Tom Kalin

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present an evening of video and television works celebrating the publication launch of Broadcasting: EAI at ICA. This free screening features selections from the 2018 exhibition of the same name, and reflects on artist responses to themes of media saturation, commercialization, duration, and public engagement. Copies of the catalog will be for sale.

Free to attend. RSVP here.

Following the mass adoption of cable TV and home video recording technology in the early ‘80s, many artists had access to a new arsenal of strategies for intervening directly with televised media. Public broadcast carved out a space for experimentation, a sensibility showcased in such series as Jaime Davidovich’s The Live! Show (1979-84) and Robert Beck’s The Space Program (1985-86), both aired on the Manhattan Cable Network. The advent of specialized networks also presented new opportunities to mingle artists’ media with “normal” televised content: MTV, with their hip youth audience in mind, invited a number of artists to create culture-jamming interstitials in between music videos including video art pioneer Dara Birnbaum, and initiatives such as TRANS-VOICES commissioned artists including Birnbaum, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Philip Mallory Jones, and Tom Kalin to produce 60-second spots for American and French broadcast. As the choices on the TV remote became more vast, so too did an overwhelming sense of content glut and advertising onslaught. New consumer video formats like VHS and Betamax gave a new generation of artists the license to remix and deconstruct these images, a practice exemplified by works such as Cable Xcess (1996), a faux-infomercial by Kristin Lucas that warns of the long-term consequences of exposure to electromagnetic fields, and No Sell Out... or i wnt 2 b th ultimate commodity/ machine (Malcolm X Pt. 2) (1995), a stunning MTV-style indictment of consumerism and racial capitalism by “art-band” X-PRZ.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.

Masks are strongly encouraged. If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.

EAI is pleased to partner with BRIC on the exhibition Public Access/Open Networks, on view from March 23, 2017 through May 7, 2017. Curated by: Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator at BRIC, in collaboration with freelance curators Reya Sehgal and Lakshmi Padmanabhan

Public Access/Open Networks showcases both historic and contemporary art works inspired by and produced for Public Access television. The exhibition features over twenty artists and collectives that have worked in the Public Access arena, as well as contemporary artists experimenting with the democratic potential of new media platforms on the Internet. As part of the exhibition, BRIC’s own Public Access television channels will also air continuously in the gallery space, and a stage in the center of the gallery will act as a set for the production of new programming by BRIC’s community producers.

In conjunction with the exhibition, EAI and BRIC will co-present the symposium Utopian Potentials and Media(ted) Realities on April 22, 2017 from 12-4pm.

April 27: "Edited at EAI": 1972-77
June 16: "Edited at EAI": Artist to Artist
June 22: "Edited at EAI": Videos by Tom Rubnitz
July 27: "Edited at EAI": Restless Generation
Aug 16: "Edited at EAI": Video Interference
Sept 22: "Edited at EAI": Dara Birnbaum

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight a less well-known but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. Many of these artists and works will be featured in screenings throughout our 45th anniversary year.

The first screening on April 27, "Edited at EAI": 1972-77 featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies. The program included early works from the 1970s by Ant Farm, Juan Downey, Jean Dupuy, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Ira Schneider, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

On June 16 Artist to Artist featured the rich collaborative process and the creative relationships between artists and the artists/editors with whom they worked, through the lens of EAI's editing facility. Video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smith—all edited at EAI—were shown together with works by Robert Beck, Seth Price and Trevor Shimizu, three internationally recognized artists who spent formative years as EAI editors. Artists Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan were in conversation following the screening.

On June 22 EAI celebrated the video work of Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992), whose deliriously camp genre parodies and music videos capture the anarchic spirit and talents of the 1980s East Village scene of Club 57 and the Pyramid Club. The rich body of work that Rubnitz edited at EAI includes TV spoofs, music videos, and the musical parody Psykho III The Musical (1985). Artist John Kelly participated in a conversation following the screening.

On July 27 Restless Generation focused on a group of conceptually driven performance videos by women artists who reenergized and redefined the genre in the 1990s, as seen through the lens of EAI's editing facility. These lo-fi performances staged for the camera­—by artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Alix Lambert, Kirsten Mosher, Alix Pearlstein, and Beverly Semmes, among others—evoke the strategies of the first generation of artists working with video in the early 1970s, even as their bold stylizations, ironic sensibility, and explicit nods to consumer culture announced a fresh approach to representations of female identity and the body that spoke emphatically to its time.

On August 16 the series continued with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, were screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices

EAI continued our 45th anniversary "Edited at EAI" series with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, were screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices continue to resonate and find relevance today.

Organized in conjunction with EAI's 45th anniversary, the "Edited at EAI" series highlights a historically significant but less well-known area of EAI's programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists, one of the first such creative workspaces for video in the United States.

EAI celebrated the art of short-form video and film with a summer screening of works that clock in at two minutes or less. Between Yoko Ono's fifteen second Eye Blink (1966) and Leslie Thornton's two minute Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6 (2006), the forty-five works in this forty-five minute screening demonstrated why a concise statement is so powerful. Ranging from analog video abstraction to quick visual comedy, conceptual exercises to formal experiments with duration, commissioned public service announcements to critiques of the quintessential short-form structure, the TV commercial, the works in this screening demonstrated the enormous possibilities that artists have found in less than one hundred and twenty seconds.

The screening included works by Dan Asher, Beth B, Phyllis Baldino, Michael Bell-Smith, Dara Birnbaum, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Forcefield, Matthew Geller, Gran Fury, Gary Hill, Ken Jacobs, Tom Kalin, Kalup Linzy, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Shana Moulton, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Paul Sharits, Stuart Sherman, Shelly Silver, Michael Smith, Leslie Thornton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lawrence Weiner and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

The Autumn 2000 edition of this ongoing program of EAI works for the Dia rooftop Video Salon and Cafe featured works by artists including Tom Kalin, Alix Pearlstein and Hannah Wilke.