MICA-TV

The special selection of media artworks for the public spaces of the Sagamore Hotel was drawn from EAI's extensive archive. The media artworks on display in the hotel presented formal, conceptual, or perceptual transformations of natural landscapes and environments. In works that range from the playful to the socially resonant, the artists investigate diverse notions of landscape, from transmutations of nature, the body, and everyday objects to the "media landscape" of today's televisual and digital cultures. Moving between abstraction and representation, the organic and the electronic, these works—which span five decades—also explore the materiality and meanings of video and digital media.

On the rooftop at X, EAI presented a program that focused on artists who use video to bring the interview into their art. Included in the program were Tony Oursler's interview with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon; a 1982 video "magazine edition" by MICA-TV and Richard Prince; Chris Burden's video confessional, Big Wrench; footage of art collective Ant Farm's 1976 appearances on Australian talk shows; and Russell Connor's fascinating, rare 1964 interview with Marcel Duchamp, in which the legendary Dadaist looks back on his life and the art of the 20th century.

On June 23rd, EAI's project space will launch with Character Witness, a program of videos by artists who take on the role of actor in their own narratives. Featuring a cross-generational group of artists, including Kalup Linzy, Alex Bag, Michael Smith, MICA-TV, William Wegman, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, these works also share a focus that resonates in the current economic and cultural climate: The irreverent investigation of the artist in relation to the art world and the art market.

In casting themselves in their own stories, the artists pursue a range of strategies, from playing or voicing a suite of multiple characters to performing alongside an ensemble cast or assuming fictionalized versions of themselves. Blurring the lines between narrative, performance and documentary, the artists take on these roles to critique, question, and satirize the systems around the marketing of the artist and the selling of their art.