Extending Harris-Babou’s broader exploration of the language and empire of Restoration Hardware, Human Design follows the artist as colonial explorer and travel blogger traveling to Gorée Island in Senegal to unearth the “rare” artifacts on display in the furniture company’s New York showroom....
In this provocative essay on racism, crime, the law and the media, Andrews constructs a layered pastiche to investigate these issues within cultural and personal contexts. He explores how the fictions of the media reinforce and perpetuate racial mythologies. Writes Andrews: "Black and Silver...
In September 1975, photographer and videomaker Marc Petitjean documented Matta-Clark in the process of making one of his major "building cuts" in Paris. Created for the 1975 Paris Biennale, Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect was a spiraling cone-shaped cut through a pair of 17th-century buildings at...
Role-playing and political performance were integral to Ant Farm's art-making strategies. In 1976 the group travelled to Australia as ironic "artists-in-residence," counter-cultural ambassadors. "Off-Air" Australia is a fragmented document of that trip, culled almost entirely from off-air footage...
The first in a series of videos investigating the use of digital effects on appropriated imagery, "Painting" Sites compiles pictures arbitrarily yielded by an Internet search for the word "Painting," and peppers the resulting series of images with digital graffiti, courtesy of editing software....
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (burgerking), November 26, 2019.
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (amazon), December 8, 2019.
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (starbucks), November 26, 2019.
Precisely edited to the start-stop rhythm of a martial beat and post-punk rock music, Absolutions glories in organized disjunction, juxtaposing images of the artist collapsing to the ground with bursts of wildly scrambled electronic distortion. Produced while Rist was working at a professional...
Trecartin describes (Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me.) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an...
Writes Michael Snow: "The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes 'messages' between the two hemispheres. *Corpus Callosum, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of, de-picts, creates, examines, presents, consists of, and is,...
In 0, Seoungho Cho literally counts cars speeding down a freeway. The interwoven and digitally rendered content — cars, the sounds they produce, numbers superimposed upon them — creates a dynamic investigation of the mechanics of the moving image. 0 combines the excitement of a motor-sport video...
An exploration in mood and tone, 1 is a montage of image, music, and language. Against a split-screen study of New York beat cops, Silver presents a sentence, drawn out in single words over the course of the piece. Through subtle word repetition, she alters what would appear to be a unified...
The final installment in Cokes' Pop Manifesto series, 1! takes a stroll through the artist's music collection, presenting the titles of 100 recent albums released over a five year period. This annotated discography is paired with excerpts from an essay by critic Christoph Cox discussing rock...
1/1 is a new direction for Seoungho Cho. This playful study, shot largely in degraded black and white, knowingly recalls the early performative experiments of 1970's video practitioners. In part an exercise in gesture and noise, the piece is also a reflexive anecdote on the nature of video itself.
At first glance, Baldino's "16 Minutes Lost" is the perfect portrayal of scatterbrainedness, testament to the clutter of modern living and the inevitable failings of manmade systems. For sixteen dizzy minutes, we are caught up in the frenzy of futile searches through cluttered handbags and...
19 Universes/my brother is the latest in a series of videos in which Baldino explores advanced scientific concepts, including nanotechnology and quantum particles. The screen is divided into nineteen shifting strips of video, each portraying Baldino's brother, a musician, as he plays rock and...
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (crackerbarrel), November 26, 2019.
2002 is a "concert film" that collects together footage of approximately forty bands videotaped by artist C. Spencer Yeh during the year 2002, including Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Sightings, Sudden Infant, Cock ESP, Double Leopards, Caroliner Rainbow, Comets on Fire, and more. Acting as a...
21 Films, which actually contains 25 titles, is a compilation of 16mm and 8mm shorts assembled by the artist. In these works, Sherman combines the hallmarks of his "Spectacle" performances—metaphoric juxtapositions and visual puns—with a fluency in film grammar. Through exquisite storyboarding...
This tape is Jud Yalkut's video realization of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's concert performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player. In this extraordinary performance, which is manipulated and synthesized by Yalkut, Paik and Moorman play Cage's score on a...
In 2@, Cokes continues his investigation of pop culture, focusing on the discourse surrounding the music industry. Dedicated to Dan Graham, whose pioneering video Rock My Religion took rock-and-roll as its subject, 2@ focuses on the development of rock music. Cokes reduces the form to black words...
A simple scene of three flags flapping over an electronic billboard advertising grocery specials conjures an indelible portrait of America.
Davidovich recorded this video with artist Stuart Sherman at Ronald Feldman's 3 Mercer Street Gallery in SoHo. As the camera moves in a continuous, 360-degree take, Sherman performs a series of actions that are never completely captured by the perpetually revolving camera. Davidovich exhibited...
This is the first in Cokes' non-consecutively produced series of "promotional tapes" for his conceptual band SWIPE. 3#, subtitled Manifesto A Track #1, introduces Cokes' concern with the ideological apparatus that undergirds the music industry. The video takes up a song by Seth Price, which is...
As an early pioneer of the music video, Julia Heyward presents a long-form "video album" with 360 that was released just a year prior to the birth of MTV. Heyward's ten songs (recorded with Jody Harris of The Raybeats and The Contortions and Don Christensen of The Raybeats and Bush Tetras) are...
A collaboration between Arcangel and Milwaukee artist Frankie Martin, this work revisits the "rave" dance party phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s. In an act of simulation at once hilarious and incisive, Arcangel and Martin stage what appears to be an amateur, made-for-public-access-television...
Founded and directed by Charlotte Moorman, the Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York began in 1963 as open forums for the presentation of experimental music, which was emerging out of the Fluxus movement and Happenings. By 1971, these evening salons of inventive musical works were expanded to...
Silver premiered 5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown in the Shorts Program of the 2010 Berlinale International Film Festival. A longtime resident of New York's Chinatown neighborhood, she writes, "You live somewhere, walk down the same street fifty, a hundred, ten thousand times, each time...
While artist-in-residence in the north tower of the World Trade Center, Lucas was given a tour of the center's sub-basement. 5 Minute Break is the eerie artifact of that tour. An animated woman roams the WTC sub-basement like a benign Lara Croft, negotiating an underground maze of empty...
The fifth and final installment in Cokes' series of "promotional videotapes," 5% (subtitled Manifesto E) shares its predecessors' format: a strict graphic presentation of on-screen text, coupled with a pop soundtrack. As with the other installments, this work is concerned with delineating the...
67/97 begins by imagining the information collected when a bar code is scanned, and then asks: What if everything could be read by a scanner? What information would be retrieved, what secrets revealed? A barrage of text is generated as a laser reads bar codes and then food, objects, and the...
The second in Cokes' series of pop "manifestos," 6^ employs two simultaneous strategies to examine questions of originality and authenticity. While layers of densely theoretical text float across a blue ground, the soundtrack, a song by the band Appendix, features a singer addressing similar...
73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying...
Founded and directed by Charlotte Moorman, the Annual Avant Garde Festivals of New York began in 1963 as open forums for the presentation of experimental music, which was emerging out of the Fluxus movement and Happenings. By 1971, these evening salons of inventive musical works were expanded to...
9/11 is a first-hand, harrowing document of the events of September 11th and their immediate aftermath, as observed by the artist. As the tragedy unfolds, Oursler records from his apartment, just blocks from the former World Trade Center, and on the ground in Lower Manhattan. Oursler began...
This video examines the many paradoxes of natural, cultural and virtual identities. Peter d'Agostino's cross-cultural interests led directly back to the personal histories and cultural memories of his Italian American roots. The video moves back and forth in time by juxtaposing iconic images of...
In a generous project that celebrates the many workers keeping New York City functioning and thriving, Beloff and her partner Eric Muzzy extend the COVID-19-era concept of the “essential worker,” calling attention to the broad range of workers who might fit into this designation. The video...
Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended video series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their...
Single-channel video recordings of a live bot performance on Twitter (zara), March 22, 2021.
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Twitter (ʞooqǝɔɐɟ), June 22-23, 2021
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Twitter (etradefinancial), November 30, 2020.
Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Twitter (elleusa), November 30, 2020.