Michael Bell-Smith

EAI and The Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach presented Screen Play: Moving Image Art, a special exhibition of moving image artworks for the public spaces of the hotel during Art Basel Miami Beach. Screen Play, guest curated by Lori Zippay, EAI's Executive Director, brought together video, film, and digital artworks drawn from the EAI collection across six decades. These works highlighted the cross-disciplinary relation of the moving image to other artistic media and forms—performance, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture—while also exploring the distinctive vocabularies of video, film, and digital media. The public encountered artists' moving image works in multiple public spaces of the hotel, as well as a dedicated "EAI TV Channel" for the hotel guest rooms. Screen Play featured moving image works by artists including Michael Bell-Smith, Takeshi Murata, Leslie Thornton, Jacolby Satterwhite, Joan Jonas, Merce Cunningham, Alex Hubbard, Dara Birnbaum, Shana Moulton, Lawrence Weiner, Steina, and John Baldessari.

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.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to participate in The 2008 New York Art Book Fair. EAI will present a special program of videos that considers issues of access, circulation and obsolescence. The program explores "out of print" art and media, in the form of limited edition videos, site-specific installations, Internet searches, one-off broadcasts, and ephemeral actions and performances that exist only as documents or artifacts.

In his first artist talk in New York City, Michael Bell-Smith spoke at EAI about his innovative media works and digital art practice. Bell-Smith talked about how he uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. Directly referencing art historical and painting traditions as well as the visual vocabulary of the Internet, Bell-Smith's rigorously constructed, highly conceptual works suggest new directions and possibilities in digital art. New and recent works works by the artist were also screened.

EAI partnered with Y-3 to present a program of video works from the EAI collection on the exterior of Y-3's newly opened location in Miami's Design District. Inside the Y-3 store, in its second level event space, an indoor video program featuring the influential and provocative video works of Dara Birnbaum was on view.

EAI's program of alternative music-videos and music-based video by artists traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach. Screened at Art Positions' Open Air Cinema, the program included videos by Cory Arcangel, Charles Atlas, Michael Bell-Smith, Johanna Billing, Dara Birnbaum, Meredith Danluck, Devin Flynn, Shana Moulton, Tony Oursler with Sonic Youth, Ara Peterson, Seth Price, and William Wegman.

This special open-air video screening on the Hudson River at Pier 63 Maritime included alternative music-videos and music-based video by artists. The artists in the program included Cory Arcangel, Charles Atlas, Michael Bell-Smith, Johanna Billing, Dara Birnbaum, Meredith Danluck, Devin Flynn, Shana Moulton, Tony Oursler with Sonic Youth, Ara Peterson, Seth Price, and William Wegman.

Rhizome.org and EAI presented a panel which discussed current developments in Internet art in light of larger cultural and technological shifts. Panelists included artists Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Marisa Olson, and Wolfgang Staehle and curators Caitlin Jones and Michael Connor.

EAI curated the second manifestation of Smack Mellon's multi-screen video exhibition. MULTIPLEX 2 featured new and classic video works from the EAI collection, and was the inaugural exhibition of Smack Mellon's new gallery space.

Videos by artists who explore the strange phenomena that can arise from living closely with melodrama and television, including Dara Birnbaum, Shana Moulton, Michael Smith, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.