In this short piece, the performer and viewer alike are taunted to the breaking point by an elusive purple "spot." The spot, rendered as a cardboard cut-out, eludes the grappling performer as it intones a coy song: "See me, touch me, hear me."

In the third part of the Damnation of Faust trilogy, Birnbaum shifts her focus from the individual to the social being, as she examines the collusion of personal history and collective memory through technology and mediated images. The demolition of a lower Manhattan playground is juxtaposed with...

Kalin's short video works function both as visual poems and as alternative music videos. With their astute conjunctions of image, music and text, these works respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s.

In Darling Child, Kalin uses an economy of means — spare visuals of...

In Day and Night, Jacobs teases out and toys with the ability of digital video to be infinitely and seamlessly manipulated, as well as its capacity for keeping reality just beyond the viewer's grasp. Here he uses images of nature as his source material, applying exacting technical effects to...

Day Is Done is a carnivalesque opus, a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing Goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue. Running over two-and-a-half hours, this riotous theatrical spectacle unfolds as a series of episodes that...

In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof.

A running man, exhausted and near collapse, is superimposed over the enormous, disembodied red lips of a woman, who taunts and seduces him: "Come on, you can do it. Go a little further. Keep pushing. You've got to make it." Originally a multi-monitor installation, Deadline uses an economy of...

Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Mall draws on nearly twenty years' worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer...

"Death of a Marriage I think is my first psychodrama – finding images and filmic methods of portraying my interior emotional being. I had built by hand with my husband a home in the woods, made my own horse corral, and had an art studio. Yet the alternative lifestyle didn’t erase the feeling of...

Decent Men, created over a period of almost forty years, is a video collage built around Ramos' powerful extended monologue on his eighteen months in federal prison for resisting the draft during the Vietnam War. As Ramos, a compelling raconteur, tells the story of his interactions with prisoners...

Deep Blue Sky is a witty game of association and juxtaposition. In this silent motion drawing or "structure," Weiner engages in visual and linguistic play. The interaction of Weiner's elliptical text and graphic symbols - which suggest stylized tic-tac-toe boards - allude to the relationships...

C. Spencer Yeh's music video for Deerhoof interprets the simple lyrics of the band's song to place its protagonists on a colorful, psychedelic odyssey through videogame-inspired visuals. Animated with sprites that evoke 8-bit graphics, Buck and Judy encounter sundry items like bananas and...

Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer referring...

Devotion investigates the extremely complex and hierarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man: Ogawa Shinsuke.

Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late '60s; the fight by...

Devour is a dual-channel version of the artist's multi-channel video projection installation of the same name. Schneemann notes that this work brings together "a range of images which contrast evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments... political disasters,...

Gigliotti's close-up documents capture the eclecticsm and offbeat vibrancy of the New York performance art and music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Difficult Music includes short comedic pieces by Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward and Michael Smith, among others.

Standing alone among beach dunes, Acconci begins to kick at the sand below him. Over the course of the film's ten minutes, this repeated action displaces sand at a steady rate: as the artist sinks lower into the hole he creates, the mound of sand before him grows in correspondence.

Combining slow zooms of domestic spaces with trite slide transitions and saccharine music, Bell-Smith creates a "promotional" video for the "Digital Fireplace Upside Down" DVD—a frame-filling image of a burning fireplace, flipped upside down, designed to "light up your life with a romantic,...

This video was created and released into distribution as one work in a solo exhibition that Price held simultaneously at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York in September 2006. As a video in the EAI collection, it is the one piece in the...

In Disorient Express, Jacobs reproduces a sequence of 1906 film shots depicting a journey by train, optically reprinting the footage with different formal manipulations. Dramatically altered through repetition, mirroring, inversion, and directional reversal, the film continually challenges the...

Writes Gorewitz: "The Rabbi in Berlin (How My Father Helped Destroy Modern Art) is an experimental, fictional narrative told by a dead person about his father and daughter after the Third Exile from Israel, performed by Willoughby Sharp and Debora Prado in Berlin.

"Lights Pop in Dark Places meand...

Jeju-do is the largest of Korean islands and lies between Korea and Japan. There, for hundreds of years, women dive without breathing apparatus to the ocean floor and collect shellfish, octopus, and urchins that they sell. This ancient women's tradition is about to die. Barbara Hammer dives with...

In Do You Believe in Water?, conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner employs minimalist props and scenarios to stage an oblique psychological drama. In a nearly bare loft space, Weiner's performers cluster around an octagonal pink table, enacting a series of what seem to be choreographed exercises or...

Writes Alice Weiner: "Done To (sometimes called It Is, Done To) consists of simple camera frames which are silent and/or unconnected to a complex soundtrack running parellel to the images. There are brief instances where image and sound meet; however, the majority of the images are overtaken by...

In this early conceptual experiment by General Idea, the artists manipulate reflecting surfaces to generate optical "feedback." Two mirrors are positioned to face one another over the edge of a lake. The mirrors are gradually tilted as the camera zooms in and out, revealing fragments of faces and...

"A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up, to enduring friendship. Starring Terry Sendgraff on trapeze." — Barbara Hammer "The poetry of Barbara's images carries us through the duration of a...

In her premiere video project, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle joins with Gregory Shephard to create a voyeuristic tour de force. Armed with camcorders, Calle and her collaborator/partner Shephard head West in his Cadillac convertible to produce and document a real-life narrative of their...

In Downstairs #1 and Downstairs #2, Hubbard stacks everyday objects in front of a cloth backdrop in his Brooklyn studio. These rickety towers, composed of sawhorses, a glowing fluorescent light, a red plastic gas can, a yellow motor-oil bottle, rope, and other pedestrian objects, teeter on the...

In Downstairs #1 and Downstairs #2, Hubbard stacks everyday objects in front of a cloth backdrop in his Brooklyn studio. These rickety towers, composed of sawhorses, a glowing fluorescent light, a red plastic gas can, a yellow motor-oil bottle, rope, and other pedestrian objects, teeter on the...

Almy's concern with technology as a communicative tool continues in Drake's Equation, which refers to a scientific formula used to measure the possibility of other life in the universe. Each element of the equation "measures a stage in the evolution of the stars, the planets, life...

"A 70-year-old lesbian feminist, seeing little change in the society after years of work, sends out her 40-year-old self on a journey taking her around the perimeters of the San Francisco Bay. During her quest she encounters aspects of her personality: the guardian angel who has all that she...

As they should, The Residents bring a new brand of "character" to their composition which wonders why the world worries about peace when what we need is war. Appearing on screen and adding a recorded vocal element is one of the Residents, floating in a world of empty landscapes and barren...

"A popular lesbian 'commercial,' 110 images of sensual touching montages in A, B, C, D rolls of 'kinaesthetic' editing." — Barbara Hammer "Hammer's films of the '70's are the first made by an openly lesbian American filmmaker to explore lesbian identity, desire and sexuality though avant-garde...