This highly stylized and deftly edited provocation features a cast of performers, diverse in national origin, who recite a litany of statements meant to challenge viewers' secure notions of national identity. Kalin asserts that bodies are very real battlegrounds, territories that are contested...
As densely populated as it is, there are many incursions of nature into the urban bustle of Los Angeles: overgrown yards, vine-blanketed retaining walls, slivers of forest between neighborhoods. In Nature Demo, Dodge and Kahn explore the flora and fauna of the Los Angeles River, which flows in a...
A radio play that aired on WBAI in New York in 1978, Need to Know is a sound structure. With allusions to Sam Cooke and the socio-political upheaval of the era, this multi-voiced "Experimental Theatre of the Air" is alternately playful and, as promised by its title, urgently imperative.
Neptune's Choice is Santos' self-described "letter to Amsterdam." With lush images, elliptical text and a haunting sound collage, this poetic work explores the artist's impressions of the cosmopolitan city. Defining Amsterdam through its historical and contemporary relation to water, Santos...
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.
This work is derived from one of Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern performances, which are created with a hand-manipulated projector and use neither film nor video. Highly stroboscopic...
With its reference to television commercials and its minimalist theatricality, New Man continues Pearlstein's wry commentary on gender and the media. Here five shirtless men defiantly face the camera, against an austere white backdrop. A disembodied voice counts down to zero, at which point the...
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.
In New York Ghetto Fish Market 1903, Jacobs uses archival film footage of New York's Lower East Side as his source material. The vintage film, shot by Thomas Edison in 1903,...
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.
In this unique document, Jacobs demonstrates one of his live, multi-projection "Nervous System" film performances in real time. (The Nervous System performances feature a unique...Excerpted from Price's 2001 video-lecture "New York Woman," which explored the ways in which music production techniques change over time, NJS Map uses animated diagrams to lay out the historical development of one period in pop music, the briefly-lived but influential genre often called "New...
In the three-part series Nine Years Later, Beck revisits video performances he created nearly a decade earlier to music by the British pop band The Smiths. Beck betrays the apparent effortlessness of the original clips by editing them alongside the numerous rehearsals, variously self-conscious...
In her first feature, after decades as a pioneer of lesbian cinema, Barbara Hammer weaves striking images of four contemporary gay and lesbian couples with footage of an unearthed, forbidden, and invisible history, searching eroded emulsions and images for lost vestiges of queer culture....
"No Europe is an ironic white American recasting of Native American culture in precolonial history, told as a dream." —Tony Conrad
Rhythmically departed from Murata's usual assertive cadence, No Match employs footage from the 1980's game show, Classic Match. The seamless loop of an unyielding contestant's ineptness solidifies as an almost cruel experiment, as the stretched time limit imprisons him in a fruitless guessing...
Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates a witty and stunning film about how women view their sexuality versus the way male images of women and sex are perceived. The impact of technology on sexuality and emotion and the sensual self is explored through computer language juxtaposed...
Here LoVid composes a strobing synesthetic landscape of image and sound that is equal parts glitchy animation and input from an analog synthesizer. Made at the close of their residency at the Experimental Television Center in Oswego, New York, No Sleep Till... combines semi-familiar shapes with...
Nocturne, writes Ahwesh, is "a psychological horror film built on the conflicts of a woman tortured by the ambiguity between reality and illusion, dream and desire."
Kalin's short video works, which use literary quotations as starting points, 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...
Notes from the Underground presents unyielding voyeurism on the London Underground. In Deadman Walking, a middle-aged commuter pulls a variety of bored expressions. As the sequence starts, the train is leaving Temple Station, center for the city's law practices and named for the Order of the...
In Novel City, Thornton revisits her 1983 film Adynata, which explored questions of the Other through what Thornton has termed an "Orientalist spectacle" that was "intended to bring about a critical self-response, a simultaneous attraction and repulsion that provoke an instance of cultural...
Now takes on video's claims to immediacy and authenticity, as Benglis juxtaposes live performance with her own prerecorded image. The soundtrack features phrases such as "now!" and "start recording," commands that usually ground us in the present, but here serve to deepen the confusion between...
Influenced by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn, which deals with concepts about time, Baldino set about making a video to capture the idea of "now," during an especially volatile moment in American politics. Production of this work coincided with the artist's visit to Cuba,...
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.
Jacobs writes: "The belle of the ball surrounded by suitors. A vigorous 3-D that can be seen without special spectacles and even by the one-eyed."