In her very first moving image work, Cantor already displays the masterly use of appropriated footage for which she would become known, inserting explicit scenes from the classic porn film Behind the Green Door (1972) into key scenes of lovemaking from Louis Malle's 1959 succès de scandale The...

Madeline Quinn, Caroline Golum, and Andrew Lampert chat about the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Madeline takes center stage as she recounts her rebellious youth while Lampert—a disembodied voice supposedly manning what sounds like a film camera, though the footage has been digitally...

MAJORCA-fantasia is a densely textured collage of often discordant, often beautiful visual and aural elements. To an exquisite musical composition by Chopin, as interpreted by Charlie Morrow, Paik and Garrin create a surreal pastiche of fragmented, manipulated elements: The late Joseph Beuys howls i...

Mao Meets Muddy documents a trip Ramos made to Beijing to accompany his good friend, painter Frederick J. Brown, for a retrospective of Brown’s work at the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square in 1988. It was the first solo exhibition in China of a Western artist, and Ramos sets the stage...

Notions of urbanism, speed, and cinema in the digital age, drawn from Paul Virilio's The Overexposed City, are investigated in the dark, noirish cityscapes of Alphaville and Bladerunner, and the year-to-year mutations of corporate architecture.

In elegiac work, Kubota explores the relationship between two of the most influential figures in 20th century art and music. The core images are Kubota's own photographs of the famous 1968 chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, in which the board, wired for sound, functioned as a...

Writes Cokes, "The video animation is based on the closing section of Cokes' and Perchuk's second collaborative presentation, 'Margins and Bubbles,' at 'Our Literal Speed 2' at the University of Chicago in May 2009. Visually, it features text excerpts from an interview between artist Tino Sehgal...

The artist writes that this work, "a response to Pee Wee's Playhouse, focuses on the girl child, grappling with the fluidity of gender roles as she role-plays with her toys."

From behind a pyramid of TV monitors, perhaps calling to mind the TVs stacked for destruction in Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1975), Jenkins slowly rises, garbed in protective eye goggles and an American flag scarf. He begins to intone a haunting refrain: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to...

In Max Payne Cheats Only, JODI presents a series of video game "cheats": alterations to the behavior of a video game that are often built in by the original programmers to help players who have reached an impasse. Here the artists have compiled cheats from the ultra-violent New York vigilante...

Maya Deren's Sink explores Deren's concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her Los Angeles and New York homes. The project began after Hammer discovered a sink formerly owned by Deren at Anthology Film Archives and embarked on an homage to the "Mother of American...

Writes Schneemann: "Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision,...

Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collision of two of America's most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco's Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the "ultimate media...

“Melange is a videodance by Merce Cunningham and filmmaker Charles Atlas, created over September 30 - October 2, 1999 during the filming of Atlas’ documentary Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance. “The videodance comprises a series of excerpts that alternate between the austere/minimal...

Melody Set Me Free is an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative about contestants in an American Idol-style talent show competition and their quest for fame and stardom. Writes Linzy, "Vying to win a recording contest, they must take a Whitney Houston song and make it their own." The...

Melter finds Murata applying his deft touch with image-making software to questions of fluidity. Exploring formal tropes of melting, rippling, and bubbling, Murata's abstract experiment in hypnotic perception is at once organic and totally digital.

Writes Shimizu: "I had just taken my last East Coast tour with Cass McCombs in which our first stop was the Rainbow Gathering in Virginia. This was also during my second week starting as the Technical Assistant at EAI. At the Rainbow Gathering, my band mates and I wandered around groups of people...

The rituals and philosophies of indigenous non-Western cultures recur throughout Viola's work. In 1976, he travelled to the Solomon Islands with portable color video equipment, which was then a new technology. The first of two "visionary documentaries" produced during his two-month stay, Memories...

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers is a collection of works that address the desire to transcend the perceptual and cognitive structures of experience. Viola describes The Wheel of Becoming as concerning "the notion of the parallel nature of reality, that is, simultaneous events separated in...

A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation, in which women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. Menses combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy and drama.

"Television obscures art in life, and life in art. Can we reverse time?" In Merce by Merce by Paik, a two-part tribute to avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham and 20th-century master Marcel Duchamp, Paik and his collaborators question art, life and time through video. Paik's electronic...

Produced at the seminal Florence-based video art studio Art/Tapes/22, Merlo is an early piece in which Jonas performs alone in several dramatic outdoor locations: a rocky gorge, a wind-tossed river, a balcony looking out over a valley. Cloaked in a dark, hooded robe, Jonas employs a long paper...

In this deadpan conceptual anecdote, Arcangel delivers exactly what his title promises. In doing so, he directs us to the ceaseless and apparently effortless movement of digital information; in this case, a translation of data from the private to the public, from audio to video, and from a...

Baldino renders the progression of a migraine headache as fluttering, glowing shapes, which swiftly overtake the field of vision with a brilliant insistence before finally passing. The work is Baldino's visual articulation of a subjective physical phenomenon, elevated by her precise, almost...

Mike's World Orientation Video was created as an introduction to the retrospective exhibition Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators), which opened at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas in 2007 and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in...

Hill's early formalist works explore the manipulation of electronic color and image density. Of these works, Hill has written that "much of the subject matter and the expressionistic method of working underline and in some sense parody the traditional medium of painting." In the silent Mirror...

Sanborn writes: "While my work is usually known for its dark humor and flights of fancy, the events of 2001 forced me to be introspective and focus on areas of my life I had literally taken for granted. I struggled with the death of my father, and that confrontation forced me to face the facts of...

Mobile Homestead is a public artwork by Mike Kelley consisting of a full-scale replica of his childhood home in the Detroit suburb of Westland, built upon a complex of secret subterranean tunnels and rooms. Located on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) in Downtown...

Collaborating with writer Constance DeJong, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and performance artist Karen Finley, Oursler creates a psychedelic trilogy of works exploring the theme of the destruction of the human body through violent projection, psychological as well as electronic. These sequences, in...

In these five "modern narratives" of desire in contemporary consumer culture, Almy constructs an ironic social critique. Each segment focuses on a single concept that is visualized with a simple formal device. With an economy of visual and verbal means, Almy merges voiceovers and images to...

Featuring Super 8 film footage and Instamatic slide images of artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt as they visited California's Mono Lake in July of 1968, this piece was edited by Holt in 2004. Mono Lake candidly captures the young artists as they explore the haunting landscape...

Takeshi Murata continues to push the boundaries of digitally manipulated psychedelia. In Monster Movie Murata employs an exacting frame-by-frame technique to turn a bit of B-movie footage (from the 1981 film Caveman) into a seething, fragmented morass of color and shape that decomposes and...

In Moonlighting NYC 2013 Bell-Smith creates an homage to the 1980s television show Moonlighting, which starred the young Bruce Willis and Cybil Shephard. Re-making the title sequence of the popular TV series through the addition of his own structure and animation, the artist interrogates what he...

Writes Kobland, "MOSCOW X is part personal diary and part city symphony. Photographed in the fall of 1990, it is essentially a meander through Moscow on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire. A rumination on the terrible uncertainty inherent in societal change, read on the face of a city...

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

This work is a demonstration of one of Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern performances, which are created with a hand-manipulated projector and use neither film nor video. Highly...

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 Mouthpiece, the gyrations of an electronic red mouth on a blue background affect the rolling of the image.

In Movie Map, Lord interweaves classic chase scenes from two San Francisco films, Bullitt and Hitchcock's Vertigo. As he "maps" the city through cinema, juxtaposing the appropriated images of Steve McQueen and James Stewart driving through San Francisco with his own footage of neighborhood movie...

"A curiosity, Movie Show looks backward to the era of structural films, particularly Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. The clip of film used in this performance is taken from my Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, the work with which I closed out my interest in combinatorial...

Moving, an early tape in Downey's Trans Americas series, is a diaristic "road video," a personal Portapak journey through North and South America. Travelling from Cambridge to the tip of Chile, Downey first drove across the country to California with artists Willoughby Sharp and Frank Gillette,...

Mrs. Peanut Visits New York is a video portrait of the legendary late performance artist, fashion designer, and nightlife icon Leigh Bowery. Atlas' camera follows Bowery as he flamboyantly strolls through Manhattan's Meatpacking District, outrageously costumed in a self-made reinterpretation of...

Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television. In...

Cheryl Donegan writes: "I had daydream that the Smiths asked me to make a video for their new single. It is actually a case of the present facilitating the past, or rather the recent past, or maybe a past that is out of reach...When I was a kid in my 20's and was totally obsessed with the Smiths,...

"This video documentary centers on the questions of civil liberties and cultural differences in a society beginning to open as one woman searches for her own ethnic roots, identity and family history in Ukraine. Issues of human rights, anti-Semitism, homophobia, feminism and a divided and...

In this feature-length silent film, Acconci uses hand-written title cards to present an "interior monologue" about speaking, language, and silence. The written text alternates with images of Acconci, alone in the interior of an urban loft or on a rooftop, with the skyline of downtown New York as...

For this performative/lecture, Schneemann invited Teija Lammi, museum librarian at the Porin Taidemuseo in Pori, Finland, to be an improvisatory participant. Together Schneemann and Lammi physically respond to images of the artist's cats. Schneemann relates her own research into historic...