William Wegman

EAI is pleased to announce its first-ever Benefit Art Auction, to be held on Thursday, April 19. This special event will raise essential funding towards our mission of preserving and providing access to media art’s rich legacies, while fostering powerful new voices.

silent auction hosted by P·P·O·W
535 West 22nd Street, 6th floor, New York, NY

cocktail reception & screenings at EAI
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor, New York, NY

online bidding available on Artsy

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special project for Times Square. In partnership with the Times Square Alliance and MTV, EAI brought artists' visions to the MTV 44½ LED Screen. Marking EAI's 40 years of support for moving image art, EAI in Times Square celebrated video art's rich history of creative intervention in one of the world's most dynamic media landscapes.

From April 13 to 19, EAI highlighted the remarkable creative media interventions of artists on a spectacular scale. Works by Vito Acconci, Dan Asher, Phyllis Baldino, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, Shigeko Kubota, Takeshi Murata, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Stuart Sherman and William Wegman were seen daily on MTV 44½'s large-format LED screen.

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.

Playtime celebrates the sight gag and the visual pun. Engaging the medium, these works employ a purely visual mode of communication, one that depends on comic timing as well as space. The artists look not only to silent comedies for influence, but to the external storytelling of Jacques Tati, the surreal anthropomorphizations of Ernie Kovacks and the tradition of trick photography tracing back to the Lumiere Brothers. Aided by props and animals, the artists appear alone with their cameras, concocting vignettes of wit and expressiveness, without the use of dialogue. Playtime salutes the absurd, the wayward and the out of place. Included in the program are works by Stuart Sherman, VALIE EXPORT, Phyllis Baldino, George Kuchar, John Baldessari, William Wegman, Cynthia Maughan and James Byrne, among others.

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.

During the PERFORMA07 performance biennial, EFA Gallery was transformed into a video lounge to host Electronic Arts Intermix's Viewing Room, a program that provides free public access to one of the foremost collections of video art in the world. Visitors to EFA Gallery were able to choose from a curated selection of major performance-based video works by over 30 artists from the EAI Collection. Viewers were able to watch these seminal performances and contemporary classics at their own pace in a comfortable viewing environment. During the opening reception on Friday, November 2nd, programs featuring selected works were installed throughout the gallery.

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.

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.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a selection of early works from the EAI collection that feature some of contemporary art's most legendary artist/muse collaborations Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, William Wegman and Man Ray, and Andy Warhol and the Superstars. The screening was preceded by a special evening viewing of the group exhibition The Muse at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, which also explored the role of the muse in contemporary art.

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging from performance and the body; narrative; cultural essays; activism, and poetics.