An old man reads a newspaper on the street corner. A game of waiting, of pretending to wait, waiting for something to happen.

This historical videotape, produced in 1973 at Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy, is being made available for the first time in decades through EAI's Video Preservation Program. Writes Acconci: "A long narrow corridor, leading to the camera—at one side, a window—sun streams in, splotches of...

Walkaround Time (1973) marks Charles Atlas' first visual documentation of a Merce Cunningham dance. Soon after the film's creation, the choreographer approached Atlas, who was then the dance company's assistant stage manager, to collaborate with him through video. Unlike many of their...

The artist walks around Brooklyn, angling the camera towards the ground and interacting with assorted debris in the process: a discarded strawberry, a Pepsi-branded cup, dead leaves, a Citibike dock, and more.

Using the text of a brief poem by Goethe and the music of Franz Schubert, Chion asserts that the impulse to create poetry and beauty is a link between cultures.

Want is a video portrait of Kim Gordon—musician, co-founder of the legendary rock group Sonic Youth, visual artist, clothing designer—from the mid-1990s. Starkly lit and framed in a tight close-up, Gordon is first seen in an intense vocal and guitar performance. She then stares silently into the...

Writes Sanborn, "When I first heard Kyle Gann's War is Just a Racket, I did not respond to the spoken words or what seemed like a simplistic rant against capitalism. Boy, was I off-base. The text is from a Congressional deposition given by General Smedley Butler, twice honored with the...

War Pigeon invokes the use of trained pigeons as aerial photographers during World War II. In this phone call to the customer service department of a bank, the speaker describes an unnerving encounter with a suspicious bird, which has led him to question his trust in the bank’s very existence.

Warm Objects was produced in close collaboration with the engineering research center MIRTHE (Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment), an organization dedicated to the development of optical trace gas sensing systems. Utilizing MIRTHE's imaging technology, scenes of everyday...

Steina's long-running investigations into video-effects technology and performance come together in this recent tape, in which she slowly approaches the camera, her body warping this way and that.

Acconci's face is seen in close-up. His eyes trace, in real time, the movement of the hands of an off-screen clock.

Writes Lawrence Weiner: "SITUATED WITHIN A LANDSCAPE OF HUMAN INTERACTION THOSE ACTIVITIES THAT LEAD TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF STRUCTURES NECESSARY TO DEAL WITH OR CO-EXIST WITH THE FORCES OF NATURE, WATER IN MILK EXISTS ATTEMPTS TO PRESENT VARIOUS CHARACTERS AT A POINT OF DISJUNCTIVE BUT...

Water Plastic Bag is one of a series of durational, risk-taking performances that Ramos made with fellow artists Lowell Darling and Joe Ray. An idyllic shot of beach and surf is the setting for this unnerving performance. Ramos and Darling are tied into body-sized plastic bags and then buried in...

Baldessari performs an amateur magician's rendition of the holy miracle.

Waterways comprises four minimalist exercises in which Acconci explores the formal, visual and dynamic properties of a body fluid in a controlled performance situation. Using extreme close-ups and amplified sound to force the viewer into the space of his body, he experiments with his mouth as a...

Trecartin and his collaborator/co-star Lizzie Fitch ponder the messages delivered by the most banal forms of mass media and pop culture in their own unique version of a music video. They voice questions in song and dance segments that feature a deliberately ill-fitting pastiche of discarded...

Ken Jacobs writes: "Early stereograph of dancers at rest. One leans forward to display her bosom. The stereo-camera preserves their youthful presence forever."

Condit writes: "We Were Hardly More Than Children tells an epic tale of bloodshed as lived by two women on a perilous journey through a world that has little concern for their survival."

"The visual track of Weak Bodies and Strong Wills comes from my 1973 film, Enlightenment through Experience: Interim Semester at Albright College. The found film images had been kept in a closet at Albright College, where I was invited to teach a workshop. I edited the original silent footage and...

Weekend in Moscow (unofficial art) is a snapshot of the underground Moscow art scene at the time of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain. While Soviet officialdom still exercises firm control, a community of "unofficial" conceptual artists perseveres against the odds. Capturing these brave and...

Welcome to This House is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the US, Canada, and Brazil believing that...

Under a cloudless Los Angeles sky, Kahn—dressed in incongruous heels and a summery dress—runs an electric weed whacker through a hill of overgrown grass. During breaks, the whacker's annoying buzz gives way to the trill of birds and distant sirens, with Elvis Presley's In the Ghetto leaking from...

In Idemitsu's seminal feminist video, the image of a tampon swirling in a toilet bowl slowly appears, as the artist speaks about the troubling roles, responsibilities and expectations of women in a clinical tone. Minimal in composition, What a Woman Made is a candid critique of the treatment of...

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

Jacobs applies three-dimensional digital animation to a century-old film by Edwin S. Porter, the pioneering motion picture director for Thomas Edison's production company. Porter's...

The three short, low-tech works in this compilation celebrate downtown New York nightlife at the beginning of the 1990's. Set in a New York Meat Market restaurant after hours, Butchers' Vogue features a voguing waiter and waitress, two prostitutes on the run, and a cop. In The Draglinquents, the...

In What I'm Looking For, Silver relates the story of a woman who sets out to photograph intimate moments in public space. As she finds herself drawn into a series of meetings with strangers contacted through an Internet dating service, her apparently simple task unfolds into ambiguity and...

Ace reporter Nour Mobarak and man in the street Andrew Lampert trek to the outer fringes of Portland at an ungodly hour to ask burning questions about the ramifications of technological change. What they find (besides mostly inebriated locals) may completely dumbfound you.

Trecartin's extraordinary digital manipulations reach a new level as he speculates in vivid animation about reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities. Evoking lo-fi, promotional, cult-worship videos, Trecartin and his fantastically costumed collaborators manufacture an alien yet...

This interactive CD-ROM project was inspired by the Wooster Group's play House/Lights, which is itself related to Gertrude Stein's play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Stein's work is the starting point for Beloff's playful philosophical investigation of how theories of perception, logic and...

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...

The first installment in the multi-part Whispering Pines series, this unsettling video introduces Cynthia, the series' silent, somewhat confused protagonist, who is played by Moulton. In these wryly humorous narratives, Cynthia's interactions with her everyday world mix the mundane and the...

Presenting a domestic world just slightly askew, Whispering Pines 2 follows Moulton's character Cynthia as she attempts to navigate the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home décor. Moulton has spoken of her interest in the ways in which people draw spiritual or existential...

Whispering Pines 3 continues Moulton's evocatively oblique video series. Seated in an easy chair, wearing a multi-colored neck brace and surrounded by odd home decorations, Moulton's protagonist Cynthia makes notes in her diary, allowing us a glimpse into an inner life that seems to oscillate...

In this episode of the ongoing Whispering Pines series, Moulton's hapless protagonist Cynthia seeks a cure for an ailment via "Healing Hands," a natural New Age therapy. Donning conch-shell-and-pine-cone-adorned headphones and an Avon relexology glove, she listens to "sound medicine" and...

"While searching for comfort in her self-help books and soothing knick-knacks, the cold and depressed Cynthia is transported to an electric temple that springs up from the pattern in her electric blanket. There she has a cathartic experience with a pipe organ, faces her demons and discovers the...

In this episode of her ongoing narrative performance series, Moulton's alter-ego Cynthia seeks solace from her troubles by putting together a puzzle and shopping for light-up waterfall decorations. The combination of these activities helps Cynthia to solve the puzzle of self-discovery.

In this episode of the Whispering Pines series, Moulton's character Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture. While Cynthia performs her nose-pore cleaning routine in front of the mirror, a sphinx appears and...

Moulton again performs as her alter-ego Cynthia in the latest episode of the Whispering Pine series. Fueled by the sugar-free drink Crystal Light, Cynthia methodically fills a vase with alchemical home decorating items. Once her project is completed, Cynthia is again left to dwell in her...

"Aerial views of Los Angeles rooftops and a swimming pool surrounded by tan sunbathers contrast starkly with the Wheeler Ranch, hippie free land of shacks and barren landscape in Sonoma County. Is this about the filmmaker's own childhood urban lifestyle and the rural life she chose in early adult...

Kahn met Kellie, the subject of this work, through placing an advertisement on the website Craigslist, seeking to interview people who had created their own jobs. Kellie inhabits an interesting double function: someone who is indeed a real person but also a recognizable portrayal of a set of...

Why Not a Sparrow is a hallucinatory piece, in which semi-narrative sequences of a woman on a woodlands vision-quest mix with mythological images, including dancers wearing animal masks. Condit has fashioned a lament for all the wildlife — particularly birds — at risk of extinction due to human...

Wild Blue Yonder fuses animated drawings and text with video footage of Weiner's friends, colleagues, and family. Weiner recontextualizes the everyday, leveling gestures, conversations, actions and interactions into a system of codes that blur the boundaries between what is choreographed and what...

WILDNESS is a resonant portrait of a Latino Los Angeles LGBT bar, the Silver Platter. WILDNESS integrates elements of fiction and documentary structures to vividly portray Tsang’s multi-layered relationship with the bar, one that explores her role as an artist and activist, and a member of a...

Silent or with minimal sound, Hill's early formalist works explore the manipulation of electronic color and image density through the camera obscura and image processing devices. Of these tapes, Hill has written that "much of the subject matter and the expressionistic method of working underline...

The artist drinks a Red Bull—the Austrian energy drink that claims in its advertising campaigns that it will “give you wings”—against a PhotoBooth background of clouds.

The artist drinks a Red Bull—the Austrian energy drink that claims in its advertising campaigns that it will “give you wings”—against the backdrop of a 2013 ad for the beverage by cartoonist Horst Sambo. Featuring music by NYC Vanity Fair.

Winner is a fictional interview gone awry, featuring a reticent sweepstakes winner who doggedly avoids receiving her prize and manages to morph an ad spot into a mini documentary about her art work. Shot in a day and largely improvised, Winner is the first collaborative video by Dodge and...

Winter in Miami 2005 is Kubota's touching tribute to her husband, artist Nam June Paik, who died at their home in Miami in January 2006. This intimate piece features previously unreleased sound recordings of Paik at the piano in his New York home in 2005, playing haunting compositions that he...

Swinging between pleasure and torment, Cantor narrates an autobiographical story of a doomed love affair over scenes from The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). Wittily and ingeniously cutting between parallel sequences from the iconic...

Women I Love is a series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker's friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. Culminating footage evokes a tantric painting of sexuality sustained.

This program of early works includes explanations of Vasulka's image-making tools, and also charts his development of a grammar of these imaging techniques.

Vocabulary, writes Vasulka, is "designed to convey in a didactic form the basic energy laws in electronic imaging." Here a hand, as a...

To create this audio piece, Wegman asked people to talk about the history of the world. Their answers bespeak a humorous and highly subjective view of the world, revealing more about memory, egocentrism and Eurocentrism than about world history. Interwoven on two channels of audio, these...

Peter d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks have been performed on six continents over the past four decades. Initiated as video "documentation/performances" in 1973, The Walks Series evolved into video-web projects during the 1990s and mobile-locative media installations in the 2000s. World-Wide-Walks expl...

Seoungho Cho continues his sophisticated investigation of the moving image, its manipulation through video processing, and the ways in which these technologies can be made to represent the natural world. In ws.2, Cho's precise camera movement and hypnotic post-production techniques deliver an...

ws.3 is a minimalist investigation of the texture of landscape. A windy, abstract soundtrack accompanies close-ups of a lunar-like, brilliant blue and white terrain. As the camera arcs rapidly and images move in and out of focus, sky and desert seem to merge. Cho erodes distinctions between...

Michael Snow's film Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of avant-garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In February 2003 Snow made WVLNT, a "re-mix" which created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed...