Stan VanDerBeek

EAI presented a special event that celebrated new interactive media and video works: open source Web art, hacked video games, restaged and reworked films, girl-band music videos, and underground legends of the downtown music and art scenes. This event was also the official launch of Tux Dog, artist collective Paper Rad's new open source Web project, which is hosted by EAI. Cory Arcangel and members of Paper Rad were present to introduce and demonstrate this new project. In addition to the Web launch, EAI presented a program of new and newly released video projects by multimedia, multigenerational artists, including Cory Arcangel, Cheryl Donegan, Ken Jacobs, Kristin Lucas, Tony Oursler, Pipilotti Rist and Stan VanDerBeek

EAI presented a live performance event and video screening featuring three new art collectives who re-activate the lo-fi. Cory Arcangel and Alex Galloway from Beige and Radical Software Group demonstrated the subversive genre of video game hacking. Video work by Forcefield and a live music performance from Termination Gnome galvanized obsolete analogue signal-processors and defunct electronics. With psychedelic ebullience, Paper Rad synthesized and re-staged popular material from the Internet, television, video games, and advertising. An analogous era of analogue synthesis was bridged by rarely screened video from technical pioneers of the 1960s and 70s.

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging from performance and the body; narrative; cultural essays; activism, and poetics.