This delirious montage of appropriated and computer-generated elements merges perennial Paper Rad themes such as Gumby and the 8-bit computer aesthetic with a keen, critical take on contemporary culture. This self-described "mix tape" — a term that refers here both to the group's montage strategy...

P.opular S.ky (section ish) submerges characters from other sections of Any Ever into an extreme poetic state where their creative limits bloom, but perhaps only on an illusory level. As the section "ish" (vs. section "a") to the works above, the movie's threads appear to be the culmination of...

Writes Yonemoto: "From the great Irish potato famine to Van Gogh's dark painting, the potato has represented misery. Why should a life of living from the land be one of misery? The prevalent documentary content of 'marginalized peasant misery' will be the central image under scrutiny. Does a...

This lyrical meditation on the cultures of the African diaspora is a richly visualized collage of sounds and images derived from African cosmology, tracing the long historical struggle to define a trans-cultural African race.

Paradigm Shift was created as part of "TRANS-VOICES", an...

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their experience...

Magnetic performances by Karole Armitage, Michael Clark and Philippe Découflé are the focus of this French production, an intricate and quintessential Atlas pastiche of provocative dance, new music, pop design and costuming, narrative, documentary, and media references. Armitage's eclectic, often...

Baldino continues to examine the quirky fringes of mathematics and advanced science, a territory she has explored before in videos on topics such as quantum physics, symmetry, and nanotechnology. With ParaUniVersesVersesVerses, she takes on the notion of parallel worlds, employing ingenious video...

"A silent film that investigates the nature of spectator perception by tourists and travelers. What do people see when they travel and isn’t it as much about moving forward as moving back? The Bateau Mouche tourist boats circle the Seine in Paris literally becoming the emblem of the voyager who...

Three people play a game in an urban garden, tossing a small sack back and forth. The player who drops it becomes "odd man out" or the designated victim. The game now becomes one of dominance and submission. The elegant surroundings contrast with the base series of humiliations he is made to...

Participation represents the Vasulka's experience of the New York downtown scene in the late 1960s and early '70s. In this fascinating portrait of wildly creative people, places and times, the artists use the early Portapak video system to document, among others, Don Cherry performing in...

"Passage to the North revolves around a reverse Ibsen dialogue (Ibsen's people would have longed for the south) about the necessity of the various characters-including two hard-faced young women in black leather coats and a soft man-going to the north. Domestic scenes of inquisition and conflict...

Path of Totality documents the events leading up to the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse in St. Joseph, MO (one of the prime locations within the path of the shadow as well as the hometown of the artist). Featuring a colorful array of eclipse-chasers, middle-Americans, and commercial...

Throughout the early 1970s, Ryan used video to explore the dynamics of human interaction in threes, defining "triadic behavior" as that which has the ability to "stabilize long-term relationships between three people." Ritual of Triadic Relationships includes exercises in which participants use...

Pause brings together Cokes' inquiries into issues of cultural identity and the codes of pop music. Exploring the formal features of contemporary electronic music in relation to African Diaspora cultural forms, and employing a soundtrack appropriated from a popular, Internet-disseminated musical...

This collection of short phrases balances along a line of tension and release -- and as the title states, this is a dance. Using the dynamic duo of Joseph Copley and Margaret Cromwell, the video explores the anxiety between male and female, and the eager dominance of body over mind. - John Sanborn

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended video series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their...

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended video series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their...

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their experience...

First presented at The Mission for Temporal Art (Marshall, North Carolina), this video and sound piece creates an electric landscape that flickers between decay and illumination. Part of a series of videos composed with LoVid's handmade analog synthesizer, Pele's Umbilicus creates a hypnotic...

"PERFECT FILM presents some out-takes of history, in this instance of the assassination of Malcolm X. This is a record of events literally preserved as found from the cutting room floor. Carelessly strung on a reel, I bought it for $5 on Canal Street.

Malcolm X was murdered by Elijah...

Produced to coincide with the 1984 Presidential Campaign, Perfect Leader is a cautionary tale that brings to life a prototypical politician, as packaged by Madison Avenue. With a driving soundtrack and bold visuals, Almy satirically presents this dynamic simulation of media politics as a...

This anthology presents a historical survey of Abramovic and Ulay's individual and collaborative performance pieces. The works span the years 1975 to 1980, from the artists' early body-based performances and actions through their rigorous Relation Work pieces.

Program 1. Four...

Baldino writes: "A friend of mine rented a home in rural Connecticut for the weekends. Eugene O'Neill once lived there, but in the original part of the house... It has been on the market for a long time but still does not sell. There is something about the house... the way it was, the way it is...

The remarkable landscape of the Swiss Alps inflects Thornton's musings on the sublime, as it may be pursued in nature and photography.

A home-movie paean to the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom plumbs the depths of boudoir small talk. In the first part, a newly-acquainted odd couple discuss desire—and lack thereof—over a bag of potato chips. In the second part, a recumbent woman describes her partner and herself as...

In the ongoing project Photography is Easy, Thornton continues her investigation of the production of meaning through media such as photography, film and video. Thornton and a companion are seen hiking through a desert, photographing and recording the journey. Shots of desert landscapes are...

This is one of several exercises that explore the notion of extreme concentration. Blindfolded, Acconci attempts to intuite the position of another person's hands over his body.

In this visual evocation of sex and sexuality, a man and woman stage an elaborately choreographed courtship ritual, edited with Rist's usual attention to the syntax of mass media. As a driving bass sample plays, a surveillance camera makes low-flying journeys across the bodies of the actors,...

Writes Sanborn: "If you took the musical transformation of John Cage, the radical thinking of Marcel Duchamp, and the media anarchy of Nam June Paik, and put them in a blender... the result would be PICO (Performance Indeterminate Cage Opera). PICO is a video memoir celebrating the lineage of...

In his works from the late 1970s, Hill continues to construct a dialogue of sound and image, devising analogies between linguistics and electronic phenomena. Hill writes that Picture Story is "structured upon a hierarchical ladder of meaning, starting with the mechanistic and ending with a vision...

Produced for public television broadcast in Ontario, Pilot takes the form of a prime-time newsmagazine, with General Idea as the subject. As hosts, AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal describe their collective transformation from young strivers to "famous, glamorous artists," and...

"Pine Barrens is concerned with evoking through film a barren wilderness in south-central New Jersey. The camera is always in motion — tracking, pivoting, and walking through the landscape. Though they are never seen in the film, the voices of the local people, the 'Pineys,' are heard relating...

Pinea Silva: Lost Meanings of the Christmas Tree, a performance-lecture by Carolee Schneemann, was first presented on December 15, 2011 as part of the 40th Anniversary Benefit at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). The live recording, which was edited by Schneemann at EAI, represents an audio-visual...

An epic experimental film, Pinochet Porn, embodies – though a dizzying array of stories and narrative methods – the multifaceted work of artist Ellen Cantor. Using her 2004 series of eighty-two drawings, Circus Lives from Hell, as an unconventional “script,” Cantor worked on Pinochet Porn, her...

Nominally organized around the theme of cable television, Paper Rad's PjVidz #1: Color Vision is a psychedelic variety show in which snippets of off-air footage alternate with original animations and music. Music videos, cartoons, and Gumby and Pokey all make appearances in a tape that...

Traveling mattes of the artist's torso, limbs, and extremities in Puget Sound, Yosemite and the Yucatan. Her attempt to "touch" nature is removed and blocked between figure and ground setups by the optical printer's flatness of planes. As the figure and ground are presented as two planar...

Writes Jenkins: "This video takes the 'Planet X' myth and interfaces it with the Katrina tragedy in New Orleans, LA, based upon their similar natural disaster principles. With a proclamation of prophecy spoken by avant garde jazz musician, Sun Ra, predicting a coming disaster to African-Americans."

In this harrowing performance, Ramos and another man (the artist Lowell Darling) are blindfolded, their hands and feet bound, and sealed into body-sized plastic bags. Over the course of twenty minutes, the men struggle to escape from the clear plastic bags. The real-time performance creates a...

"Plowmans Lunch is called a documentary because its intent was to explore actual occurrence, be it the building of the work, or what befalls the players. It still uses the structure of an open form although the characters are more developed: they have 'names' and some of the scenes were truly...

Writes Kuchar: "In this short tape (part of a series about visiting nice homes when the occupants are out of town) I'm invited by a young man who waters their plants to hose down with him amid the bric-a-brac and sensuous topography of Marin County, California. Darkness settles on objects d'art as w...

Point Of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image is a DVD series that features eleven leading artists from different generations and cultural perspectives, who are among the most important artists working in film, video, and digital imagery today: Francis Alys , David Claerbout, Douglas Gordon,...

This fascinating anthology, updated to include ads from the 2020 presidential campaign, documents the selling of the American presidency since the 1950s. Surveying the American televisual campaign process from Eisenhower to the Biden and Trump campaigns, the artists trace the history of the TV...

"Hiking in Point Reyes National Seashore I came upon a vernal pool with an intriguing and mysterious underwater world. I optically printed swimming underwater to slow the movement to a meditative rhythm. I hoped that the appreciation of the clarity and beauty of water would lead us to better...

One of Cunningham's nature studies, Pond Way evokes the trickling effect of water, as dancers move in wave-like motions across the stage, timing their movements so that one begins just after another. The movement was inspired by Cunningham's childhood game of skimming stones across a pond....

"Pools is a pictorially and technically impressive sampling of spectacular swimming pools at W. R. Hearst's San Simeon and manages to validate itself from within, or at least within its own frame of identification." — Richard T. Jameson "In co-making Pools with Barbara Klutinis I wanted to...

Oursler's explorations of the fusion of art and music, which began in the 1970s with his "art band" The Poetics (created with Mike Kelley and John Miller), have led to numerous collaborations with acclaimed rock musicians and sound artists. Pop is a video portrait of the musician Beck. Here Beck...

In the dynamic Pop-Pop Video tapes, Birnbaum appropriates standard television genres — the soap opera, sports event, action drama — to deconstruct the idiomatic meaning of TV's structural codes and conventions, such as the intercut and reverse shot.

General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed...

"A 10-minute narrative video made at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Portal Excursion stars the hapless 'Mike,' Smith's eponymous performance persona whose high hopes and dubious achievements have complicated the story of the white American male since the late 1970s. In Portal,...

Davidovich produced The Live! Show on Manhattan Cable Television's leased access Channel J from 1979 to 1984. The program featured performances by and interviews with art world personalities, live phone-ins and a home-shopping segment. Davidovich hosted the show in the guise of his character "Dr....

Precarious is an edited document of Schneemann's multi-channel DVD projection installation with motorized mirror system, commissioned by the Tate Liverpool's 2009 Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival. The document compresses the mirrored video projections of dancing in captivity: fleeting...

This video documents one of RSG's self-playing video game consoles, hacked to exploit existing bugs and glitches in the code. In this case, a commercial skateboarding game provides the source. As hard rock, punk, and rap play in the background, the skater protagonist twitches and flails,...

Michael Snow is considered one of Canada's most important living artists. A prolific painter, photographer, sculptor, jazz musician, and filmmaker, Snow's art explores the possibilities inherent in different mediums and practices. He has received many international awards, and his work is shown...

In his works from the late 1970s, Hill continues to construct a dialogue of sound and image, devising analogies between linguistics and electronic phenomena. Primary is a formal study of the primary colors red, green and blue, in which we see Hill's lips repeating the names of the colors as...

Funded by The Heinz Endowment for the Art's Creative Heights residency program, Problem Solvers is Paper Rad's ideal Saturday morning cartoon. The episode adheres to the parameters of a children's TV program—in structure (half-hour format with space for commercial breaks), method (an "economic...

Automation House

This tape is an exercise in spatial perception, using mirror reflections of people and their movements.

Producer: Carlotta Schoolman

Clockshower

In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and...

Conical Intersect

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.

Camera: Bruno Dewitt, Gordon Matta-Clark.

...

Splitting

This film documents the major building cut made by Matta-Clark in a house on Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey.

Bingo/Ninths

In August 1974, Matta-Clark made a cut in a house in Niagara Falls, New York. The artist obtained permission to divide the exterior facade into...

Fire Child

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.

Fresh Kill

This film records the complete process of the...

Tree Dance

For the exhibition Twenty-Six by Twenty Six at the Vassar College of Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, Matta-Clark created a performance inspired by spring fertility rituals. He performed in a structure made of ladders, ropes and other materials, which he built at the top of a...

Combining artfully designed sets and digital processing, Santos recreates the historic Apollo lunar landing for this essayistic video, which uses simulation to interrogate representation. Relating a long-circulated rumor that the landing was actually faked in a NASA film studio — an opinion...

In this new video work, Rosler presents a short but incisive statement. A mechanical toy figure dressed as an American soldier plays "God Bless America" on a trumpet. The camera pans down, revealing that the toy's camouflage-clad trouser leg has been rolled up to uncover a mechanism that looks...

A documentation of a live performance at New York University, Pryings is a graphic exploration of the physical and psychological dynamics of male/female interaction, a study in control, violation and resistance. The camera focuses tightly on Kathy Dillon's face, as Acconci tries to pry open her...

"The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers coming together through the powers of film." — Barbara Hammer

In this documentation of a performance at New York University, an overhead camera circles above Acconci and Kathy Dillon. In a dark auditorium, Acconci walks in a circle around Dillon, while she moves in the center. Staring at each other, they try to maintain eye contact while following the...

Pulling Up Roots is the emotional journey of a woman who is navigating the tenuous strain between the past and the future. Filmed in an abandoned housing project in Western Ireland, she uproots exotic plants and flowers, as one might collect stories and memories one can't understand. Condit's...

In this ironically ambivalent period piece, Linzy plays with double entendre and linguistic anachronism as a raunchy blues song by Bernice Edwards plays on the soundtrack. Linzy, decked out like a gangster's moll, makes a confession to his lover: "I am not gay. I've realized my gayness must come...

Jacobs writes: "1903 hand/horse drawn street carts on New York's Lower East Side. Tiny movements evolve in place, caught between 2-D and 3-D."

Put Blood in the Music is a unique documentary on the downtown New York music scene. In a collage of music, performance and commentary, Atlas captures the energy and pluralism that characterize this urban milieu. Reflecting the eclecticism of his subject, Atlas re-structures the conventional...