Forcefield

Sound Stage was a special Saturday afternoon screening program featuring artists' videos that are driven by music performance. Sound Stage was presented as part of Chelsea Sound: A Not-For-Profit Festival of Artists in Sound, organized jointly by Printed Matter Inc., Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, Electronic Arts Intermix and Family Business. Taking place in Chelsea's Gallery District on Saturday, October 27th, the collaboratively produced festival included a series of performances, sound installations, and video screenings throughout the day across four venues.

Featuring works from the last four decades by a diverse group of artists, Sound Stage presented a program of videos that foreground musical performance. The screening embraced artists' documentation of music performances, artists' performances that incorporate live music, and works created for the camera and screen in which musicians take center stage.

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.

EAI presented 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa 09.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presented a series of video programs at The Park Avenue Armory during the 20th annual Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). EAI invited the first year graduate students in the CCS program to curate video programs out of the EAI collection. Four separate programs were produced by the students, which were exhibited on monitors in the Armory's main Hallway between February 21-25, 2008.

Contemporary music drives the visuals of these recent and historical videos. Pop, heavy metal, experimental, house, hip-hop, and ambient sounds mix in this series of performance, found-footage, abstract, and animated videos. Videophonic includes works by Steina Vasulka, Gusztav Hámos, Cory Arcangel, Forcefield, Takeshi Murata, and Paper Rad.

This was the first in an ongoing series of monthly programs at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, programmed by EAI. For September 2005, a selection of video works by the legendary artist collective, Forcefield, were shown.

For the Liverpool Biennial, members of artist collective Paper Rad presented a special program of video works that they selected from EAI's major collection of media art. The program included an animated introduction and conclusion created by Paper Rad specifically for this screening. Paper Rad synthesizes popular material from television, video games, and advertising, reprogramming these references with an exuberantly neo-primitivist digital aesthetic. In this program Paper Rad presented works by Forcefield, Radical Software Group (RSG), Mike Smith, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and William Wegman.

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.