A Silly Symphony at 45 rpm spliced straight from life. "Hit it and quit it" -- James Brown

"This exquisite single shot is a complement to Combat Status Go. Here the viewer is positioned casually, even though every other element in the film experiences a painful precision: piano, gun, wardrobe; conversation directed at (and across the bow of) the viewer; timing, direction, gaze." —Tony...

In TeleTapes, d'Agostino continues his critique and analysis of television's influence on everyday life and culture by exploring the content and time structure of broadcast TV. Composed of three parts — TeleTricks - TV Environments; TeleGames - And Now, The News; and TelePuzzles - TV Movies —...

This dreamlike, hypnotic work is structured in four sections, each of which repeats, in various permutations, key visual and verbal systems. Part One introduces the main theme — a poetic text, music, and a set of images that relate to language play in the text. The sections Key/Code, Translations an...

Temp Stop, as the title implies, has a disjunctive quality that separates it from the other parts of Re'Search Wait'S. As if emanating from the basement of Any Ever, each scene plays like a hidden-away epilogue rendering characters comparatively surreal--in part because they are often...

Ten Packed Minutes is an eclectic audio collage of music, text, found sounds, and excerpts from the recordings of Leon Redbone, Cow Cow Davenport, Eric Dolphy, Karl Berger, and Ornette Coleman.

Ten Packed Minutes is one of a series of newly restored early conceptual audio works by Acconci....

Hammer’s 1996 documentary Tender Fictions is the second in a trilogy of autobiographical films that includes the iconic Nitrate Kisses and History Lessons. The film was chosen for the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, for which Lisanne Skyler wrote, “[Barbara Hammer’s] struggle becomes symbolic of all...

A thread illuminated with neon video static pushes its way through a white sleeve, linking one arm to another. Commenting on the linkages between technology and the body—literally sewing the two together—Tension Tape can also be seen as making a reference to theories of time 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...

Produced by De Appel, Amsterdam, while General Idea was in residence there, Test Tube was conceived as a program for television. Presented under the brand "The Color Bar Lounge," a cocktail bar in the mythical 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion, the program is a hybrid of popular television formats,...

"By accepting and playing off of the ductility inherent in the classic viewer role, That Far Away Look imposes upon the viewer’s expectations for 'reading' and understanding images. The viewer does not decide what s/he sees, and moreover submits totally to (any) conventions that are offered to...

That's Wassup is Linzy's "dance mix." Using simple animation techniques and GarageBand beats to reflect club culture rudiments, Linzy populates his music video with dancing figures and floating placards announcing "Tipsy Cups 4-Sale." States Linzy, "That [link with club culture] started for me in...

A 3-D vacation album, The Day Was a Scorcher pictures what Jacobs describes as "movie-star Flo, Nisi the thoughtful young girl, and Aza old enough to trudge with the rest of us, but still expecting to be pushed around on wheels," frolicking in a sun-drenched Rome in the 1970s. Explains Jacobs,...

Writes Baldino: "Initially inspired by the theories behind 'Fuzzy Logic,' this series reveals that opposites can be the same. Something is what it is and what it is not, simultaneously... All of the work is shot in the first take, without editing."

In these witty performance pieces, Baldino...

Writes Baldino: "Initially inspired by the theories behind 'Fuzzy Logic,' this series reveals that opposites can be the same. Something is what it is and what it is not, simultaneously... All of the work is shot in the first take, without editing."

In these witty performance pieces, the...

Writes Baldino: "Initially inspired by the theories behind 'Fuzzy Logic,' this series reveals that opposites can be the same. Something is what it is and what it is not, simultaneously... All of the work is shot in the first take, without editing."

In these witty performance pieces, Baldino...

Writes Baldino: "Initially inspired by the theories behind 'Fuzzy Logic,' this series reveals that opposites can be the same. Something is what it is and what it is not, simultaneously... All of the work is shot in the first take, without editing."

In these witty performance pieces, Baldino...

Writes Baldino: "Initially inspired by the theories behind 'Fuzzy Logic,' this series reveals that opposites can be the same. Something is what it is and what it is not, simultaneously... All of the work is shot in the first take, without editing."

In these performance pieces, Baldino...

The Amazing Bow Wow tells the tragic tale of a hermaphroditic dog, reduced to performing as a tent-show freak. Problems begin when Bow Wow's owners, small-time carnival impresarios Babu (Stanton Kaye) and Rexina (Lynda Benglis), discover that their dog can not only talk, but is also highly...

Alternating between an English lesson, in which a French-speaking man and woman translate English phrases, and short "samples" of what Acconci calls "the voice of America" — movie soundtracks, Creole singers, honky-tonk piano — The American Gift investigates the problematics of translation and...

First performed live in 1977, this the only one of Antin's live performances to be prepared for video. "Eleanor Nightingale" leaves the silken prison of her Victorian home and goes off to war. In the Crimea she engages with the political issues raised by class and sex inequities, military...

Taking up the popular 1960's movie "The Parent Trap," in which two girls at summer camp discover they are long-lost twins and set about mending their parents' marriage, Zando turns Hollywood images against themselves to investigate submerged issues of sexuality and subjectivity. Mixing scenes...

In commemoration of Damien Hirst's 1995 Turner Prize, Bag made The Artist's Mind, which takes the form of a PBS-style show chronicling a day in the life of a contemporary visual artist. In this episode, aspiring sculptor/painter "Damien Bag" demonstrates his creative process, which begins with...

This video examines the sorts of propaganda that a corporation might distribute internally to communicate an over-arching mandate or vision to its workers in order to boost morale. Bernadette Corporation slyly turns the notion inside out, yielding a document that at once subverts and expresses...

The artist's ballerina self, represented here as a "would-be ballerina from the sticks," plans to walk across the United States to "make it in the Big City." She meets a bum on a freight train and together they dream of success.

Collaging appropriated CGI-animated clips from the Taiwanese news outlet TomoNews, The Blackest Sea juxtaposes the sky and sea as primordial phenomena against the anxious, bureaucratic features of modern human life. Hundreds of fish die and float to the top of the ocean due to pollution and...

Writes Cokes: "In 1984 I conceived of the idea of producing a documentary that framed its own devices. I was interested in how a woman, specifically a Black woman, would speak in a television context." In The Book of Love, Cokes' mother recounts her life through interview, stories, and song,...

Yalkut documents the "chocolating" of Charlotte Moorman at the Clocktower in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1973. This project was based on a concept by artist Jim McWilliams, who devised other performance events for Moorman, including the Flying Cello.

This documentary is in two parts, with the second part, Coast Zone, available separately. The first part of the program features a revealing and informal discussion between Cunningham and his longtime collaborators, composer and musician John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg. Their lively...

Ahwesh subjects an apparently found pornographic film to coloring, optical printing and general fragmentation; the source material threatens to virtually collapse under the beautiful violence of her filmic treatment. What emerges is a portrait at once nostalgic and horrible: the degraded image,...

Accompanying Beloff's year-long exhibition at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn, this 128-page book traces the impact of Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park, and the activities of a little-known group—the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society—that was...

In The Days of the Commune, Beloff reimagines Bertolt Brecht's 1949 play on the rise and fall of the 1871 Paris Commune as a response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in the fall of 2011 in New York City's Zuccotti Park. Influenced by Brecht's anti-illusionist theater, which aimed...

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-from orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." —...

The Emperor Jones is a brave interpretation of Eugene O'Neill's play concerning the power structures of colonialism and slavery. With thoughtful use of the video medium, the work confronts not only the highly contentious elements of the play, but also the boundaries between theater and video...

The Eternal Frame is an examination of the role that the media plays in the creation of (post)modern historical myths. For T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, the iconic event that signified the ultimate collusion of historical spectacle and media image was the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963....

Created with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this tape marks a departure from Kuchar's diaries in its use of post-production technology, but retains their irreverent humor and improvisational feel. A camp send-up of Gothic literature and television soap opera, The Fall of the...

The Feeling of Power documents a 1989 ACT-UP protest at Trump Tower, offering a self-reflexive manifesto of video activism that brings the ‘70s "guerrilla television" movement into the age of the camcorder.

The Female Closet is an hourlong documentary that uses archival photographs, home movies, interviews, and other visual materials to explore the closeted lesbian histories of artists Alice Austen, Hannah Höch and Nicole Eisenman. Utilizing groundbreaking research, newly discovered home movies, and...

The Fragments Project is personal filmmaking at its most immediate — documents of people in the filmmaker's life. Each "fragment" demands the viewer's involvement on multiple levels. Ahwesh's project becomes a fascinating report on our times and an investigation into the uses of film.

Originally installed in a makeshift "house" painted red, white, and blue, this provocative audio piece features Acconci addressing imaginary characters — Mama, Daddy, Big Brother, Sister, and Jesus — in a singular take on the American family.

The Gangster Sister From Chicago Visits New York (A...

Created for the Long Beach Museum of Art and aired as an episode of The Live! Show, this evening-news-style "special" finds Davidovich field-reporting on the status of video art in Long Beach, California. Davidovich visits the Museum and a local shopping mall to poll strangers of all stripes and...

First screened as part of Jacobs' "Nervous System" film performance, The Georgetown Loop is based on an archival film from 1903, which Jacobs pairs with its mirror double to produce a kaleidoscopic two-screen projection. The original film depicts a journey shot from the cab of a train passing...

"In 2006 legendary composer/performer and raconteur Charlemagne Palestine appeared in Boston for the first time in over 30 years. On a stage festooned with teddy bears he told tales about Morton Feldman, imbibed cognac and simultaneously performed on two Steinway pianos. Andrew Lampert and Saul...

Made the same year as Digital Fireplace Upside Down, The Hamburger Presets also plays with the familiar visuals of advertising. Here, Bell-Smith takes a slowly rotating, panning shot of a hamburger and, through repetition, extends it to the absurd length of nearly eight minutes. Each repeated...

The Hollow Coin explores roles of authority in public space and the intersection of personal and historical narratives. The video combines documentary footage of New York City’s rapidly disappearing network of payphones with audio of a covertly recorded telephone exchange between an actor and an...

Flat discs (possibly Cracker Jack prizes) are tilted in the artist's hands, each revealing a mirrored surface and the face of a beautiful woman. In this absurd demonstration of "cinema," Baldessari reduces movie magic to its barest elements: actresses and lighting.

The artist writes: "These works form a capstone to concerns that have been in my work since I began to make video — the artist's studio as theatre, the self-conscious/self-reflexive gesture that unites performance and painting, creation unraveled. The space for painting/performance is very...

An evening of performance and music by Mike Kelley presented at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in 2009. Including: The Judson Church Horse Dance and the Horse Dance of The False Virgin, and live performances of instrumental soundtrack music from Kelley's Day is Done, composed in...

Writes Antin: "Applying hair to her face, the artist moves through a variety of bearded faces seeking the identity most appropriate to her facial structure and satisfying to her aspirations." Antin transforms herself into a man and adopts one of her recurring performance personae, "The King."

This historical compilation was produced in 1975 by The Kitchen to document and present examples of its video, music, dance and performance art programs. The resulting compendium of multidisciplinary art works supported and exhibited at the Kitchen in its early years offers a window onto the...

Arising out of a film and theatrical collaboration with the late Ron Vawter, this moving elegy to his memory employs footage of Vawter taken just before his death, as well as starkly beautiful sequences of distant human forms.

In 1976, The Kitchen in New York announced a program of rare videotapes by Marcel Duchamp. These crude, shaky documents of Duchamp's Greenwich Village neighborhood were actually an elaborate performance piece, conceived and executed by Sanborn. Participants and co-conspirators Hannah Wilke, Shigeko...

In this documentary feature, Charles Atlas examines the legend and the life of his friend and collaborator – artist, performer, fashion designer, model, and club promoter and icon Leigh Bowery. In a remarkable and brief period before his early death from AIDS-related illness in 1994, Bowery made...

The artist's Ballerina Self, now in the city, has "made it!" Dressed in a tutu, Antin regales an utterly silent gallery audience with her strategy for conquering New York, meeting George Ballanchine in Sardi's and becoming prima ballerina of the company. The climax of the routine is a...

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. In this typical episode, cablecast on April 29, 1983,...

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. In this episode, aired February 18, 1983, Davidovich's...

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. In this episode, cablecast on January 21, 1983, Davidovich's...

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. This episode, cablecast January 28, 1983, features...

This promo for Davidovich's legendary cable access program (which aired on Manhattan Cable Television from 1979 to 1984) illustrates and enumerates the show's highlights with clips and the voice-over rhetoric of a TV sales pitch, imploring viewers to "turn off commercial television and turn on The L...

The depth of sorrow, loss and redemption in Phil Kline's contribution to "A Sweeter Music" is the closest to the nerve endings that make us human of all the works. In response I included very personal images that if I lost -- would devastate me and leave me bereft of life. I ordered them so that...

Constance DeJong's writing is closely connected to performance. Since 1977 she has made oral adaptations of her experimental texts and performed them to audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe. At this event at the Kitchen, DeJong reads The Lucy Amarillo Stories, while a musician performs a...

The Making of Amarillo Ramp is Nancy Holt's final film. The piece documents Holt, Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi as they complete Robert Smithson's unfinished earthwork, Amarillo Ramp, in the months following his death in 1973. The 1973 still photography and video footage, which documents their...

In the first part of this work, Arcangel silently documents the real-time construction of his video game cartridge piece, Super Mario Clouds, in which he hacked a "Mario Brothers" cartridge, erasing everything but the blue sky and clouds. The Making of..., which Arcangel calls "a documentary on...

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the United States. WGBH commissioned six visual artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James...

This documentary is an unconventional video portrait of the Fluxus movement, an international group of artists who since the early 1960s have challenged and disrupted our ideas of what art can be. The tape was produced largely in Venice at the 1990 reunion, when many of the original Fluxus...

Collaborating with choreographer Douglas Dunn, Atlas uses anthropological text, satirical movement, and vividly colored chroma-keyed backgrounds in an episodic, often humorous look at the evolution of modern dance.

Antin employs the structure of a popular movie genre as an armature for her continuing theater of ideas in this feature-length, narrative videotape. Using hand-painted dolls, who display more than a coincidental resemblance to figures in the art world, Antin recounts the hijacking of "Nurse...

The Pink of Stealth is an interactive Web and DVD project that explores the relationship of language, color, and class. Here the vernacular of foxhunting and the color pink become spring boards for a multi-textual investigation of ideas around race, wealth, gender, culture, and sexuality. View...

Writes Sanborn, "The Planets is an epic, 77-minute video feature commissioned by the new music ensemble Relâche. The score took composer Kyle Gann twelve years to complete and became a multi-media immersion into the myths and mystery of the planets when Relâche commissioned video artist and...

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...

The Re'Search is a tween-aged microcosm of Any Ever. The movie is actual market research collected by Wait for Y-Ready. It doubles as the site of Wait's vacation, as well as echoed versions of scenarios from other sections of Any Ever from which characters either reappear or are replicated here...

The Red Tapes is Acconci's masterwork, a three-part epic that is one of the major works in video. Designed originally for video projection, the work is structured to merge video space—the close-up—with filmic space—the landscape. Acconci maps a topography of the self within a cultural and social...

Viola describes The Reflecting Pool as "a collection of five independent works which, taken as a whole, describe the stages of a personal journey using images of transition — from day to night, motion to stillness, time to timelessness, etc. Each work explores specific video techniques and...

In a series of short pieces drawn from his ongoing feature film project Behold Goliath, Kalin further develops the method of on-screen, appropriated, literary texts that he employed in Third Known Nest. The title of the series is a reference to the stories of writer and critic Alfred Chester...

Ahwesh's two young actresses, Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A roughly corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire...

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

"One of the nice things about movies was you could keep them at a distance. Movies knew their place. We were dimensional, they were flat, so it was easy to know which was which....

An exercise in montage, The Seduction of Tondelayo is composed of two simple images. The first is a bomber jet in takeoff. The second is close-up of Heddy Lamarr from White Cargo, a 1942 MGM film about an illicit affair in the Congo between a British businessman and a "savage beauty" named...

The Space Between the Teeth is based on the structure of acoustic phenomena and the psychological dynamics of a man screaming at the end of a long dark corridor. With each successive scream, the camera point of view hurtles at high velocity along the length of the hallway in decreasing...

The Space Program, a catalytic work for Beck/Buck, undertaken before he participated in the Whitney ISP Program in 1993 and emerged on the visual art scene in the 90s, should be considered alongside such artistic television interventions as Gerry Schum’s TV Gallery and Alex Bag’s Cash from Chaos...

Set against a backdrop of Atlantic City's seedy casinos and dreary off-season hotels, The Star Eaters is a melancholy, non-linear portrait of a woman as she attempts to trace her memories and make sense of her life amidst the faded glamour of the seaside resort. Telling her story in voiceover,...

This historical document locates Nam June Paik's artistic origins as a composer, tracing his studies at the Conservatory for Music in Freiburg, his work with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, and the influence of the art and ideas of John Cage on his work. In a humorous performance, Paik...

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

Ken Jacobs writes: "Stereograph of the crowd at the opening of the US Centennial Exposition of 1893. It turns into a movie. Into an enormous rugged and craggy 3-D landscape.......

This video journal is an informal time capsule of the downtown cultural and artistic milieu in New York. Part 1 documents a party given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Clarke is an active voice behind the camera as she records this celebrity-rich event, with guests including Andy Warhol and Jack...

In The Thinker, Almy satirically envisions the evolution of human intellectual thought—from ape to yuppie—as a television event, with an emcee providing the play-by-play commentary of a sportscaster. Classical, Medieval and Renaissance theories flash by as catch-phrases. When this accelerated...

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky...

Laura Mulvey writes: “Beloff’s latest film is a meditation on, and a visualization of, the scenario that James Agee wrote in 1948 for his lifelong hero, Charlie Chaplin. The film interweaves two cinematic spheres. In one, Agee, dramatized by an actor, conjures up and imagines his ideas for the...

The TV Commercials is a recent compilation of Burden's four legendary television interventions, which date from 1973 to 1977. For each of these conceptual projects, Burden purchased commercial time on broadcast television and aired his own subversive "ads." Included are TV Ad: Through the Night...

Originally projected in the interior of a customized Dodge at the 2001 Armory Show in New York, The Van features Bag as three young female artists riding in the back of a van, en route to the Armory Show. Their gallerist Leroy, dressed as a pimp, is the driver of the van; he promises them major...

Here Ahwesh's heterogeneous textual approach comes to the fore, as she juxtaposes narrative, faux documentary, comedic and "serious" footage, and merges film, video, and Pixelvision. Suggestions and meanings accumulate: austere, theoretical text is interrupted by shots of women relating bawdy...

In this early, performance-based work, d'Agostino experiments with perceptions of landscape, time and point of view. The Walk Series documents three different "walks" (on a roof, a fence and a beach) that the artist took in the San Francisco area, while recording with a hand-held camera. These...

This newly assembled work is a rare document of a 1976 Matta-Clark performance in Berlin. The piece begins with the following statement: "In 1976, as part of the Akademie der Kunst and Berliner Festwochen exhibition 'Soho in Berlin,' Gordon Matta-Clark went to Germany with the intention of...

Founded by graduates of Lódz Film School in 1970, the Workshop of the Film Form helped define the moving image avant-garde in Poland in the 1970s. The Workshop was a pioneering and highly influential collective that promoted analytical experimentation in all of their multidisciplinary practices....

In Theme Song, Acconci uses video as close-up to establish a perversely intimate relation with the viewer, creating a personal space in which to talk directly to (and manipulate) the spectator. He is face to face with the viewer, his head close against the video screen, lying cozily on the floor....

Writes Sanborn, "The basis of this project was to ask composers to address war and peace—that interpretation frames each work. Composer Jerome Kitzke chose two poets, Walt Whitman and Rumi, to voice 'There is a Field,' making me ask, 'How does an artist interpret such moral themes?'...

There Is Nothing Underneath the West Virginia Wing takes us to the Project Greek Island bunker – a vast and elaborate underground bomb shelter that was designed to house members of Congress in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Now declassified and open for public tours, the bunker was covertly...

There was an Unseen Cloud Moving is part documentary, part personal meditation. The piece is the first in a series of Thornton's projects that focus on the life and work of Isabelle Eberhardt, an explorer who died in 1904 in Algeria while traveling in the Maghreb disguised as a man, and who...

Third Annual Roggabogga is the installation created by Forcefield for the Whitney Museum's Biennial Exhibition of 2002. For the installation, the artists created a diorama with neo-tribal figures, films, objects and sounds. The environment incorporated projected film animation, silkscreened...

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...

Velez writes: "This and That is a road movie about forgetting — and being forgotten. Shot over a period of six years while traveling through France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, it is a document of failed loves, death and how neither vengeance nor pardon can modify the...

A documentation of a 1977 performance at Artists Space (NYC), This Is My Blue Period is a surreal monologue featuring four of the artist's poems. At once incantation, song, and internal monologue, here Heyward describes a virus as it overtakes her body and infects her heart, blood, and mind. She...

This Old Man/My Name is Ne Ne is an eloquent tribute to the students of New York City's PS 11. Aided by Lucier's careful manipulations of sound and image, this work offers a montage of portraits that are, by turns, gracefully slow-moving and hyper-kinetic, reflecting the energy and spirit of...

In these early film exercises, Acconci exhibits an almost childlike vulnerability that is at once comic and oddly affecting. In Blindfold Catching, a blindfolded Acconci reacts, flinching and lunging, as rubber balls are repeatedly thrown at him from off-screen. In Soap & Eyes, he tries to keep...

In Looking Around Piece, the performer stands before a fixed camera, which records his eye and head movements as he follows a moving object outside the frame.

In Starting Piece, the performer starts too far away to be captured by the camera; as he walks down the hill, he gradually enters the...

In one of his earliest films, Acconci performs a series of actions — running in a circle, jumping, pushing another man — in which the physical limits of the action refer to the boundaries of the film frame itself.

Three Moons refers to the three seasons—summer, spring, fall—spanned during the project’s creation, and accompanying phases of land-care across this timeframe. The video was shot using a temporospatial camera with no viewfinder, custom-made for LoVid by long time collaborator Douglas Repetto....

In this three-part exercise, Acconci explores the dynamics of the artist's interaction with or manipulation of an other. Each study involves a form of mirroring. In Shadow-Play, Acconci spars with his own shadow image, aggressively confronting himself as other. In Imitations, Acconci attempts to...

In Three Returns, Jonas addresses perceptual phenomena in the natural landscape and questions the camera's recording of reality. Here she ritualistically charts sound, space and time in the topology of landscape. A boy playing bagpipes emerges from behind the camera, circles a field and then...

Writes the artist: "The idea behind these pieces was to re-imagine the approaches to photography and the archive Ed Ruscha displayed in his books, through the lens of a post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google image search age." To do so, Bell-Smith arranged images sourced from the...

Following up earlier works Eclipse and Baby Birds (2009), Three Waves amplifies and investigates the anatomical production of sound and its mediation through sensory technology — what Yeh describes as “kind of a moving-image riff on concrete poetry.” The video assembles a chorus line of seven...

Again, Myers negotiates her relationship to the frame of the camera as it gradually realigns itself — this time in a clock-wise movement that turns the room sideways. Myers adjusts her position, bracing herself with increasing difficulty against the wall, in an attempt to remain upright even...

Ant Farm's "Time Capsule" project was inaugurated in 1972. The project featured a new-model refrigerator that was packed with foodstuffs and medicines deemed representative of the cultural moment and then sealed for future retrieval. This video documents the project, cutting between 1972...

In vom Bruch's video loop Time Without End, a woman (actress Gene Tierney) is continuously on the brink of falling asleep while reading a book of the same title. The scene, extracted from John M. Stahl's 1945 noir-melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, depicts several layers of escape: the woman,...

In Timewarp Experiment, Murata applies a simple temporal manipulation to a piece of found footage, to uncanny effect. Digitally slowing the opening credit sequence from the 1970s' TV sitcom Three's Company, Murata creates a strange, hypnotic flow of movements and arrested gestures that unfold in...

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the...

"An ashtray is used to demonstrate five different actions related to the work. With the camera static, the video opens with the ashtray in the center of the screen. A hand approaches it from above and slides the object up and down, then back up and back down. A voice states the work, the...

Asher documented the funeral procession of Joshua Compston, former owner of the Factual Nonsense Gallery in London. Compston died at the age of twenty-five from a combination of drink and drugs after attending the opening of a retrospective exhibition by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Many of the British...

This special edition of Jacobs' classic work Tom Tom the Piper's Son includes the two-hour film, which is recognized as a structuralist masterpiece, as well as A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), Jacobs' never-before-seen poetic riff on the transformation of his film from chemical to electronic form during...

One very straightforward interpretation of peace is the tranquility of reflection and centering -- a toning of the soul. Almost Zen, but curiously frustrating and liberating at the same time, for this work I added both standard and offbeat words to speak to the end of a process. - John Sanborn

Write Silver, "A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us, his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his...

"The slide of the image into politics finds concrete expression in the film Tourist as the word 'spectacle' nestles in the Hollywood Hills like an Edward Ruscha painting. Psychic desires of 'tourists' permeate the architecture of seeing. The fleeting spectacle is a series of imaginative...

Birnbaum swiftly traces the geopolitical history of the U.S. and then France, charting their constant reconfigurations across maps rendered malleable through special effects. A densely layered soundtrack guides the viewer through this "anti-terrain," in which boundaries are arbitrary and national...

A corridor of closet spaces in an industrial warehouse at the Städisches Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany. In one of these closets, the artist crouches, naked, on a floor of toys and fabrics and plastics, detritus from a child's room. He talks to his penis, addressing it as another...

From a collection of newly restored (and newly available) work, including Super 8 films, installation elements, and works for television spanning the period 1974 to 1992. Other titles include In the Place of the Public: Airport Series, Martha Rosler Reads "Vogue", and The Garden Spot of the World.

A travelogue in four parts – two long tracking shots, an edited segment of static shots, and one long handheld shot.

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 large tree.

Steina continues her investigation into the interaction between processed sound and image. Here she manipulates footage of electroacoustic music composer Trevor Wishart at a studio microphone, electronically slurring his words into a stream of synthesized gibberish. Our attempts to understand...

Trill-ogy Comp consists of the three movies K-CoreaINC.K (section a); Sibling Topics (section a); and P.opular S.ky (section ish). Its title freely associates with the words "trill" and "comp"—as in the musical sound resulting from rapidly alternating between two notes, or the phonetic sound...

Turn-On is one of Acconci's most charged and dramatic exercises, a tense and dynamic confrontation with the viewer. The back of Acconci's head is seen in tight close-up. He hums to himself, first lyrically, then aggressively, violently. Suddenly he wheels around to face the camera, his face...

Turning Some Pages was produced in conjunction with the printing of a limited edition journal of the same name by the Howard Smith Paper Group, a British paper merchant. The action of reading a book informs the structure of this motion drawing. Abstract arrangements of shapes and images of dice...

Paper Rad synthesizes popular material from television, video games, and advertising, reprogramming these references with an exuberantly neo-primitivist digital aesthetic. Tux Dog, which began as a cartoon character drawn by a Paper Rad member as a child, is an open source Web project hosted by...

The ultimate American sports spectacle is given a behind-the-scenes look by TVTV, with color commentary provided by Bill Murray and Christopher Guest. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys descend on Miami for Superbowl X in 1976, bringing with them lunatic fans, the media, and the coveted...

Made in 1976, TVTV's close-up look at Hollywood's annual awards ritual mixes irreverent documentary with deadpan comedy. TVTV's cameras go behind the scenes to follow major Hollywood figures (including Steven Spielberg, Michael Douglas, Lee Grant, Jack Nicholson, and many others), capturing them...

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...

"Two Bad Daughters, by Barbara Hammer and Paula Levine, is a whirlwind tour of paternal institutions: fatherhood, Lacanian psychoanalysis and bondage. The tape turns on the dominators, using a heavy complement of graphics and manipulated images to collapse control. The stratified surface of Two...

In Scene Steal, Acconci, fully clothed, tries to shield a nude woman from the camera. In Container, he wraps his nude body around a cat as if to totally enclose it.

Two sacred architectural structures of two dissimilar cultures — the kiva of the Native American and the cathedral of Western Europe — are juxtaposed to contemplate their cultural and spiritual differences.

This piece was created as part of "TRANS-VOICES", an international multi-media public...

"In 1930, Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein spent six months in Los Angeles under contract with Paramount. A decade later, German playwright and theater director Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from Nazi Germany, lived there from 1941 to 1947. Both set out to make films in Hollywood on...

The television production Two Moon July was a multidisciplinary event that featured experimental video, film, visual art, performance and music in a theatrical framework. More than thirty artists participated in the program, which was produced for the Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman and directed by...

Acconci oftens performs controlled actions as if he had entered into a contractual agreement to test his physical limitations. In Grass/Mouth, Acconci ingests grass until he chokes; in Hair/Mouth, he fills his mouth with the hair from a woman's head.

In Two Track, Acconci experiments with direct and peripheral perception of information in the context of communication and interaction. He sits with a man and a woman in front of a microphone. The man and woman each read a different text (a Mickey Spillane novel and a Raymond Chandler novel)...

In October 1989, estranged friends Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith died within a week of each other. Ken Jacobs met Smith through Fleischner in 1955 at CUNY night school, where the three were studying camera techniques. This feature-length work, first performed in 1989 as a live Nervous System...

Featuring performances from Jenkins's fellow Otis Art Institute classmates Greg Pitts, Ronnie Nichols, Roger Trammell, and Kerry James Marshall, Two-Zone Transfer depicts, in Jenkins's words, a "dreamscape in which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of three minstrels who tell the story of the...