Paul Garrin, 1957, is best known as a politically active video artist from the 1990s. His most famous work is Man with a Video Camera (Fuck Vertov), 1989, in which he videotapes a riot in Tompkins Square Park in New York City's Lower East Side. The video records police officers with covered badge numbers beating protesters, and Garrin himself being pulled off a van and assaulted for shooting video tape. In the video, Garrin proposes a new revolution is coming; a reverse Big Brother state in which citizens armed with camcorders are continually watching the government. Another well known work is Free Society, 1988, an intensely processed video using images representative of a police state.

Garrin was an artist living and working in the Lower East Side during its last days of creative production. His work straddled a gap between the highest technology available and hands-on street video, all for a common political cause. Later on, Garrin collaborated with video art superstar Nam June Paik, producing numerous works between 1982 and 1996.

Since the 90s, Garrin has carried his politicized style of action artmaking onto the internet, founding companies and projects that work to free the internet from corporate and government control.