, magnetic tape reels, and audiocassettes between 1960 and 1973. The Alan Watts Org began as the Electronic University in 1973, with the mission of continuing Alan's spoken work legacy in perpetuity, and the project has been carried on the work continuously ever since. We have disseminated Alan’s Watts’ spoken word as various technologies technology evolved, first LP’s and analogue reels, then on cassette tape and compact disk, and now online through downloads and streaming. With the rise of the internet in the early 2000’s we became the Alan Watts Org, and today although a few radio stations (including KPFK in Los Angeles) still share Alan Watts’ lectures on air, most of our outreach efforts have now morphed into podcasts, downloads,
And with the resurgence of interest in Alan’s work over the past few years, this sustained effort has proven more important than ever, and today, in addition to downloads, we offer streaming lecture series. And as media evolves, people all over the globe are using snippets of Alan’s life works to make their own movies and music— from yoga soundtracks to rave trances. However more recently we've heard ‘Alan’ being computer generated by A.I., confusing a new generation of listeners with a range of faux British accents. In our role as stewards whose goal is to maintain access to the authentic Alan Watts works in a cohesive form, and so we discourage imitations as we are seeing first hand how confusing and misleading these have been.
WHERE WE’VE BEEN
When Alan conceived of the Electronic University project with his son Mark in 1973, Mark had already been recording his father’s talks for five years. Most of the early sessions were recorded on the East Coast, and later in California on Alan’s extensive West Coast tours. In 1972, Mark made two films and video series on many of Alan’s key topics, and helped curate the growing audio library. The father and son duo quickly decided to organize the talks into collections, beginning with the Essential Lectures in 1971 and followed in 1972 by the Essentials video series. By the summer of 1972 Mark was compiling what they envisioned as ‘electronic college programs’ and by 1973 the first ‘courses on cassette’ were offered, beginning with The Essence of Buddhism.
Most of the authentic Alan Watts field recordings were made in the sixties and early ’70’s by Alan, sound pioneer and humorist Henry ‘Sandy’ Jacobs, and Alan’s son Mark. Prior to this, recordings were made in a radio booth at station KPFA in Berkeley, and recordings for his various LP’s were made in Sandy’s Sausalito, California, studio. And in the late 50’s a few live seminar sessions were recorded in NYC, and broadcast on KPFA Berkley to his growing radio audience. These were the first recordings to capture the more playful and engaging side of Alan with a live audience, and were so well received that they led to a fundraising effort to purchase a high quality portable recorder, the famous Swiss Nagra tape deck often used by film sound engineers.
WHERE WE’RE GOING
Today we see artistic expressions inspired by Alan’s words manifesting in a myriad of mediums. We now welcome the evolving role of overseeing the use of Alan's voice as sampled in music and video, to ensure the integrity of his message while continuing to support Alan's efforts. The Alan Watts Organization encourages diverse uses in a variety of ways, and support conscious creatives’ efforts presented to us for collaboration. We also remove blatant cases of pirating where the obvious goal is to capitalize unethically on the value of Alan's voice. Licensing and partnerships continue to fund our ongoing outreach efforts through social media and the other content sharing platforms where we regularly post Watts’ content. The organization encourages artists to submit requests to use Watts’ words in their creative context.