Dennis Cooper writes in Artforum: "If A Family Finds Entertainment can be reduced to a thumbnail description, this might be it: Trecartin stars as Skippy, a clownish but terrifyingly psychopathic boy who has locked himself in the upstairs bathroom of his family home during a wild party. Ignoring...

Echoing themes explored throughout David Wojnarowicz's art and writing, A Fire in My Belly is a visceral meditation on cultural and individual identity, spirituality, and belief systems. On a trip to Mexico City with Tommy Turner to scout Day of the Dead imagery, Wojnarowicz shot 25 rolls of...

"Using the structure of a feature film as its basic format, A First Quarter adopts the principles of nouvelle vague cinema as its role model. Simultaneous realities, altered flashbacks, plays on time and space are all components of the form and content of the film. Because it was originally shot...

In Hammer’s autobiographical experimental film A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, the artist reflects on her personal fight against stage 3 ovarian cancer, transforming illness into recovery. Describing herself as a cancer "thriver" rather than a "survivor," Hammer rides on horseback through the red...

In A Loft, Jacobs applies his exacting digital techniques to footage of his New York City working and living space. Jacobs' take on the "artist's studio" portrait shows the important early influence of abstract painter Hans Hoffman on Jacobs, and his continued interest in abstract aesthetics and...

"Fleeing from the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles in 1941. This film is inspired by notes for movie that he based on an article in Life Magazine called "A Model Family in a Model Home". It explores Brecht’s ideas about working people and the home as a stage upon which larger...

In this collaborative "verbal drawing," Fluxus artist, painter and poet Emmett Williams is profiled by his friends and colleagues. Fifteen artists, poets and writers convened in the Form Hotel in Warsaw, Poland to pay tribute to Williams in the form of personal anecdotes. In this intimate...

Television on speed, Paik and Garrin's A Tale of Two Cities is a potpourri of pop personalities, avant-garde antics and international cultural kitsch, where past, present and future collide in the kaleidoscopic, hyper-kinetic, televisually "now."

A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs' 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper's Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.

Zoe Beloff's book A World Redrawn is part of a larger exhibition of archival objects, films, architectural models and drawings (first displayed at the CUNY James Gallery in 2015), which takes up the tantalizing prospect of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht living and working in the seat of...

Baldino explores both the sublime and mundane aspects of symmetry, from the physicist Lee Smolin discussing "super-symmetry," to individuals confessing their design for eating corn on the cob. Sliding across the screen, each image produces a clone; the ceaseless, conveyor belt-like motion...

About the Absence is Present series, Baldino writes, "As a result of open-heart surgery last year, I currently have a blind spot near the center of my vision. I had a 'mini-stroke' during surgery, and a small air bubble landed in my visual cortex, of all places. Normally I do not create work that...

About the Absence is Present series, Baldino writes, "As a result of open-heart surgery last year, I currently have a blind spot near the center of my vision. I had a 'mini-stroke' during surgery, and a small air bubble landed in my visual cortex, of all places. Normally I do not create work that...

Baldino writes, "As a result of open-heart surgery last year, I currently have a blind spot near the center of my vision. I had a 'mini-stroke' during surgery, and a small air bubble landed in my visual cortex; normally I do not create work that is explicitly related to my personal life, but this...

On Translation: Açik Radyo is part of Muntadas' ongoing series of works and projects about communication, culture, and the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. This piece is the result of a two-year project created in the context of "Lives and Works in Istanbul," a program that...

Working with both video and music forms as a member of, respectively, the art collective X-PRZ and the band SWIPE, Cokes employs appropriation and re-presentation in his art. In Ad Vice his source material includes advertising slogans, rock lyrics, and music videos. Cokes offers one phrase after...

Davidovich searches in vain for the meaning of "avant garde." The artist travels to Iowa City, where he conducts a series of "man on the street" interviews with artist Michael Smith, painter and critic Walter Robinson, University of Iowa professor of art history W.J. Tomasini, a security guard at...

Deploying fragments of sound and image in a confounding shell-game, Adynata challenges notions of Asianness and the East. Thornton, appearing in the guise of a 19th-century Mandarin and his wife, explores oppositions of femininity and masculinity concealed in Orientalist assumptions. Here, lushly...

Europe's enchantment with American consumer culture is depicted, as well-known European architectural landmarks — the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, London Bridge — are reflected in the glossy surface of a 1960's Cadillac convertible, the ultimate symbol of the "golden age" of American consumerism.

Using Amazon’s virtual voice assistant Alexa, a woman (played by Condit) interrogates the nature of consciousness — whether human, animal or man-made — as she walks through the woods, dragging electrical cords behind her like bread crumbs. Alexa’s disjointed, robotic voice contrasts starkly with...

"Aldebaran is the brightest star of the Taurus constellation. It is not without hubris that I claimed that light-seeing eye for myself. The world of Aldebaran is projected light, rear screened and filmed again, pre-optical printer, and contemporary with the Haight-Ashbury projection light shows...

In what the artists term a "video collage noise composition," LoVid uses paper cut stencils and raw electrical signals to produce a stunning strobe-like audiovisual effect. In line with much of their video and performance work, Alien Philosophy investigates the tension between organic and...

A deceptively charming psychological set-piece, All About a Girl depicts a young girl wrestling with her own imagination and fears. An ordinary game of "let's pretend" turns uncanny as, alone in the woods, she projects life, voice, and ultimately her own identity onto an unexpected surrogate in a...

In All Day and a Night, Pearlstein explores relationships among psychology, ritual and religion. This piece was filmed within an installation by Simon Foreman. An interior white cube bathed in intense bright light is viewed through a square window from an adjacent area. A 70's kitsch picture...

June 15-17, 1965. Ornette Coleman's trio featuring guest Pharaoh Sanders and a small string orchestra record the soundtrack for Conrad Rooks' in-progress feature film Chappaqua. Upon listening, Rooks recognizes the exquisiteness of Coleman's boisterous music, but believes it will overpower his...

Arcangel brings a willfully lo-fi aesthetic to bear in manipulating a consumer video document of a twenty-year-old Simon and Garfunkel concert; his concerns lie as much with the event's reproduction and dissemination as with any of its supposedly original qualities. Investigating the social...

Recalling recent urban horror films such as 28 Days Later or Cloverfield, All Together Now is a tale of survival in a devastated but familiar world. Feral tribes are the only inhabitants left in a decimated Los Angeles, sustaining themselves on the debris of an annihilated culture. A sense of...

Mike Connor of the FACT Centre in Liverpool writes: "This piece is a Screen Grab tutorial of how to make simple computer graphics using the BASIC programming language. This continues JODI's work for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer... You can follow along with JODI as they programme the ZX...

High school is where life starts to get serious. You are becoming the person you were meant to be, and you dream about what you will do. Forty years later -- almost a lifetime -- what happened? Did things work out the way you imagined? Are you where you want to be? And after all that time -- who...

"Alphaville," a gated residential neighborhood in Sao Paolo, is the primary site of Muntadas' Alphaville e outros, which examines the phenomenon of "gated communities," and how fear and a search for exclusivity lead to urban isolation and exclusion. The work takes as its reference the 1965 film Alph...

Rist's well-developed technique of mixing the personal, the pop and the mass cultural are distilled in this short work. Against a backdrop of tranquil Swiss alpine scenes, a small window presents a graphic record of human birth. This sequence, unsentimentally depicting what has historically...

"The mise-en-scene, the whole story, takes place in one location, the artist's studio. A delicate psychological allegory on 'a day in the life of' anchors the displacement of (filmic) reality and the alienation of the (players) self. Devices such as incongruity between the image and the...

Premiered as a live performance at The Poetry Project in 2010, Am I From Brooklyn? betrays Lampert's interest in the spectacle of sentiment, especially at the mercy of consumer technology. Using the now obsolete but once popular home-movie format super-8 film, Lampert runs through a sequence of...

Ken Jacobs writes: "Innocent movie-goers never given a chance, captured...in 3D while other Americans invade, bomb and burn to protect our freedoms (to invade, bomb and burn). They are civilians, with bodies and thoughts far from war. Distance protects our serenity, our amiable enjoyments....

Writes Schneemann: "The 'Americana I Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working for the CIA. The next presentation was May '77, as a cooking event...

A chilling cautionary tale, Amnesia is a stark and uncompromising portrayal of the escalation of xenophobic sentiment in the current neo-conservative climate of both France and the U.S.

A work of often visceral power, An I For An I is a dynamic cultural statement on the internalization of racism and violence. Andrews assails the cause and effect of institutionalized and mass media exploitation, which he states is "directed at and produced by our culture, attacking the mind and...

"An Immense Majority isolates certain social responses to entertainment media, in its ironic insistence by the on-screen character that he wants greater authenticity than that provided by TV. Often people’s greatest fear in confrontation with their own actual participation in television (or...

WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.

Writes Jacobs: "The real subject of ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) is depth-perception itself. Our beloved performers from the 1905 Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son again...

Drawing from Paik's earliest experiments with video synthesizers, Analogue Assemblage employs current technology to create a multilayered montage that references both the old and the new. The eerie 1969 electronic score floats over ghostly image processing; the result is a paean to the way the...

Digital Snow is a comprehensive DVD-ROM collection devoted to the works of experimental filmmaker/artist Michael Snow. A virtual encyclopedia of Snow's works, Digital Snow features original interviews, video excerpts, musical extracts, rare documentaries and records for over 700 of his works. In...

How did Andy Warhol meet Ulrike Meinhof? By Chance. Ulrike Meinhof is one of the legends of our age. Her personality is just as tragically failing as Warhol's. Completely his opposite, she turned politics into tragic poetry; she had to meet Andy Warhol, who turned exhausted art into daily food....

Writes Condit: "Annie Lloyd is a daughter's complex and poetic documentation of the last four years of her mother's life and a portrayal of the creativity and wisdom of old age."

Pairing dated East German techno music with early twentieth-century film reels of cabaret lines and vaudevillean dance productions, Another Worldy forces the viewer to question categories of "old" and "new," "good" and "bad."

Ant Farm's Dirty Dishes is a freewheeling portapak time capsule that captures the collective spirit of Ant Farm's life and work in California in the early 1970s. The original half-inch open reel tape was also the first work to be indexed in EAI's video collection, and holds the number "001" in...

This work is a single-channel version of the 1971 five-monitor piece Apple Eaters, which was shown at The Kitchen (then known as the Mercer Arts Center) in 1972. Tardos asked artists and other friends to "pose" for her while eating an apple. (In a later project, she invited other artists to eat...

A woman kisses Acconci's body, covering him in red lipstick traces. Acconci then rubs his body against another man (Dennis Oppenheim), transferring the stains onto him.

Bell-Smith and Pandian's re-edit of a 1989 Paula Abdul music video was created from a lo-res Web video, creating a look that references YouTube hobbyist remixing and fan edits. In their version, one line of the song - "I like to smoke" - is seamlessly substituted for other lyrics, turning the...

With April is the Cruelest Month, Kubota continues her ongoing video diary project. Here she reflects on her relationship with her husband Nam June Paik. While the prior installment, Sexual Healing, focused on Paik's recovery from an illness, this chapter is a tender tribute. Kubota constructs...

Writes Laurel Reuter, Director, North Dakota Museum of Art: "[Arabesque] explodes into dance, the dance of the bucking horse, the bull, the clown, the rodeo rider. This is the resplendent West, but Lucier undermines its glory with loss. Brilliantly, the artist sets her choreography to George...

Arena was presented both as a live performance for an invited audience, and as a video shoot on two consecutive weekends at Salon 94 in New York. This took place one month before the presidential election and concurrent with the main debates. Its theme and structure echo these events. Three...

"Footage shot from the New York IRT and the Berlin S-Bahn are shifted and shuffled, interpenetrating in space and time with enthralling dexterity, leaving us adrift between the familiar and the strange, while personal diary entries, a Russian ballad and dubbed dialogue from 8 1/2 are rehearsed...

Equal parts persevering and fragile, two puppets with no arms, no legs, and no moving parts are pitted against an insurmountable obstacle: they are just crumpled pieces of paper, and subject to imminent disintegration at the whims of water, fire, wind—even the very beer they attempt to...

Around the Park was a public art project commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservency in New York in autumn 2007. The video, which stars Wegman's canine cast enjoying a fall day in the park, was presented on four outdoor monitors near Madison Square Park's food kiosk.

Theo Eshetu records a 1989 Fluxus event in Paris. Shooting with handheld video in a style that is alternately disorienting and investigative, Eshetu captures the performances, which include Charlotte Moorman dunking herself into a barrel of water between cello movements and Yoko Ono smashing a...

A playful commentary on art and representation, Art Tape: Live With/Think About, like much of Bell-Smith's work, incorporates content from popular television shows and movies, in this case Law & Order and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Bell-Smith combines this material with his own digital animation...

In As Seen On TV, "new vaudevillian" performance artist Bill Irwin is the subject of a wryly comic performance narrative. Framed by the storyline of a parodic theatrical audition, Irwin plays a hapless Everyman who inadvertently becomes trapped inside a television set. Displaying an antic...

This work documents a ritualistic performance concerned with "Ansemia," or the inability to either express or understand gesture. Using symbolic materials — hot wax, a knife, a dead bird — as well as text, Export investigates human expression, and how communication can fail.

"I had used my...

Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, including images of...

Assemblage is a recently rediscovered lost film featuring Merce Cunningham and his early dance company: Carolyn Brown, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, Meg Harper, Susana Hayman-Chaffey, Jeff Slayton, Chase Robinson, and Mel Wong. A collaboration with director and former dancer Richard Moore, Asse...

This early performance tape is an example of what Acconci has termed his "quasi-ESP exercises," in which he explores mental concentration and intuition as a means of non-visual and non-verbal perception, interaction and communication. Blindfolded and wearing earplugs, Acconci and another man...

Asymptomatic Carrier explores New York City’s abandoned North Brother Island, the site of a former quarantine hospital that housed “Typhoid Mary,” presently crumbling amid dense, overgrown forest. A man claiming to be living off the island for many years calls a vendor to negotiate the...

In these two works, Cort merges video theater, early imaging technology and interactivity. In At Maple Tree Farm and Beyond, he employs the Video Art Transposer to transform images during the recording process, manipulating staged events in a real-time, interactive electronic theater. Explorations i...

In this piece, what appears to be the set-up for a simple dramatized joke is revealed to be a multi-faceted depiction of racial identity in America, in keeping with other performance, painting, and writing projects by Musson that track the assimilation of African-Americans and the shifting public...

Barbara Hammer takes her camera out to film the audiences at screenings of her films – some women only, some mixed – at the London Film-makers' Co-op; at the Roxie Theater, in San Francisco, during Gay Pride Week (where the audience includes fellow filmmaker Curt McDowell); at The Funnel, in...

Vom Bruch describes Augenzeugen (Eyewitness), subtitled Behind the Doors of the Haus der Kunst, as a series of "philosophical speculations" on the famous Third Reich propaganda building in Munich, which opened in 1937 to serve as the official German art museum. In his video, archival footage of...

This tape is an exercise in spatial perception, using mirror reflections of people and their movements.

"Available Space is a film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen. Unexpected angles, corners, slants, floor and ceiling are engaged in unexpected...

Awakening from the 20th Century contends with the collision between the actual and the virtual in the city of San Francisco. "Is life becoming virtual?" Lord asks. "Are we witnessing the end of the City? Will the computer replace the automobile?" These questions are taken up by six prominent...

AWGTHTGTWTA (Are We Going to Have to Go Through with This Again?) is one of a recent series of single-channel video works in which Oursler explores the idea of the "chorus." Here Oursler asked high school and middle school students in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, many of whom are recent...