In Face of the Earth, Acconci's face becomes a metaphorical theater for a narrative drama of the mythic American landscape. Eyes closed, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, the camera looking up from his chin, he inhabits a dreamlike, intensely theatrical space. Alternately humming...

In this exercise in nonverbal communication, Acconci explores facial expressions, and their psychological resonance, as a mode of performance narrative.

In Facing a Family, a family is observed watching television. The viewer becomes the object of the family's gaze, as much as the family is the object of the viewer's gaze. Writes Roswitha Mueller, "The Electronic and the Real gazes cross without interacting."

Facing a Family was originally...

In FADE TO BLACK, Cokes and Trammel assemble a chronology of stereotyped cinematic representatives of African-Americans and a series of subjective narratives of racism in everyday social exchanges, constructing what he terms the "details of an ideology," both on and off the screen. Writes Cokes:...

Fall NYC compiles glimpses of an autumnal New York City. Writes artist Whitney Claflin: “In Maggie’s videos, documentary and fantasy play b2b sets—the mundane is transformed into the magical almost immediately, only to have the next frame bring an action right back into its earthly setting. In Fall ...

Produced by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Smith's short video parodies the sort of cultural and educational programming interlude that one might see on European or American public television. Famous Quotes From Art History presents the bon mots of Henri Matisse as drolly recited, in French, by...

Fancy Pantz is a mock prime-time newsmagazine report on a fictitious street-performance troupe of the same name. Described by one member as "experimental modern dance of the ages...definitely," Fancy Pantz collectively dazzle the city of New York with spandex costumes and spontaneous outdoor...

Fantastic Prayers, produced by the Dia Center for the Arts, premiered as both a live performance and a project for the World Wide Web. Writer Constance DeJong, artist Tony Oursler, and musician/composer Stephen Vitiello collaborated to create a haunting urban landscape that is inscribed with...

Asher writes: "Far From the Madding Crowd concerns the relationship between the I and the Eye; in other words, an autonomous self performing a repetitive action while persons of another dimension go about their everyday or workday lives. These two universes are parallel, yet distinctly separate,...

Hodel continues her ongoing series of video explorations into notions of beauty, gender, and desire. FAT attacks the issue of weight obsession by taking it to absurdist extremes: Hodel applies massive quantities of lard to her own seated, naked body, sculpting a grotesquely beautiful monument to...

Appropriating a dated exercise video hosted by actress Angela Lansbury, Feeling Free presents a woman, played by Moulton, who attempts to follow the televised workout in her living room even as elements of her home décor begin to appear onscreen. Deriving its title from an inspirational segment...

Donegan's vertiginous File looks to consumer detritus for inspiration, as well as Rem Koolhaas' notion of the "junkspace" of modern cities. Scraps of color and pattern slide across the screen in a stop and start progression that frustrates all sense of spatiality and depth. David Schafer's...

In Filler, Acconci lies on the floor, facing the camera, his head and upper body hidden inside a large cardboard box. At regular intervals throughout the duration of the tape, he coughs repeatedly. The focus of this minimalist work becomes the rasping sounds of the cough, and the near-silences...

A view of a brick wall: the artist enters and walks from one side to the other, back and forth, row after row.

These two historical collaborations between Nam June Paik and Yalkut, originally documented on 16mm film and now available on video, reveal some of Paik's earliest experiments with television and electronic imagery.

In Missa of Zen, a TV screen, filmed from an extremely oblique angle, appears...

Finally is Baldino's personal video chronicle of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009. Visiting Washington as an ordinary citizen, Baldino ambitiously resolves to attend both the swearing-in ceremony on the National Mall and the parade in front of the White House. The...

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 tapes respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s, more than a decade into the AIDS crisis.

In finally destroy us, Kalin...

In 1971 Matta-Clark produced works for the exhibition Brooklyn Bridge Event. This film records his process of making a sculpture - a small wall made of rubbish, waste paper and tin cans collected from the area.

Recreated images of the conquest of the Americas serve as the backdrop for this stinging indictment of European annexation.

Flaubert Dreams of Travel..., focuses on images of death and transcendence as suggested by the writings of Gustave Flaubert. The film was made in conjunction with the Wooster Group's theater production Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Anthony, a re-invention of Flaubert's epic "closet drama"...

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

Writes Mark McElhatten: "The cast is in flux — the animate and the inanimate get double billed with that dynamic duo — Push and Pull. If matter has consciousness and has renounced...

Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (1970-2005) is a project by Robert Smithson that was realized posthumously. Produced by Minetta Brook in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, Floating Island features a barge landscaped with earth, trees, shrubs and rocks: a...

The artist, covered in flour, tries to blow the flour off his skin.

"Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, Flushing is a tour of a mall that doesn't live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailing." Cheryl Donegan

On March 24, 1979, The Kitchen hosted a concert of reconstructed historical Fluxus performances. Over forty short pieces by thirty artists and composers were performed (with occasional assistance from the audience) and are included in this documentation. Among the pieces featured were...

Fluxus' interdisciplinary aesthetic brings together influences as diverse as Zen, science, and daily life and puts them to poetic use. Initially received as little more than an international network of pranksters, the playful artists of Fluxus were, and remain, a network of radical visionaries...

In this exercise in the act of viewing and being viewed, Acconci explores intuitive perception through intense concentration. Blindfolded, he stands against a wall, his nude back to the camera. The camera focuses on his neck; the cameraman says, "I'm staring at the back of your neck from straight...

A corollary to Price's written piece "Sports," Folk Music and Documentary takes on questions of political speech and political image in a time when terms like "globalization" or even "politics" itself are so emptied out as to be meaningless in everyday usage. The 1990s were years of newfound...

This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists' cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing...

'Writes Alice Weiner: For Example Decorated is an art world talk show between personalities Britta Le Va, Peter Gordon and James Sarkis. The show begins with Le Va, seated at a table, introducing the show (i.e. reciting the credits). Then she introduces herself, soviet style as in Do You Believe...

The artists describe this tape, which merges performance and animation with fantastical narrative, as "Forcefield in its darkly-shrouded assassin period." Shown in conjunction with live music performances during Forcefield's 2001 tour, Tunnel Vision includes the group's first animation...

Forcefield Video Collection features the group's earliest videos. These loosely-wrought narrative vignettes combine Forcefield's shrouded figures, handmade props, and a range of evocative backdrops, brought together by hyperkinetic editing, video effects, and vivid electronic soundtracks. Video...

Writes Pearlstein: "The premise of Forsaken is a hierarchy that undergoes a radical shift. One character holds the position of power, which the others, his 'entourage,' appear to support. His position alludes to that of celebrity, politician, teacher, director or boss. The first three scenes...

Writes Kobland, "Foto-Roman is a layering of voyeuristic atmospheres; a Borgesian enigma of 'Who dreams and who is dreamt.' A prologue to a possible 'thriller,' or maybe its synopsis." Amy Taubin, writing in The Village Voice, states, "Foto-Roman [is] as close as moving pictures have ever come to...

Contemporaneous to his best-known video works, these Super-8mm films represent Baldessari's conceptual engagement with motion picture film, pointing to the technical strengths and weaknesses of the celluloid medium relative to video, such as the superior reproduction of color, on one hand, and...

Sherman may best be known for his solo Spectacle performances, which usually took the form of quick-paced interactions with everyday objects over a table top. He created and performed eighteen Spectacles in total, twelve of which he performed solo, and six with groups of collaborators. A...

In Fractions I, four video monitors share the screen space with the dancers. Throughout the performance, these monitors show close-ups of the performers in the dance space, as well as images of those moving outside of the space. The images on the monitors share the same "tense" as the dancers who...

"Fragments of a Revolution? What revolution? The French Revolution? The Russian revolution? The modernist revolution? The sexual, feminist, racial, gay revolutions? Once there was a time when the world was up for grabs, when keys seemed to open doors rather than lock them, when experimental...

This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneeman and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany.

Atlas' exuberantly hip homage to a specific time and place — New York, August 1983 — is a dance "home movie," a quasi-documentary that follows choreographer Karole Armitage and her dancers along the boardwalk of Coney Island and through the streets of Times Square. Atlas' energetic hand-held...

"From Romance to Ritual invokes and inverts the title of the 1920 book by Jessie L. Weston, as it like the book, draws connections between pagan history and ritual and mythology. "This film is formed around several scenes of women telling stories to the camera of their sexual history and...

The archivist attempts to put together the "lost years" of Eleanor Antinova, the once celebrated black ballerina of Diaghlev's Ballet Russe, when she returned to her native America to eke out a meager living in vaudeville and early movies. Her career in America is documented through narrative and...

A drama of relations between strangers. Vantage point is everything.

This historical Acconci videotape, produced by Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy in 1973, is being made available for the first time in decades through EAI's Video Preservation Program. Writes Acconci: "I walk in a circle around the camera: sometimes I'm on screen, sometimes I'm off, sometimes I...

In his works from the late 1970s, Hill continues to construct a dialogue of sound and image, devising analogies between linguistics and electronic phenomena. In Full Circle, the screen is divided into three sections: a close-up of hands bending a metal rod into a circle; a full-image view of this...