"Note to the viewer: Das Kunstkabinett, or Cabinet of Curiosities, is a 'microcosm' or theater of the world. A memory theater which provides solace and a retreat for contemplation." These words open and frame Kobland's Cabinet of Curiosities, a meditative work that speaks to memory, identity,...

Cadillac Ranch 1974/1994 is a document of Ant Farm's major site installation, Cadillac Ranch, which was commissioned by Texas millionaire Stanley Marsh 3. To create the work, ten Cadillacs, vintage 1948 to 1963, were buried fin-up in a field off Route 66 in Amarillo. The image is a comically...

"This is a feature film tracing the history of the collaboration of choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, which began nearly 50 years ago at the Cornish Institute of Allied Arts in Seattle, Washington. In telling the story of Cunningham and Cage, award-winning filmmaker and...

Cantaloup is an informal documentary on the Vasulkas' Digital Image Articulator, an imaging device they designed with Jeffrey Schier. Using a cantaloup and the three artist/designers as source material, Steina explains the capabilities of the machine, including its real-time imaging ability and...

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

In Capitalism: Child Labor Jacobs digitally animates a Victorian stereoscopic photograph of a 19th-century factory floor, crowded with machinery and child workers. Jacobs isolates...

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

Ken Jacobs writes: "An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful,...

In her earliest film, which has been newly transferred to video, Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music. Ruggles is seen enjoying pie a la mode and ruminating on subjects ranging from...

An actress rehearses for a role as Lampert's great, great, great, great, great Aunt Chana Kozehovich. Following Lampert's direction, Golum adjusts her inflection and characterization as she delivers a melodramatic monolog describing life in late 1700s Siberia.

Collaborating with artists Dike Blair and Dan Graham, and musician/composer Christian Marclay, MICA-TV crafts an ode to the urban and suburban architecture of the contemporary American cultural landscape. CASCADE/Vertical Landscapes is constructed as a continuous parade of vertical camera...

Cats is a plotter drawing produced in an edition of 20, created by Cory Arcangel exclusively for Electronic Arts Intermix's 2018 benefit art auction. Purchase inquiries should be directed to info@eai.org. Price: $1500.

A photographic session in which the artist as "ballerina" is photographed by the "photographer" in a set of stills intended to represent her in the appropriately glamorous and correct positions, after only three months of ballet training. The tape juxtaposes the truth of the "still" image,...

An alternative to corporate music videos that mass-market young female musicians, Celebrations for Breaking Routine documents girl bands in Liverpool and Basel recording original songs commissioned by Lucas. This video is part of a larger project in which Lucas traveled to cities internationally...

Aesthetically and thematically in conversation with their earlier piece Breaking and Entering the Lost Time Frame, cell-a-scape continues LoVid's investigation into the intersections between the organic forms of bodies and nature and the inorganic world of technology and electronics. Here,...

CENTER JENNY is one of four movies to date completed in 2013 by Trecartin, first shown as a work in progress at the Arsenale of the the Venice Biennale. Since settling in Los Angeles in 2010, Fitch and Trecartin have designed and built a modular maze of sets on a soundstage with the help of...

In Centers, Acconci faces the camera, his head and arm in close-up as he points straight ahead at his own image on the video monitor, attempting to keep his finger focused on the exact center of the screen. In pointing at the image of himself, Acconci is also pointing directly at the viewer — an...

Juxtaposing two restagings of a melodramatic scene from Tommy, The Who's rock opera, Channeling analyzes the ways in which media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In Donegan's almost psychedelic renditions, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of...

To create Channels/Inserts, Cunningham and Atlas divided the Cunningham Dance Company's Westbeth studio into sixteen possible areas for dancing and used chance methods based on the I Ching to determine the order in which these spaces would be used, the number of dancers to be seen, and the events...

To create this dense pop collage, Bell-Smith overlaid the first twelve parts of R. Kelly's soap opera/song cycle, Trapped in the Closet, playing them simultaneously. He writes, "I wanted to take this cultural object and amplify its peculiarity by folding the song and narrative onto itself." The...

In Cheryl, Donegan's starting point is the appropriated audio of a self-motivating corporate monologue by a woman named Cheryl. A model of forced enthusiasm, this stand-in repeats a rapid litany of retail clichés and personal encouragements ("I am a winner!") as positive thinking turns to...

In Clarity, Donegan sits behind a pane of glass. She places a clear cellophane hood over her head and paints the cellophane "face" a vivid orange. She then presses and rubs the painted mask against the pane, smearing it with color and obscuring the view of her face through the glass. When she...

Thornton's continuing fascination with technology finds an unlikely expression in these digitally manipulated film sequences, in which a chimpanzee's pratfalls come to stand in for the human experience of media.

Jacobs' first 'Nervous Magic Lantern' performance (1990) paired with a soundtrack by Harrison Birtwistle (1971). Ken Jacobs writes: "Magic Lantern performance (a work for one projector) recorded to video. Mesh of clockwork sounds by Harrison Birtwistle. 'The movie projector's a kind of clock',...

Cinderella 2001 is a vibrant performance tape with an unnerving, compulsive narrative concerned with image and obsession. Here Hodel complicates her performance-to-camera work with a developed dramatic structure.

This early work belongs in the company of Paik and Yalkut's classic collaborative "video-films," including Video Tape Study No. 3, Beatles Electronique, and Missa of Zen. To the accompaniment of the abrupt sonic interjections of Fluxus-affiliated composer Takehisa Kosugi, Yalkut's black and...

Jacobs documents New York in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, from the emergency workers and crowds around Ground Zero to the spontaneous memorials in Union Square. He also records the process of gaining access to his own apartment, just blocks north of the Trade Center site, from...

City Slivers is a formal investigation of New York's urban architecture. Created to be projected on the exterior facade of a building, it was shown for the first time in the open-air exhibition ARCADES and later in the Holly Solomon Gallery.

A documentation of one of Acconci's most notorious performances, Claim Excerpts is a highly confrontational work, an exercise in self-induced, heightened behavioral states, and an aggressive psychological exploration of the artist/viewer relationship. During the three-hour performance, Acconci...

Compiled by Graham, Classic and Recent Installations/Pavilions 1974-2008 features video documentation of ten installations, focusing on the architectural sculptures that the artist terms "pavilions." Typically composed of transparent or mirrored glass, and often placed outdoors in public sites,...

Hayward has described her work as a confluence of narrative, emotion, melody, and light, with her dialogue informed more by the way people think than by the way they talk. In Classic Conversations, Heyward narrates a series of cultural images and references: New York's Twin Towers, Chinatown in...

Since 2000, Antin has been creating large-scale photographs that reconstruct scenes from ancient history and mythology, as seen through the lens of 19th-century salon painting. In these photographic recreations, which include the series Last Days of Pompeii, Roman Allegories, and Helen's Odyssey,...

On a trip in anticipation of an around the world motor scooter tour in 1973, Hammer and her ex-husband traverse the Mendocino coast on their motorcycle – Hammer filming all the while from the rear seat. Light reflections, creative camera perspectives, and Hammer's signature self-inclusion mark...

Abstractions of light, hand shaped mattes, radical exposure changes and the subjective body of the filmmaker mark this early film of Hammer with filmic language that reappears in her later work. Shot in Northern California on the Sonoma Coast and in the woodlands, the beauty and sparkle of silent...

In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.

Club Vanessa is a video about "real love" in the form of a sex tape. "Club Vanessa, a video about the present, begins with me fantasizing about what our lives will be like in the future. That we would have a lot of lovers, that there would be real love, but no jealousy. We were trying to...

Coast Zone, a video-dance collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas, was shot in the vaulted Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The great spatial depth of the cathedral allows for the use of deep focus and camera mobility; dancers in the...

Superimposing images of ropes, chains and vanities that act as portals to the ocean, nautical ships, and Sizzler salad bars, a rambling seaman conjures carnal stories of succulent seafood cast up from the deepest ocean depths, prepared in overflowing and dripping thick butter. Situated just...

Alternating between square and rectangular video canvases, Hubbard's camera frames from above, capturing material deconstruction and abstraction in aspect ratios akin to a Jackson Pollock painting.

The Collected Works is a comprehensive three-volume survey of the performance and video works of Marina Abramovic and Ulay, spanning the years 1975 to 1986.

The three volumes — Performance Anthology (1975-1980), Modus Vivendi (1979-1986), and Continental Videoseries (1983-1986) —...

"My 1980 production of three hours of material, from which Combat Status Go (as well as the somewhat longer Beholden to Victory and the full-length Hail the Fallen) has been drawn, involved a set of approaches that have been central to the development of all my work in the 1980s. Central to this...

The remains of a Gordon Matta-Clark piece in the basement of 112 Greene Street: a closet-like space with a window — viewers look in on their way through the gallery's ongoing exhibition. The walls are covered with mirrors. The artist, naked from the waist up, is alone with three roosters; he...

In Comma Boat, we're stuck in a mock-authoritarian fantasy--a power trip. The film centers around a director-character played by Trecartin who oscillates between feelings of omnipotence and self-doubt. As if a post-human, post-gendered reincarnation of the Fellini character in 8 ½, the director...

In Command Performance, Acconci attempts to replace himself with the viewer. He lies on his back with the camera gazing down on him and begins a hypnotic incantation: "Dream into the space... dream myself out of here, into you." Cajoling, pleading, insulting, fantasizing, he tries to seduce the...

Hill's investigations into sign systems—particularly as enunciated in the form of spoken language—join with his early concerns with montage and the idea of the cut, to produce a concise performance on the nature of television.

André re-organizes time, rhythm and sound in her portrait of the new music composer/pianist Walter Hus, constructing a study of the process of composing. Playing on the title's double meaning — "composition" and "composite" — André isolates musical gestures and fragments time, recomposing Hus'...

"Originally intended as one scene in a larger work concerned with the metaphorical destruction of the viewer (through demolition of the camera), Concord Ultimatum unexpectedly became the occasion of the larger project’s demise. In addressing the camera mechanism itself as a subject, and even...

ConCreep is a portrait of the ambitious New York street musician of the same name, who uses household implements to create an infectious drum sound. Although continually moved on by the police, he manages nevertheless to earn a solid income and build a fan base.

With this abstract digital video, Murata presents viewers with a field of seething colors and line, within which a suggestive, Rorschach-like formation manages to retain its structure even as it is in a constant state of flux. The mesmerizing tableau that results is accompanied by a cyclical,...

For the Paris Biennale in 1975, Matta-Clark made a major cut in two houses adjacent to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Les Halles. The cut, shaped like a twisted cone, was inspired by Anthony McCall's film Line Describing a Cone.

Heyward articulates a poetic monologue alongside a surreally spinning Venus de Milo, while performing vocal acrobatics and toying with the meanings of words in a stream-of-consciousness diatribe on patriarchy, sexuality, cultural and religious mythologies, and normative femininity. Heyward sets...

A woman, a man, and a beach on the North Sea are the basic elements with which André constructs an elegant fiction of a couple, and deconstructs the codes and gestures of desire and betrayal. In her formal, rhythmic compositions, André observes the intimate detail and familiar gestures of the...

Constipation is a performance Lampert worked on between 2010-2012 that featured the last rolls of Kodachrome film he shot before the ultra-colorful celluloid format was forever discontinued. None of the footage from that piece appears in this trailer.

Constricted Light explores concepts of illumination, both literal and metaphorical. Gorewitz writes: "According to the Zohar, a source text of Kabalistic mysticism, we live in a world of indirect light."

Contacts is one of a series of tapes in which Acconci creates a controlled performance situation to explore the limits of a private space. Applying intense mental concentration and intuition, he uses the body as a vehicle to explore perception and interactive communication. Acconci stands...

Contour Ploughing refers to the farming practice of plowing or planting perpendicular lines across a slope, following its contours to minimize erosion. From afar these ruts coalesce to form sprawling topographical designs across landscape, echoed in the computational patterns constituting LoVid’s...

"Contribution to Light is all about my excitement and thrill at seeing reflected and refracted light. I shot the edges of pieces of found broken glass that streamed light rays broken into myriad colors. I saw, years later, a shared aesthetic in Stan Brakhage’s study of a crystal ashtray." —...

"These films were made before I had taken a class on filmmaking. Someone gave me a Super 8 camera and I was smitten with what I could do with it, what it could record, the portability and, especially, the intimacy – how film could express who I am in a way I had not found before." — Barbara Hammer

In a stark white landscape, two performers engage in an intensely psychological dialogue, in a giddy shot reverse-shot style. Their verbal repertoire consists of groans, sighs, growls, laughter, and primal screams.

The New York Times' Holland Cotter writes, "Television soap opera is Mr. Linzy's primary, though not sole, inspiration. And this particular melodrama, with its Byzantine subplots, revolves around the tortured emotional life of a voluble young woman named Nucuazia and the death of an acquaintance...

Linzy's third installment in the "Conversation Wit de Churen" series, Da Young and Da Mess, is "a histrionic spoof of soap operas and Hollywood's penchant for casting stereotypes," writes Time Out New York's Martha Schwendener. "Linzy is doing to daytime soaps what John Waters did to his...

Linzy's "Conversations Wit de Churen" series presents "a populous and intensely imagined narrative, one based in part on the soap operas and sitcoms he watched as a child," writes Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Linzy draws upon "the daytime drama format, with its turgid emoting and big...

Both a "belated sequel to Alex Bag's scabrous art-school confidential Fall 95," (as Elizabeth Schambelan put it in Artforum), and a "self-immolating response to the enthusiastic reception that followed [Kalup Linzy's] breakout in 2005," (as Karen Rosenberg pointed out in New York Times), this...

In these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations. For example, he burns the hair from his chest with a candle, then attempts to create the illusion of having female breasts.

A mock documentary of archaeological findings from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion's "Room of the Unknown Function," Cornucopia first appeared as a part of a larger installation titled "Cornucopia: Fragments from the Room of the Unknown Function of the Villa dei Misteri of the 1984 Miss...

Unavailable until recently, Corrections is Acconci's first single-channel video. Back to the camera, with only his head and bare shoulders visible, Acconci lights a match and brings it around to the nape of his neck. The lights dim as the flame nears his body hair, which briefly flares in the...

In The Country Ball, Satterwhite fuses drawing, live performance and digital technology to translate and document personal mythology. Here the artist's sources are a home video of a family cookout and his mother's drawings. Hand-tracing the drawings and importing them into a 3D animation program,...

A snapshot of popular culture in the early aughts, Coven Services mixes vignettes of Bag in multiple guises—as a spokeswoman for Haliburton, Chase Bank, AOL Time Warner, Bechtel Corporation and other brands—with footage from Paris Hilton's infamous sex tape. In this disparaging look at the...

Pearlstein writes: "A group of four people are working together on a structure made of blocks. An interloper joins their group, but can't conform to their procedures. She disrupts their activity, eventually damaging their work. A variety of tactics are employed in an effort to reform her into a...

In Credits, Muntadas' analysis of the media landscape extends to what he terms the "invisible" information behind mass media productions. By isolating the credits of several TV and film productions — The Lawrence Welk Show, ABC's Wide World of Sports, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, among others —...

"I moved to New York City July 18, 1978 to pursue film production and cinema studies at NYU. A year later, protests ignited throughout Greenwich Village to disrupt the filming of William Friedkin’s 'erotic crime thriller' Cruising. I lived in a small studio apartment on Jones Street a few doors...

Atlas records a late-2000's revival performance of the 1993 dance CRWDSPCR, which Merce Cunningham choreographed using the choreographic software program LifeForms. In program notes to a performance of the dance, Cunningham suggested that the vowel-less title, pronounced either "crowd spacer" or...

In Cultural Diminish, Andrews indicts both the elitist and mass culture industries of postwar America, juxtaposing fragments from such disparate cultural realms as TV entertainment, art history, pro sports and black urban street life. An appropriated collage of what he terms "cultural...

"Cycles of 3s and 7s is a doubled statement. First and foremost, it is a commentary on computer art and the role of computers in video. Secondly, its arithmetic project has some bearing on the construction of musical scales. In...