Extending Harris-Babou’s broader exploration of the language and empire of Restoration Hardware, Human Design follows the artist as colonial explorer and travel blogger traveling to Gorée Island in Senegal to unearth the “rare” artifacts on display in the furniture company’s New York showroom. The work was originally made for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, after Restoration Hardware constructed a new megastore a few blocks from the museum.

In this provocative essay on racism, crime, the law and the media, Andrews constructs a layered pastiche to investigate these issues within cultural and personal contexts. He explores how the fictions of the media reinforce and perpetuate racial mythologies.

Pearlstein writes: "Beginning with a Cindy Sherman-esque scene of a battered woman, the suggested narrative quickly implodes to expose a series of psychological states being 'acted out.' The mood moves through aggression to desire to frustration to a catharsis, which creates a structural shift....

Here Pearlstein uses objects as symbols to delineate relationships between such diverse concerns as ethnicity, mythology, fear, and sexuality.

In September 1975, photographer Marc Petitjean documented Matta-Clark as he made one of his major "building cuts" in Paris. Created for the 1975 Paris Biennale, Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect was a spiraling cone-shaped cut through a pair of 17th-century buildings on rue Beaubourg. Slated for demolition as part of the "urban renewal" of the Les Halles district, the buildings were adjacent to the Centre Pompidou, then under construction. Petitjean records Matta-Clark's two-week process and interviews him at the site.

Role-playing and political performance were integral to Ant Farm's art-making strategies. In 1976 the group travelled to Australia as ironic "artists-in-residence," counter-cultural ambassadors. "Off-Air" Australia is a fragmented document of that trip, culled almost entirely from off-air footage of their television appearances, Australia media coverage of Ant Farm's events, and appropriated TV commercials.

The first in a series of videos investigating the use of digital effects on appropriated imagery, "Painting" Sites compiles pictures arbitrarily yielded by an Internet search for the word "Painting," and peppers the resulting series of images with digital graffiti, courtesy of editing software. When Price began the piece, in 2000, automated image-search tools did not yet exist online; instead, the artist used text-based searches, taking arbitrary screenshots of each and every page that was returned and then cropping out all but the image, an approach that occasionally yielded visual hallmarks like improperly loaded data or the appearance of the cursor.

Writes Pearlstein: "This piece, made as a continuous loop, literally traces the process of a stream of consciousness, such that the process itself becomes the subject. It delineates the way in which one thought leads to the next by associations made through language, sound, image, and action....

In "Psycho," the photographic image of two women is evocatively transformed through subtle transmutations of gesture and movement.

"That's It, Forget It," Miller's first collaboration with young people, celebrates pop culture, fashion, and music video, L.A. style. Miller follows six West Hollywood teenage girls as they shop, dress up, dance, flirt and drive down Melrose Avenue — all to an audio track of disco music and...

Nam June Paik's first single-channel videotape since 1989 is a heartfelt tribute to his long-time collaborator Charlotte Moorman. This portrait traces Moorman's career as an avant-garde performer, from her classical training to her notorious arrest as the "Topless Cellist" and subsequent...

Created from a pastiche of cinematic, newsreel, animation and television images that are set against Bernard Hermann's evocative score, the "endless beginnings" of Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" reveal a continuous series of curtains opening.

"Vertigo" recounts three stories, allegedly based on postcard reproductions of Giuditta, a painting by Cristofano Allori; a photo of Lu Hsun on his way to deliver a speech at Kwanghua University, Shanghai, in 1927; and a photo of a jewel box made by Archibald Knox around 1900.

Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Twitter (equinor), November 30, 2020.

Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (burgerking), November 26, 2019.

Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (amazon), December 8, 2019.

Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (starbucks), November 26, 2019.

Posited as "A tape to Wage War Against War... the War which men wage against women, children, and themselves," (are we and/or do we) LIKE MEN confronts male self-identification, violence and gender conditioning. Focusing on a series of interviews with men, Marton based this work on his...

Precisely edited to the start-stop rhythm of a martial beat, Absolutions glories in organized disjunction, juxtaposing images of the artist collapsing to the ground with bursts of wildly scrambled electronic distortion. Produced while Rist was working at a professional video facility, the piece reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the defects and imperfections of the video machine and medium, which carries echoes of psychological and personal mistakes.

Produced in Yugoslavia, Die gluckliche Begegnung, which translates as "The Happy Encounter," is an enigmatic inquiry into the means by which an individual can know and understand the self through history and the past. Odenbach orchestrates a series of lyrical images, from farmers hoeing the earth...

Trecartin describes this work as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles. Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the stylized characters are constantly on the phone or online. Their e-mail exchanges and Internet searches are channeled into bright animations that intersect with "real world" locations; the story moves from person to person like a browser surfing through Web pages.

Writes Michael Snow: "The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes 'messages' between the two hemispheres. *Corpus Callosum, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of, de-picts, creates, examines, presents, consists of, and is, 'betweens.' Between beginning and ending, between 'natural' and 'artificial,' between fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002. It's a tragi-comedy of the cinematic variables..."

In 0, Seoungho Cho literally counts cars speeding down a freeway. The interwoven and digitally rendered content — cars, the sounds they produce, numbers superimposed upon them — creates a dynamic investigation of the mechanics of the moving image.

An exploration in mood and tone, 1 is a montage of image, music, and language. Against a split-screen study of New York beat cops, Silver presents a sentence, drawn out in single words over the course of the piece. Through subtle word repetition, she alters what would appear to be a unified sentence; this, in addition to the doubled image, calls the work's title into question.

In two channels seen simultaneously on one screen, Hackenberg moves hypnotically as Chinese music suggests the idea of a different place.

The final installment in Cokes' Pop Manifesto series, 1! takes a stroll through the artist's music collection, presenting the titles of 100 recent albums released over a five year period. This annotated discography is paired with excerpts from an essay by critic Christoph Cox discussing rock music's forms and ideological premises, all laid over an appropriated vintage documentary explaining how to project a film.

1-2-3-4 is an exercise in animating numbers, using four cameras and a multikeyer to re-order and layer the image planes.

1/1 is a new direction for Seoungho Cho. This playful study, shot largely in degraded black and white, knowingly recalls the early performative experiments of 1970's video practitioners. In part an exercise in gesture and noise, the piece is also a reflexive anecdote on the nature of video itself.

"Prestype on clear film measuring tape, 10ft. length. No camera. At the end of every foot of film numbers appear, 1, 2, etc to 10."

Writes Kelley: "Bob and Sheree are old friends of mine. Bob Flanagan is a respected Los Angeles writer and Sheree Rose is a photographer who was known primarily as a documenter of the L.A. poetry scene. In recent years their work has come more and more to reflect their sadomasochistic sexual...

"Numerals on clear film from 1 to 1000."

In this dizzying portrayal of futile searches through cluttered handbags and standing files, Baldino continues her provocation of the principles of narrative structure, letting us spy on the anonymous victims of failing manmade systems and the detritus of modern life.

4:3 aspect ratio Beatles video cropped to 16:9 aspect ratio.

19 Universes/my brother is the latest in a series of videos in which Baldino explores advanced scientific concepts, including nanotechnology and quantum particles. The screen is divided into nineteen shifting strips of video, each portraying Baldino's brother, a musician, as he plays rock and roll guitar; the soundtrack is layered correspondingly. The result is a disorienting composite portrait that explores the phenomenon of parallel universes.

In Romania the fighting was not yet over when Hámos, a Hungarian filmmaker living in Berlin, left for Hungary in December 1989, for the first time since he had left his country of birth without permission ten years earlier. He wanted to make a film about censorship at Hungarian Television — about...

Single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram (crackerbarrel), November 26, 2019.

2002 is a "concert film" that collects together footage of approximately forty bands videotaped by artist C. Spencer Yeh during the year 2002, including Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Sightings, Sudden Infant, Cock ESP, Double Leopards, Caroliner Rainbow, Comets on Fire, and more. Acting as a survey, tribute, and foreshadowing of the contemporary American musical underground, 2002 captures not only the artists, but the audiences, spaces, and networks that remain incredibly formative and influential over a decade later.

21 Films, which actually contains 25 titles, is a compilation of 16mm and 8mm shorts assembled by the artist. In these works, Sherman combines the hallmarks of his "Spectacle" performances—metaphoric juxtapositions and visual puns—with a fluency in film grammar. Through exquisite storyboarding and montage, Sherman transforms the mundane into the magical, blithely manipulating colossal forms (landscapes, bridges, chili parlors, skyscrapers, rollercoasters, escalators, and airplanes) like weightless props.

The exhilarating image of a human figure momentarily suspended against the sky — a signature Blumberg shot — is the soaring introduction to this high-spirited documentary, and to the Eskimo-Indian game of blanket toss. Blumberg conveys the essence of the annual Eskimo-Indian games, which are...

This tape is Jud Yalkut's video realization of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's concert performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player. In this extraordinary performance, which is manipulated and synthesized by Yalkut, Paik and Moorman play Cage's score on a collection of "instruments" that include a pistol, a dish of mushrooms, balloons, a practice aerial bomb, and a telephone call to President Nixon.

Focusing on the discourse surrounding the music industry, Cokes continues his investigation of pop culture, setting black words on a white screen against the music of his band SWIPE. The resulting quasi-music video addresses the music of each decade since the 1960s with slogans and barbed statements.

A simple scene of three flags flapping over an electronic billboard advertising grocery specials conjures an indelible portrait of America.

Davidovich recorded this video with artist Stuart Sherman at Ronald Feldman's 3 Mercer Street Gallery in SoHo. As the camera moves in a continuous, 360-degree take, Sherman performs a series of actions that are never completely captured by the perpetually revolving camera.

This is the first in Cokes' non-consecutively produced series of "promotional tapes" for his conceptual band SWIPE. 3#, subtitled Manifesto A Track #1, introduces Cokes' concern with the ideological apparatus that undergirds the music industry. The video takes up a song by Seth Price, which is itself the systematic recreation of an early electronic pop song by Kraftwerk.

Inverting the form, style and time frame of commercial television advertising, Logue has produced a unique series of dynamic video portraits of avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and performers. In 30 Second Spots: New York, which Logue terms "commercials for artists," each of the succinct...

30 Second Spots: Paris focuses on prominent artists, writers, philosophers and musicians working in Paris. Using elegant special effects, close-ups, and a highly condensed time frame, Logue captures her subjects in moments of intimacy and contemplation. Pierre Boulez ponders the rhythms of...

San Francisco artists Starr Sutherland, Diamanda Galas and Don Buchla are among the subjects featured in 30 Second Spots: San Francisco. Logue tailors the style and content of each succinct "spot" to complement the idiosyncratic nature of the artist's work: Sutherland delivers a terse aphorism;...

As an early pioneer of the music video, Julia Heyward presents a long-form "video album" with 360 that was released just a year prior to the birth of MTV. Heyward's ten songs (recorded with Jody Harris of The Raybeats and The Contortions and Don Christensen of The Raybeats and Bush Tetras) are interspersed with her familiar a cappella-like monologues.

In 37 Stories About Leaving Home, a group of Japanese women living in the Tokyo area recount personal stories of their own experiences of leaving home. In these stories one can begin to see, from very personal and individual perspectives, the societal changes that have occurred over the last...

A collaboration between Arcangel and Milwaukee artist Frankie Martin, this work revisits the "rave" dance party phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s. In an act of simulation at once hilarious and incisive, Arcangel and Martin stage what appears to be an amateur, made-for-public-access-television promotional video in which two awkward young men dance before a swiftly changing, video-keyed background composed of the sort of black and white, "infinite-fill" patterns used in digital painting programs of the 1980s.

"A documentary that details the early days of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the film tells the story of the making of the dance Scramble, showing the daily routine of the dancers involved, and other aspects of producing new work. Includes performance footage at the Philip Johnson Glass...

Founded and directed by Charlotte Moorman, the Avant Garde Festivals began in 1963 and featured experimental music, art, and performances in diverse sites around New York. Yalkut's rare historical documents record the 4th and 7th events. Held in Central Park in 1966, the 4th Festival included Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Christo, Shigeko Kubota, and Joseph Beuys, among others. The 7th Festival was held in 1969 on two islands in the East River. Yalkut documents performances on Wards Island, beneath one of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes.

Yalkut's rare historical document was recorded at the 4th Avant Garde Festival in 1966, which was held outdoors in Central Park. It featured over 65 events with artists, musicians and performers, including Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Christo, Shigeko Kubota, Joseph Beuys, and Alison Knowles, among many others.

5 Composers: 5 Countries portrays five contemporary composers from around the world. Logue visits Michael Nyman in London, Carlos Santos in Spain, Alvin Curran in Rome, Michael Levinas in Paris, and Tod Machover in Boston, documenting the fabric of their creative lives. Concentrating on their...

In 5 dim/MIND, Feingold constructs a complex and dynamic language system by linking a series of images and sounds collected from television, film and original footage into what he terms "a new text of signifying chains" — associative progressions that mimic unconscious thought processes. An image...

Silver premiered 5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown in the Shorts Program of the 2010 Berlinale International Film Festival. A longtime resident of New York's Chinatown neighborhood, she writes, "You live somewhere, walk down the same street fifty, a hundred, ten thousand times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE, the district's shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops."

While artist-in-residence in the north tower of the World Trade Center, Lucas was given a tour of the center's sub-basement. 5 Minute Break is the eerie artifact of that tour. An animated woman roams the WTC sub-basement like a benign Lara Croft, negotiating an underground maze of empty stairwells, faded graffiti, hulking machinery, and discarded trash. Lucas' vision of a haunted netherworld of dead-ends and detritus beneath the trade center captures a lost realm.

The fifth and final installment in Cokes' series of "promotional videotapes," 5% (subtitled Manifesto E) shares its predecessors' format: a strict graphic presentation of on-screen text, coupled with a pop soundtrack. As with the other installments, this work is concerned with delineating the status of pop music as a cultural form located within structures of production, capital, and society.

In 67/97, Cho employs the technology of scanning to meditate upon the process of information gathering and the construction of meaning. The result is a lyrical and witty investigation of data systems, surveillance and information overload.

The second in Cokes' series of pop "manifestos," 6^ employs two simultaneous strategies to examine questions of originality and authenticity. While layers of densely theoretical text float across a blue ground, the soundtrack, a song by the band Appendix, features a singer addressing similar questions, albiet in the more familiar context of "rock lyrics."

In Sept visions fugitives, produced in China, Cahen creates impressionistic transformations of landscape and people. Cahen writes: "The looking and listening audiences are confronted — in addition to the pure impressions — with basic questions about work (the child using a traditional device to...

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

The 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival, organized by Charlotte Moorman, was presented in 1969 on two islands, Wards and Mill Rock, in New York's East River. Here Yalkut's rare documentation records performances on Wards Island, beneath one of Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic domes.

"You've got to break a few eggs to make a video run along the cracks in a plateful of scrambled notes." — Stuart Sherman

"Time counter, in seconds and minutes."

9/11 is a first-hand, often harrowing document of the events of September 11th and their immediate aftermath. As the tragic events unfold, Oursler records from his apartment, just blocks from the former World Trade Center, and on the ground in Lower Manhattan. In this highly personal and unmediated document, the artist also captures the responses of New Yorkers and tourists at the site in the days that follow.

9/23/69 is a newly restored treasure. This early masterwork of electronic experimentation was created by Paik while he was Artist-in-Residence at WGBH in Boston. The title refers to the day it was made — September 23, 1969. Paik creates a stunning visual collage that fuses spontaneous, free-form...

Nine young men from a juvenile court high school in Southern California, whose lives have been filled with drugs and violence, worked with Miller to produce this piece, which addresses their backgrounds, their present lives and future hopes. The opening and closing sequences are music-filled...

This video examines the many paradoxes of natural, cultural and virtual identities. Peter d'Agostino's cross-cultural interests led directly back to the personal histories and cultural memories of his Italian American roots. The video moves back and forth in time by juxtaposing iconic images of his walks on Mount Vesuvius and through Pompeii, near Naples the birthplace of his parents, with places in the Italian American community of The Bronx, New York, where he grew up. Volcanic eruptions such as that of Vesuvius in 79 AD serve as powerful metaphors for the upheavals of human displacement and disembodiment.

These films are part of a public art project which includes a large mural and installation at the Electrical Industry Training Center in Long Island City and a series of canvas banners. These short documentaries highlight the resilience and diversity of the working people of New York City. In each one, the worker introduces us to their world, their work and their dreams for the future.

"The male/female, subject/object investigation in A Bit of Matter and a Little Bit More does not have any titillating episodes leading up to it. The appetite is not whetted beforehand. Hardcore, the opening shot shows the crotch area of two bodies, male and female, engaged in coitus. The camera...

In A Budding Gourmet, Rosler explores the ideological processes through which food preparation comes to be seen as "cuisine," a product of national culture. Accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, Rosler's deadpan narrator explains her reasons for wanting to become a gourmet....

This historical tape, restored through EAI's Preservation Program, documents a conversation among artists Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis and Nam June Paik at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York in 1974. During the discussion, they introduce the theme of the potential for artists' use of satellite...

Robert Longo, one of the most prominent of the 1980's postmodern "picture artists," discusses his work and influences in this interview with Gorewitz and Barry Blinderman. An articulate subject, Longo discusses his interest in appropriating cinematic images and form, a strategy reflected in his...

Goldberg Variation #1 re-constructed with instrumental instructional videos downloaded from YouTube.

Screened inside Kelley's installation Test Room, this tape brings together several influences, including choreographer Martha Graham, sculptor Isamu Noguchi (who designed the sets for several of Graham's ballets), and scientist Harry F. Harlow, whose 1950s' experiments into the emotional...

This fragmented documentary/fiction uses a tourist's travel recordings to illuminate what Santos terms the "domestic language" of Super-8 film and the politics of cultural documentation. Super-8 footage shot and narrated by a 78-year-old Brazilian tourist — shaky scenes of Paris, Rome and London...

Trecartin hurtles the viewer into a narrative universe dominated by the fleeting logic of text messaging, MySpace, pop music, and disposable culture. He takes the clichéd gay coming-out story and processes it and reprocesses it until it is almost unrecognizable. Trecartin stars as Skippy, a colorful and troubled teenager with a secret. After a failed suicide attempt, his parents catch him with a boy in his room, he is hit by a car, his friends throw a party, and he rises from the dead in time for fireworks.

Echoing themes explored throughout David Wojnarowicz's art and writing, A Fire in My Belly is a visceral meditation on cultural and individual identity, spirituality, and belief systems. On a trip to Mexico City with Tommy Turner to scout Day of the Dead imagery, Wojnarowicz shot 25 rolls of super-8 film, documenting scenes that embodied the violence of city life. A central image is that of a child exploited as a fire-breathing street performer, which resonates in the title of the film and Wojnarowicz's own experience hustling on the streets at a young age. He later staged scenes in his New York City apartment to combine with this footage, collecting dreamlike images to illustrate thematic sections he outlined in a cutting script. Among these images is a dancing, gun-wielding marionette, coins dropping into a plate of blood, vibrantly colored loteria cards, and the now iconic self-portrait of the artist with his lips sewn shut. A Fire in My Belly was never completed. What currently circulates and is preserved in the Fales Library Collection of NYU is a 13-minute version entitled A Fire in My Belly, A Work in Progress, and a 7-minute excerpt that possibly represents a chapter planned for the finished version.

"Using the structure of a feature film as its basic format, A First Quarter adopts the principles of nouvelle vague cinema as its role model. Simultaneous realities, altered flashbacks, plays on time and space are all components of the form and content of the film. Because it was originally shot in video and then kinescoped to 16 mm film, [it] has acquired a poetic, soft look. The dialogue consists entirely of the work as it is spoken and read, built, enacted, written and painted by the players. As the scenarios build, they appear as tropes, one after another."

This interview is with Edwiges Luna Osorio, tamale maker and vendor.

"And he swamn and he swamn all over the damn!" — Stuart Sherman

In Hammer’s autobiographical experimental film A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, the artist reflects on her personal fight against stage 3 ovarian cancer, transforming illness into recovery. The haunting score is by musician Meredith Monk.

Based on a play about sexual difference by fifteen-year-old Ella Tideman, A Jar Full of Jam is performed entirely by a cast of teenage males. Structuring the work on two levels — a rehearsal and a document of the rehearsal — Labat refigures the role of the viewer and deconstructs the theatrical...

A montage of women and appearances, a fantasy about beauty and the female, a fomage, a mirage. An attire satire. Preserved in 2022 by Museum of Modern Art and Stan VanDerBeek Archive with BB Optics.

In A Loft, Jacobs applies exacting digital techniques to footage of his New York City working and living space. The loft, crowded with books and film equipment, is rendered in vivid digital colors, inverted, and broken into planes that flatten the space, while Jacobs' signature stroboscopic effects give the illusion of three-dimensionality. The result is a deconstruction of his most personal physical space and an intensification of its psychological dimensions.

Kipnis has constructed a video essay that asserts an effective social critique through pseudo-documentary and narrative devices. Clovis Kingsley, powerful, pro-family, anti-feminist ideologue, author of The Power of Total Submission — and a woman who has traveled the country insisting that a...

In A Million Other Things (2), changes in light and sound on the edge of a pond during an eight-hour period from day to night are composed in rhythmic variations resembling music. When the sun sets, an individual in the landscape remains the sole visible object, illuminated by a single electric lamp.

Fleeing from the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles in 1941. This film is inspired by notes for movie that he based on an article in Life Magazine called "A Model Family in a Model Home".

In A Mosaic for the Kali Yuga, a relentlessly accelerating repetition of media fragments laid out in building-block succession depicts technological society gone critical mass — succinctly realizing its epilogue, the Vishnu Parnan's prophecy foretelling the contemporary confusion of inner and...

Viola describes A Non-Dairy Creamer as "the eradication of the individual by self-consumption." The artist's face, visible only as a reflected image on the surface of a cup of black coffee, slowly disappears as he consumes the coffee.

In this collaborative "verbal drawing," Fluxus artist, painter and poet Emmett Williams is profiled by his friends and colleagues. Fifteen artists, poets and writers convened in the Form Hotel in Warsaw, Poland to pay tribute to Williams in the form of personal anecdotes.

This interview is with Michael Paul Britto, Community Coordinator at Forsyth Satellite Academy High School, as well as an arts educator and artist.

Rosler identifies the totalitarian implications of an argument for torture under certain circumstances, as it appears in the editorial pages of Newsweek magazine. Her critique is formulated through voiceover narration and an on-camera collection of print media — articles on subjects ranging from...

Referring to the Biblical passage that enjoins against the making of graven images, A Small Jubilee, which was created following Gorewitz's grandmother's death, merges the personal and the social. Religious symbolism is countered with visions of political upheaval and chaos, and the rhythmic ebb and flow of image and text manipulation.

In this piece, Steina, a pioneer of electronic signal manipulation, applies digital technology to alter our sense of video space and time. Through computer effects, a montage of seemingly arbitrary shots of Japanese religious sites and natural settings becomes a hypnotic vortex. Speech and text...

Writes John Sanborn, "Sarah Cahill conceived of A Sweeter Music (borrowing a phrase from Dr. King?s Nobel Prize acceptance speech) as an artistic response to the Gulf War. In 2009, Cahill commissioned 18 composers to write on the subject of peace, and she received a diverse collection of...

Hámos and German artist Astrid Heibach collaborated on this lyrical work, the text of which is based on a dialogue from Plato's Symposium. The erotic, the philosophical and the ironic are seamlessly interwoven in this interpretive visualization of a dialogue on the nature of love and eros. The...

Television on speed, Nam June Paik's A Tale of Two Cities is a potpourri of pop personalities, avant-garde antics and international cultural kitsch, where past, present and future collide in the kaleidoscopic, hyper-kinetic, televisually "now."

A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs' 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper's Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.

A Tribute to John Cage is Paik's homage to avant-garde composer John Cage. A major figure in contemporary art and music, Cage was one of the primary influences on Paik's work, as well as his friend and frequent collaborator. In this multifaceted portrait, Paik creates a pastiche of Cage's...

With irreverent good humor, this affectionate homage to artist Nam June Paik uses Paik's own rapid-fire editing and dizzying collage techniques to evoke his wide-ranging influence in video and contemporary art. Excerpts from Paik's tapes and installations are intercut with appearances by Charlotte M...

Mike Kelley and Michael Smith's feature-length video A Voyage of Growth and Discovery follows the existential journey of Baby IKKI over several days at Burning Man, a festival of "radical self-expression," famous for its presentations of large-scale displays of fire, held in the remote Black Rock...

Zoe Beloff's book A World Redrawn is part of a larger exhibition of archival objects, films, architectural models and drawings (first displayed at the CUNY James Gallery in 2015), which takes up the tantalizing prospect of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht living and working in the seat of American consumerist spectacle. Arriving in Hollywood independently for periods in the 1930s and 40s, Eisenstein and Brecht worked on screenplays and treatments for studio films that were never developed, leaving behind notes and fragments for unrealized projects that Beloff uses as points of departure for her own creative and critical engagement.

Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters, and his personal involvement with the issue. Ramos, who had served an eighteen-month prison sentence for draft resistence, was...

Baldino explores both the sublime and mundane aspects of symmetry, from the physicist Lee Smolin discussing "super-symmetry," to individuals confessing their design for eating corn on the cob. Sliding across the screen, each image produces a clone; the ceaseless, conveyor belt-like motion suggests the senselessness of manufacture and machinery, and the maddening frustration of the need for balance.

Abscam (Framed) comments on the role of video as a surveillance technique, and uncannily prefigures broadcast news' controversial use of the dramatic re-enactment as a journalistic device.

In this silent work, Baldino surreptitiously films André Derain's painting Nature Morte sur fond noir in the Musée d'Art Moderne in Troyes, France. She writes, "As a result of open-heart surgery last year, I currently have a blind spot near the center of my vision....Normally I do not create work that is explicitly related to my personal life, but this new series is about perception more than anything else."

Gone on gone (1) was shot in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. Baldino writes, "As a result of open-heart surgery last year, I currently have a blind spot near the center of my vision. I had a 'mini-stroke' during surgery, and a small air bubble landed in my visual cortex, of all places. Normally I do not create work that is explicitly related to my personal life, but this new series is about perception more than anything else."

Baldino writes, "As a result of open-heart surgery last year, I currently have a blind spot near the center of my vision. I had a 'mini-stroke' during surgery, and a small air bubble landed in my visual cortex; normally I do not create work that is explicitly related to my personal life, but this new series is about perception....This piece was shot at the Botanical Gardens in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. I used my low tech Harinezumi 2 digital video camera."

In Accident, Wegman intercuts the narratives of three people who witnessed the same accident. Nonlinear and non-chronological, their different versions of the same incident underscore the subjectivity of observation and the disparity between visual and verbal information. Rearranging and...

On Translation: Açik Radyo is part of Muntadas' ongoing series of works and projects about communication, culture, and the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. This piece is the result of a two-year project created in the context of "Lives and Works in Istanbul," a program that invites artists from European countries to work in—and create works about—the city. Açik Radyo is an alternative, independent radio station that broadcasts throughout the metropolitan area of Istanbul.

Set to music by composer Philip Glass, Act III features rapidly spiralling and multiplying three-dimensional forms that echo the repetitive strains and vital energy of Glass' music.

Writes Lucas: "This video carries the tension of an audition or screen test. I am called onstage for a test drive around a virtual race course, a metaphor for the information superhighway. My intention for this video is to investigate the term 'action' as it applies to the contemporary lifestyle."

"Actions" is one of more than a dozen newly restored works by Muntadas, including early media interventions and works produced for television that were recently made available.

Ad Vice inhabits the realm of the music-video, only to use that form's language against itself in a subtle critique of the interactions of desire and commerce in a capitalist culture.

Originally commissioned by the Sony Corporation of Japan and performed live on the JumboTRON, a fourteen-story TV set at the Expo in Tsukuba, Japan, Adelic Penguins is a collaboration between Fitzgerald, artist Paul Garrin, and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also appears as a performer)....

Adjunct Dislocations II documents a technically inventive performance. VALIE EXPORT moves along a track with two closed-circuit cameras that are facing different directions and are focused upon patterned screens. Her action creates changing linear shapes on monitor banks within the space.

The...

TVTV turns its critical eye to the world of advertising in Adland, subtitled Where Commercials Come From. Focusing on the reality behind the image, and specifically on the strategies of Madison Avenue, they interview prominent 1970s admen such as George Lois and Jerry Della Femina. They also go...

Davidovich searches in vain for the meaning of "avant garde." The artist travels to Iowa City, where he conducts a series of "man on the street" interviews with artist Michael Smith, painter and critic Walter Robinson, University of Iowa professor of art history W.J. Tomasini, a security guard at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, an art school secretary, and strangers on the street.

Deploying fragments of sound and image in a confounding shell-game, Adynata challenges notions of Asianness and the East. Thornton, appearing in the guise of a 19th-century Mandarin and his wife, explores oppositions of femininity and masculinity concealed in Orientalist assumptions. Here, lushly beautiful scenarios function as double-edged critical tools, inhabiting the discourse that they critique.

Working at night, under the glare of automobile headlights, a man scours and restores the facade of a building in New York's Soho district. With this visual metaphor, Barr opens Aeros, a look at the evolution of Trisha Brown's dance work Astral Convertible. Choreographed by Brown, with sets and...

In After Laughter, VanDerBeek constructs a rapid-fire montage depicting the evolution of the human race and the haunting specter of its destruction.

This elegant study in abstraction and landscape from an aerial perspective takes its title from the Montgolfiers, the 18th-century French scientists who popularized balloon travel. Documenting an exhilarating ride in a hot-air balloon over Minnesota farmlands and cityscapes, Gigliotti's study of...

One of Gorewitz's most beautiful works in its use of processed imagery and naturalistic imagery, After the Storm contemplates the inner landscape of the human heart. Using poetry by James Merrill, chants in praise of Allah, and an ancient Incan text on mystical love, he creates "a romance with an ambiguity about whether the desire is physical or ethereal, carnal or spiritual. [It is] about relationships with oneself, one's partner, the world, and the conflict with these things."

"Wake up and smell the hole in the wall!" — Stuart Sherman

Europe's enchantment with American consumer culture is depicted, as well-known European architectural landmarks. The Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, and London Bridge are reflected in the glossy surface of a 1960's Cadillac convertible, the ultimate symbol of the "golden age" of American consumerism.

Using Amazon’s virtual voice assistant Alexa, a woman (played by Condit) interrogates the nature of consciousness — whether human, animal or man-made — as she walks through the woods, dragging electrical cords behind her like bread crumbs.

"Aldebaran is the brightest star of the Taurus constellation. It is not without hubris that I claimed that light-seeing eye for myself. The world of Aldebaran is projected light, rear screened and filmed again, pre-optical printer, and contemporary with the Haight-Ashbury projection light shows that played behind the bands at The Fillmore." — Barbara Hammer

In what the artists term a "video collage noise composition," LoVid uses paper cut stencils and raw electrical signals to produce a stunning strobe-like audiovisual effect. In line with much of their video and performance work, Alien Philosophy investigates the tension between organic and inorganic with visual patterns reminiscent of abstracted eyes and bodies. The piece also questions the meanings of analogue and DIY and the potential for "interference" between media (video and cut paper), exposing the labor of alteration—another layer of interference—and the complicity of destruction in the act of creation.

In Alive! Artist! Model! Pleasure!, Donegan calls into question the institutional armature that surrounds a work of art, and investigates boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. In a nondescript suburban bedroom, a woman watching late-night television catches Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin...

A deceptively charming psychological set-piece, All About a Girl depicts a young girl wrestling with her own imagination and fears. An ordinary game of "let's pretend" turns uncanny as, alone in the woods, she projects life, voice, and ultimately her own identity onto an unexpected surrogate in a doll's dress.

Pearlstein explores relationships among psychology, ritual and religion. The piece was filmed within an installation by Simon Foreman. An interior white cube bathed in intense light is viewed through a square window; a 70's kitsch picture depicting Christ hangs discretely on the back wall of the ancillary space. Pearlstein takes up Foreman's consideration of the relationship between Christianity and modernism, while also instigating interactions between psychology and the search for alternative consciousness, ritual and religion.

All Magic Sands/Chappaqua (2011) synchronizes reels from an unfinished film (a Christian children's adventure feature) with a rejected soundtrack by Ornette Coleman, both of which were originally created within a month of each other. Lampert acquired all the known camera footage for the film and assembled the intact reels into a sequence that is nearly the exact same length as Coleman's classic score. A darkly funny and deeply strange chance discovery, this unexpected pairing of exact opposites makes for strangely ideal company.

Arcangel brings a willfully lo-fi aesthetic to bear in manipulating a consumer video document of a twenty-year-old Simon and Garfunkel concert; his concerns lie as much with the event's reproduction and dissemination as with any of its supposedly original qualities. Investigating the social production of celebrity and its representations, Arcangel touches on issues of bootlegging, amateurism, and a culture in which participation can border on obsession.

All Together Now is a tale of survival in a devastated but familiar world. Feral tribes are the only inhabitants left in a decimated Los Angeles, sustaining themselves on the debris of an annihilated culture. A sense of fresh disaster is evoked through disturbing details: cars abandoned in the middle of the street, yards strewn with kitten and bird carcasses, and buzzards circling over darkened skyscrapers.

"This piece is a Screen Grab tutorial of how to make simple computer graphics using the BASIC programming language. This continues JODI's work for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer.... You can follow along with JODI as they programme the ZX Spectrum in real time..." The resulting conceptual piece unfolds as a witty performative rendering of graphics and text that highlight the abstract poetics of this early computer language.

In Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, the influence of Jewish fathers on their sons and the complexity of familial relationships are explored in a witty, poignant portrait of two artists. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (whose father Louis was a poet in his own right) and performance artist/sculptor Allan...

Uncovering the "hidden text" of network news footage, Allegory of Oblivion is a dark deconstruction of television's subliminal power. Feingold recorded the news on a nightly basis from November 1980 to May 1981. The resulting visual sequences, arranged chronologically and separated by a solid red...

High school is where life starts to get serious. You are becoming the person you were meant to be, and you dream about what you will do. Forty years later -- almost a lifetime -- what happened? Did things work out the way you imagined? Are you where you want to be? And after all that time -- who are you? How are you doing in the performance of your life? Filmmaker John Sanborn made discoveries by attending his 40th high school reunion with a film crew to interview former classmates, find answers to those questions, and gain a measure of closure. The result is a highly personal video memoir that blends interviews with contemplations and meditations on the unpredictable challenges and life-altering transformations fifteen graduates from Walt Whitman High School faced in the years before they all met again. And to show us, ultimately, that life is a long list of things.

In what Hall has termed the "world's shortest documentary," Almost Like a Dance captures the power of Olympic weightlifter Mario Martinez as he lifts 404.5 lbs. With subtle wit, Hall monumentalizes a small moment. Utilizing slow motion and varying camera angles, Hall simultaneously parodies the...

"Alphaville," a gated residential neighborhood in Sao Paolo, is the primary site for Muntadas' examination of the phenomenon of "gated communities," and how fear and a search for exclusivity lead to urban isolation and exclusion. Referencing the 1965 film Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard, a dystopian sci-fi vision of a totalitarian, urban future, Muntadas presents an architecture of space based on the rhetoric and mechanisms of fear and control. Scenes from Godard's film are juxtaposed with promotions for the gated neighborhood, digital animations, security camera footage, and images of fences, pools, tennis courts and gardens.

Rist's well-developed techniques of the personal, the pop and the mass cultural are distilled in this work. Against a backdrop of tranquil Swiss Alpine scenes, a small window presents a graphic record of human birth. This visual confrontation, unsentimentally depicting an event that has historically symbolized female difference and power, insistently draws attention from the contemplative natural views beyond.

"The mise-en-scene, the whole story, takes place in one location, the artist's studio. A delicate psychological allegory on 'a day in the life of' anchors the displacement of (filmic) reality and the alienation of the (players) self. Devices such as incongruity between the image and the soundtrack, odd camera angles, and plays on objective focus are integral and explicit components of the narrative... It is shot in black and white with very sensual, very seductive photography." - Alice Weiner

Premiered as a live performance at The Poetry Project in 2010, Am I From Brooklyn? betrays Lampert's interest in the spectacle of sentiment, especially at the mercy of consumer technology. Using the now obsolete but once popular home-movie format super-8 film, Lampert runs through a sequence of scenes from a life imagined had he grown up in three different ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn (as opposed to his hometown St. Louis).

This classic documentary is both character study and social commentary — a portrait of DeVito's grandmother, Adeline LeJudas, and a telling critique of a patriarchal society. Interviewed by DeVito in her Brooklyn home, Adeline recounts the violence she suffered at her abusive husband's hands,...

Amassed is a focused architectural study that evolves into a kaleidoscopic collage. Cho animates and layers richly saturated video frames of interior architectural elements, creating and collapsing geometric forms. Constant camera movements produce a destabilized and abstracted orchestration of...

Callas writes: "This tape takes the alphabet as its theme. By addressing the location or positioning of letters within the alphabet as 'enforced' (or predetermined) edits, it questions this given structure and at the same time attempts to exhume some of the possible sharmanic origins of the shape...

Ken Jacobs writes: "Innocent movie-goers never given a chance, captured...in 3D while other Americans invade, bomb and burn to protect our freedoms (to invade, bomb and burn). They are civilians, with bodies and thoughts far from war. Distance protects our serenity, our amiable enjoyments. Innocent monsters? Perhaps."

"The 'Americana I Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972... With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking 'material,' utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook's apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair...."

Arriving at its epilogue text through elegantly precise visualizations, Amida initiates Reeves' formal poetic strategies. A quote from Tozan that concludes the tape announces Reeves' concept of visual poetry: "It is difficult to hear with the ears; but when we hear it with the eyes, then we know...

A chilling cautionary tale, Amnesia is a stark and uncompromising portrayal of the escalation of xenophobic sentiment in the current neo-conservative climate of both France and the U.S.

Embraced by a fuschia boa and the Donizetti aria, Hodel looks at her image in a gold mirror. The object of her longing, revealed in short intercut frames, is a masculine silhouette gazing out to sea.

Amphibian was a collaborative video/dance performance by Lucier and choreographer Elizabeth Streb. In this unique fusion of dance and video, Streb performed on a raked platform between two large screens showing different sets of video images. Streb portrays a mythological creature in the process...

A work of often visceral power, An I For An I is a dynamic cultural statement on the internalization of racism and violence. Andrews assails the cause and effect of institutionalized and mass media exploitation, which he states is "directed at and produced by our culture, attacking the mind and the body."

"An Immense Majority isolates certain social responses to entertainment media, in its ironic insistence by the on-screen character that he wants greater authenticity than that provided by TV. Often people’s greatest fear in confrontation with their own actual participation in television (or video) is that they will not know how to act, that they will be perceived as insufficient. This tape activates the viewer’s response to that sentiment through its emphases upon acting, upon the glamorizing role of technology, and upon the idea of one’s image of self (as a polyvalent expression, realized through portraiture, dress, personal style, makeup, comportment, and social action)." —Tony Conrad

The ironic themes and strategies of the Soap Opera Series continue in this postmodern tale of artistic and sexual crises in Southern California. Boredom and alienation, the banality of fantasies and reality, and the need for idealized romance afflict the cliche-driven characters that wander...

Dunye employs home movies, old film clips and her own spare visuals to sketch an oblique portrait of her older brother. The soundtrack, built around memory and anecdotes, grapples with the difficulties of portraiture while also revealing, almost as asides, pointed moments from Dunye's family...

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

Writes Jacobs: "The real subject of ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) is depth-perception itself. Our beloved performers from the 1905 Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son again encapsulate human absurdity for our amusement but this time in illusionary (and berserk) 3-D. Clowns and harlots and slumming gentry freely step forward and back through the screen surface, often misplacing heads and limbs as they change location."

"Analogue was the first piece I made after I started working at EAI in the fall of '98. I made it in the office, after hours. I didn't have a studio so it was nice to work somewhere. I was living in a sketchy place. Once I was waiting for the super out front and this young family rolled up in the...

Drawing from Paik's earliest experiments with video synthesizers, Analogue Assemblage employs current technology to create a multilayered montage that references both the old and the new. An eerie electronic score from 1969 floats over ghostly processed images; the result is a paean to the way the future was.

Digital Snow is a comprehensive DVD-ROM collection devoted to the works of experimental filmmaker/artist Michael Snow. A virtual encyclopedia of Snow's works, Digital Snow features original interviews, video excerpts, musical extracts, rare documentaries and records for over 700 of his works. In addition to the extensive DVD-ROM material, this collection includes two catalogs with introductory texts, an outline of the main principles in Snow's work, content summaries, instructions, and more. Text in English and French.

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were applied to construct illustrations of temporal symmetry, duality and transposition — time-based equivalents of musical compositional principles such as counterpoint and serialism.

Shot in Saskatchewan, And Now This... transforms landscape through technology, evoking the pristine lines of wheat fields and abandoned farm buildings.

Subtitled An Escapist Primer, Andros is the journey of a man who is desperately trying to escape from his internal world, his pain and ultimately himself. Shot entirely from a subjective point of view, this confrontational video journey begins with the man watching television in a dark room, as...

Performance Camera: Larry Solomon. 'An Imperial Message' camera: Michel Auder. Editor: Roughcut Studio. Music: Blondie, Kraftwerk. Appearance by Kathleen Kendel as the White Witch.

Writes Kuchar: "A youth and a geezer or two chew the fat about cosmic mysteries beyond the realm of scientific digestion."

Writes Viola: "A succession of individual images focusing on mortality, decay and disintegration, are delineated by long, slow fades to black. The image sequences — fruit falling from a tree, a candle being extinguished, a family having a flash photograph taken — appear as a series of openings or...

Anger is a riveting portrait of an emotion. Commissioned by German television, this startling document is part of The Seven Deadly Sins, a work in which each "sin" was depicted by a female filmmaker. Cohen began by placing an advertisement in The Village Voice, asking, "Angry? What makes you...

Writes Condit: "Annie Lloyd is a daughter's complex and poetic documentation of the last four years of her mother's life and a portrayal of the creativity and wisdom of old age."

Applying the formal manipulations of the plastic arts to moving-image tableaux, Hubbard creates witty and poignant compositions that toy with viewer expectations. Here his material is a used Ford Tempo, turned into a moving composition with the addition of humble artists' supplies, such as...

Pairing dated East German techno music with early twentieth-century film reels of cabaret lines and vaudevillean dance productions, Another Worldy forces the viewer to question categories of "old" and "new," "good" and "bad."

Ant Farm's Dirty Dishes is a freewheeling portapak time capsule that captures the collective spirit of Ant Farm's life and work in California in the early 1970s. The artists use the early portable camera as an interactive sketchbook. Writes Chip Lord: "It's an anthology of clips from the first year of living with a Portapak and it gives a fairly good representation of the way we lived in those days - collectively, loosely, improvisationally."

Fitzgerald and Sanborn began the Antarctica series to explore innovative collaborations with contemporary musicians. In Ear to the Ground, David Van Tieghem uses the city of Manhattan as his musical instrument, playing the surfaces of the sidewalks, buildings and phone booths with his drumsticks...

These early works are raw, often primal expressions of anguish and alienation. Bozanich directly confronts the viewer, using the immediacy and intimacy of video as a psychodramatic construct.

In the evocative Return, Bozanich stares into the camera as shifting light and layered glimpses of...

Anthem is a post-industrial lamentation, structured on the single piercing scream of a young girl as she stands in the vast chamber of Union Station in Los Angeles. Viola relates this structure to the form and function of religious chants, particularly Gregorian chants (using a harmonic scale in...

Performed like a series of vaudeville scenes that overlap, Antic Meet consists of ten playful and comedic numbers. The curtains opened with Cunningham moving among the other dancers as a clown-like figure "who falls in love with a society whose rules he doesn't know," and concludes much in the...

Ads for defunct and foreign products are interspersed with newsreel and documentary footage. The result is a distanced view of the link between desire and commodities. For instance, footage of the Hitler youth with "S" shirts performing a swastika is overlaid with an ad for "Stabil." Products...

This work is a single-channel version of the 1971 five-monitor piece Apple Eaters, in which poet and composer Anne Tardos asked artists and other friends to "pose" for her while eating an apple. The result is a portrait of Tardos and her environment in the downtown New York art scene of the early 1970s. Among the "apple eaters" seen here are artists Charles Atlas, Gianfranco Mantegna, and Juan Downey.

A woman kisses Acconci's body, covering him in red lipstick traces. Acconci then rubs his body against another man (Dennis Oppenheim), transferring the stains onto him.

Bell-Smith and Pandian's re-edit of a 1989 Paula Abdul music video was created from a lo-res Web video, creating a look that references YouTube hobbyist remixing and fan edits. In their version, one line of the song - "I like to smoke" - is seamlessly substituted for other lyrics, turning the rote rhetoric of the original pop song into an absurdist dialogue. By exploiting the song's structure, they not only call attention to that structure, but also question the cultural environment within which it was created.

Commissioned by ISSUE Project Room for their series of “Isolated Field Recordings” streamed online during the global COVID-19 pandemic, April was shot toward the start of quarantine conditions in the US. The video's premiere, which helped raise money for ERASE Racism, took place shortly after...

Silver casts her female gaze onto a series of anonymous male subjects that she follows through the streets of the Marais district in Paris. The resulting "surveillance narrative," which features the music of Jo Privat, is an observation of viewing, power, and privacy in a public space.

With April is the Cruelest Month, Kubota continues her ongoing video diary project. Here she reflects on her relationship with her husband Nam June Paik, in a collage of documents including interviews, performances and installations, as well as footage of the couple in Miami Beach, where they spent their winter months.

"...The work explodes into dance, the dance of the bucking horse, the bull, the clown, the rodeo rider. This is the resplendent West, but Lucier undermines its glory with loss. Brilliantly, the artist sets her choreography to George Strait's Country Western song, I Can Still Make Cheyenne. The music and the images cascade back over themselves, folding, repositioning, repeating, alive with rapture...and, again, longing." (Laurel Reuter, Director, North Dakota Museum of Art)

Produced in collaboration with Aysha Quinn, Arches juxtaposes the stunning beauty of the southern Utah desert with the postcards that supposedly "capture" it, a concept refuted by a spoken and scrolling text that alludes to the living spirit of the land.

Writes Silver: "Jerry loves Jill, Jill loves John, John loves John, and so goes the story of Are We All Here?, a narrative video with a strange twist. Because inexplicably, at the least opportune moment, and accompanied by the ringing of a doorbell, Jill, Jerry and John change into each other....

Arena was presented both as a live performance and as a video shoot on two weekends at Salon 94 in New York, one month before the presidential election and concurrent with the debates. Its theme and structure echo these events. The video is a real-time mix of three camera points of view, serving both as a document and an independent piece. Exposing the mechanics of the live event and the fiction of the narrative,Arena examines the essential components of competition, hierarchies, and the dynamics of power.

“Shot in the Peruvian convent of Santa Catalina, Arequipa analogizes the building blocks of film (frames, color and black and white stocks, negative reversal, superimpositions) to the frames of architecture (doorways, windows, walls, corridors). The confinement of the frame, the convent, changed...

"Footage shot from the New York IRT and the Berlin S-Bahn are shifted and shuffled, interpenetrating in space and time with enthralling dexterity, leaving us adrift between the familiar and the strange, while personal diary entries, a Russian ballad and dubbed dialogue from 8 1/2 are rehearsed to conjure a sense of futility and impasse in the mundane rituals of daily life." — New York Video Festival, 1999.

In Arms Are Overrated, existentialist questions are formalized in layers, in the play on puppetry as a representational form. Concerns incumbent to embodied life, things like desire, distress, rumination are restaged in a precarious phantom state where there is only the representation of a body, and the representation itself is not itself. Formal cinematic moves raise these barely-beings temporarily into "a world that matters." And these same cinematic tropes are also their undoing.

A preface of sorts to Primarily Speaking, Around & About is a speech-driven image procession that self-consciously addresses the nature of a shared reality with the viewer. Around & About is an eloquently concrete conjunction of text and image, using staccato glimpses of interiors and closed...

Around the Park was a public art project commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservency in New York in autumn 2007. The video, which stars Wegman's canine cast enjoying a fall day in the park, was presented on four outdoor monitors near Madison Square Park's food kiosk.

In this exercise in associative meaning and word/image conjoinment, Baldessari pins a sequence of photographs to a wall below the "headline" Art Disaster, which has been torn from a newspaper. While some of the photos are clear, others are illegible. The viewer reads the images in relation...

This piece documents the process behind the creation of Holt's major public art installation, Dark Star Park, in Arlington, Virginia. The park, which features giant concrete spheres and pipes, allows the visitor to reconsider the experience of space, earth and sky within an urban context. It also...

Theo Eshetu records a 1989 Fluxus event in Paris. Shooting with handheld video, Eshetu captures performances by Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono, among others. While sometimes wandering into abstraction, the up-close video technique allows a unique, fly-on-the-wall glimpse of a rare Fluxus performance event.

In each of these four related films, the artist applies a successive layer of colored makeup (white, pink, green, and finally black) to his face and upper torso. While he masks himself literally, the title implies that in so doing he also creates himself, "makes himself up." Initially the films...

Art of Memory is a major work, an original and mature articulation of Vasulka's inquiry into the meaning of recorded images. Constructing a haunted theater of memory from a spectacle of filmic and electronic images, Vasulka collapses and transforms collective memory and history in an enigmatic...

Video compiled from editing together the most random results for contemporary art related searches on Youtube & performed with live voice over @ Art In General, 2008.

Video compiled from editing together the most random results for contemporary art related searches on Youtube & performed with live voice over @ Art In General, 2008.

A playful commentary on art and representation, here Bell-Smith incorporates content from popular music, television shows, and movies and combines it with animation and subtitles. The piece comments on video's place in the art world and its ability to encourage one to "think about" rather than "live with" its content. Bell-Smith appropriates images of video's predecessors to evaluate their expressive limits and produce new meaning through synthesis.

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

Art Thoughtz with Hennessy Youngman is an episodic, Internet-based talk show in which Musson performs in the guise of hip-hop "art critic" Hennessy Youngman. In a series of short, talking-head monologues, Youngman offers aspiring artists his irreverent views on the contemporary art world, from...

The streets of Minneapolis are transformed into a carnival of unconventional performance, as Blumberg spiritedly captures five artists in "that verité experience — caught in the act of creating." A two hundred-foot balloon sculpture by Susan Keiser, sculptor Donald Lipski's one hundred...

Artifacts is a didactic demonstration of the syntax and vocabulary of the digital image, via the electronic capabilities of the Digital Image Articulator. Vasulka's intent is to create a dialogue, a symbiotic relationship between artist and machine. "By artifacts," he states, "I mean that I have...

In Artificial Illuminations, Asher records patterns, shadows, and traces of ambient light; the embodiment of temporary lives.

In this black and white performance tape, Donegan continues her ironic exploration of the process of making art. Working within the format of a music video, Donegan plays with notions of artist and model, subject and object, and the "painterly gesture."

Writes Kuchar: "A hellish tour of domestic interiors peopled with artisans who help to construct their own destruction."

"Artype patterns, intended for loops. Benday dot patterns. Dots, lines. Screens, wavy lines, parallel lines, etc. on clear film. No camera."

Writing on his Huffington Post blog about the new episodes of his artworld soap opera series As Da Art World Might Turn, Linzy states, "The new version continues to center around Katonya, Big Feet Freddy, and Sholeva Sure's melodramatic journey through 'their' contemporary art world, but also...

In As if Memories Could Deceive Me, a piano keyboard, symbol of German bourgeois tradition, is the metaphorical ground upon which Odenbach devises a dynamic associative discourse on the construction of personal and cultural identity. A haunted theater of collective and subjective memory is...

As Is: is a mythical interpretation of New York City, from the grand theater of its urban architecture to its diverse ethnic heritage. Velez reshapes and layers the urban landscape, isolating gestures and rituals — the hand signals of traders on the New York Stock Exchange, coffee taste-testers —...

"New vaudevillian" performance artist Bill Irwin is the subject of a wryly comic performance narrative. Framed by the storyline of a parodic theatrical audition, Irwin plays a hapless Everyman who inadvertently becomes trapped inside a television set. This narrative ploy allows Irwin and Atlas to demonstrate their respective skills at constructing an ironic and inventive forum for contemporary performance.

This work documents a ritualistic performance concerned with "Ansemia," or the inability to either express or understand gesture. Using symbolic materials — hot wax, a knife, a dead bird — as well as text, Export investigates human expression, and how communication can fail.

Asian Studs Nightmare examines the racial politics operating behind the hit U.S. television dating show "STUDS." Fulbeck narrates, recalling fictional nightmares of Asian male identity, over a multi-layered visual of footage from the actual "STUDS" show and examples of Asian male stereotypes....

Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read from cards they have submitted. A continuous relay of projected slides comprises an iconography of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, as Schneemann reacts spontaneously to the questions.

This historical document, produced in 1969 for the CBS television program Camera Three, records a fascinating conversation with the influential avant-garde composer John Cage. In a wide-ranging dialogue, Cage discusses aspects of his work, his aesthetic philosophies, his working processes, and...

Assassins Ride is a protracted tableau; three masked figures stand around a blustering fire, while a pulsating, measured electronic beat booms out. Occasional strobe effects and a fireball add to the incendiary feel. The soundtrack is taken from the Assassins CDR.

Assemblage is a recently rediscovered lost film featuring Merce Cunningham and his early dance company: Carolyn Brown, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, Meg Harper, Susana Hayman-Chaffey, Jeff Slayton, Chase Robinson, and Mel Wong. A collaboration with director and former dancer Richard Moore, Assemblage features Cunningham dancing with his company in a public happening in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square in November 1968. Cunningham's riveting performance--conceived from the beginning as a dance staged for the camera--is amplified by Moore's astonishing special effects and a soundtrack by John Cage, David Tudor and Gordon Mumma. Rediscovered after Cunningham's death, Assemblage was transferred from 16mm and colorized by artist and filmmaker Charles Atlas, himself a longtime collaborator of Cunningham's.

This early performance tape is an example of what Acconci has termed his "quasi-ESP exercises," in which he explores mental concentration and intuition as a means of non-visual and non-verbal perception, interaction and communication.

Asymptomatic Carrier explores New York City’s abandoned North Brother Island, the site of a former quarantine hospital that housed “Typhoid Mary,” presently crumbling amid dense, overgrown forest. A man claiming to be living off the island for many years calls a vendor to negotiate the particulars of a flag purchase, digressing into a frank discussion encompassing time, isolation, and disease.

In At Maple Tree Farm and Beyond, Cort employs the "Video Art Transposer" to transform images during the recording process, manipulating staged events in a real-time, interactive electronic theater.

Here Cort merges video theater, early imaging technology and interactivity. In At Maple Tree Farm and Beyond, he transforms images during the recording process, manipulating staged events in a real-time, interactive electronic theater. Explorations in the Videospace features two broadcast recordings of video participation environments.

What appears to be the set-up for a simple dramatized joke is revealed to be a multi-faceted depiction of racial identity in America. A white everyman visits a shoe shine stand, not to have his shoes shined, but to have his face slathered in polish matching the skin tone of one of a selection of black celebrities, whose images are displayed on a placard menu that includes Oprah, Eddie Murphy, and President Obama, among others. The comedic skit, which references a history of racial stereotypes exploited for entertainment purposes stretching back to the minstrel shows of the 19th century, questions the status of race after the election of the nations' first black president.

Attention, Focus, and Motion is one of Lucier's earliest black and white experiments with video technology and natural phenomena. Introducing themes that resonate throughout her work, Lucier investigates the intersection of landscape, motion and vision.

Barbara Hammer takes her camera out to film the audiences at screenings of her films – some women only, some mixed – at the London Film-makers' Co-op; at the Roxie Theater, in San Francisco, during Gay Pride Week (where the audience includes fellow filmmaker Curt McDowell); at The Funnel, in Toronto; and at McGill University, in Montreal.

Vom Bruch describes Augenzeugen (Eyewitness), subtitled Behind the Doors of the Haus der Kunst, as a series of "philosophical speculations" on the famous Third Reich propaganda building in Munich, opened in 1937 to serve as the official German art museum. The museum's double doors, seen in archival footage, open and close repeatedly upon a succession of what vom Bruch has termed "ironically charged images of passion and war": appropriated films of bomber jets, a goose-stepping cartoon cat, Hollywood starlets singing in close-up, the bombing of a European city.

Through a sophisticated collage of commercials and news footage, AUTO FIRE LIFE critiques the relationship between American consumerism and political and military power.

Produced for the Olympic Committee in 1984, Auto-Olympia merges document and fantasy in a cautionary tale of American car culture in overdrive. A Greek torch runner, transported to the media landscape of Los Angeles during the '84 Olympics, is confronted by contemporary urban life. Juxtaposing...

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Kentridge's hauntingly beautiful series of animated black and white drawings brings viewers into the artist's unconscious. The DVD includes an interview with the artist by Dan...

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

Using a circular fish-eye lens, Gorewitz transforms New York's architecture into a spinning sphere in Autumn Floods.

"Available Space is a film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen. Unexpected angles, corners, slants, floor and ceiling are engaged in unexpected play and projection. The film can also be shown as a single channel without live performance." — Barbara Hammer

Lord constructs a journey to discover the changes the computer (automobile of the twenty-first century) has introduced to San Francisco, and urban centers in general. Weaving together a series of interviews with fellow San Franciscans, he uncovers a suburbanized city as fashion statement, worn by those who lead the frictionless lives of Internet culture.

AWGTHTGTWTA is one of a series of video works in which Oursler explores the idea of the "chorus." Oursler asked high school and middle school students in Manhattan, many of whom are recent immigrants, to describe their ideal or fantasy places. The resulting piece brings together scenes of the students reciting text in unison, excerpts of their imaginative responses to Oursler's question, and found footage of the online gaming, shorthand sms text messaging, and YouTube improvisational recordings that characterize their environment.

Produced in conjunction with a 1985 media arts event in Amsterdam entitled Talking Back to the Media, Azimut is a tightly structured work in which images of the body, inscribed with technology and communications, become a mesmerizing invocation. Accompanied by a hypnotic, repetitive soundtrack, a...

Seoungho Cho writes: "I received permission to videotape an unknown sannyasi having a siesta as if he were in a deep meditation. Usually we believe that body is the vehicle of soul. I would not know what kind of soul this old, tired and unconsciously open body might suggest. I came to think that what I am searching for is not his soul but mine, which is still as of yet unknown to myself."

Commissioned in 2019 for an exhibition at the Hudson Yards art space The Shed, B4 & After the Studio Pt. 1 examines the intertwined relationship between art and real estate development, repurposing a text on the 1988 Tompkins Square Riot and an excerpt from Sharon Zukin’s 1989 book Loft Living:...

In a powerful collusion of traditional and pop cultural mythologies, Labat confronts his Cuban heritage and identity, and critiques the representation of this culture by the mass media. Donning theatrical face-paint and a wig, Labat transforms himself into an icon of Babalu, the Afro-Cuban folk...

Described by Justin Patrick for Brainwashed as a "music video," Baby Birds provides an intimate look at Yeh's body and the physiological production of sound. Five views of the artist's throat appear on screen, the camera looking down each one in illuminated close-up. The mouths open and close,...

This piece documents one of Smith's earliest performances of his "Baby Ikki" character, in which he performs in public as an oversized infant in diaper, hat and sunglasses. Baby Ikki was conceived as a mute, ambiguous character fixed neither by age nor gender — an archetype with an unclear...

In June 2008, Michael Smith staged a birthday party for his legendary character Baby Ikki at EAI. Baby Ikki's Birthday Party documents this performance, following the diaper-clad baby as he interacts with party guests and an ebullient clown named Curly. During the party, cake was served, games were played, a piñata was broken, guests sang "Happy Birthday," and gifts were opened. There was even a puppy.

Background Story continues Lucas' ongoing examination of the isolating and disorienting effects of electronic media on contemporary life. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turks program, which connects employers with an anonymous labor pool to complete jobs referred to as "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks), Lucas and her collaborator/employee create a self-reflexive rewrite of the creation story, using text and fair use background images.

Set in the arch-American "home movie" context of a sunny suburban yard, Rosler's early Super-8 film Backyard Economy I documents the products of mundane domestic chores. Silently depicting scenes of laundry hanging out to dry in a suburban backyard, Rosler points up the labor that allows leisure...

Set in the arch-American "home movie" context of a sunny suburban yard, Rosler's early Super-8 film Backyard Economy ll (Diane Germain Mowing) documents the mundane activities of a woman going about her domestic chores. Quietly depicting this figure in the tasks of mowing and watering the grass,...

Bad is a technical exploration of several commands in the Vasulkas' Buffer Oriented Digital Device, which controls digital imaging functions such as up/down and right/left movement, as well as the stretching and squeezing of the image. Steina uses her own face as visual material, rhythmically dismantling and reconstructing her self-image.

In an ironic intersection of two systems — arcane theoretical discourse and popular music — Baldessari sings a tract by Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt. Introducing this performance by noting that "these sentences have been hidden too long in exhibition catalogues," Baldessari sings Lewitt's...

Baldino expands her continued fascination with scientific phenomena — in this case, the movement of neutrinos. She traveled to Switzerland to visit CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, where she recreated the high-speed journey of the neutrinos. In a digitally accelerated road trip through the Alps and into Italy, Baldino traces her own artistic process.

With a striking economy of means, Ramos enacts a close-up performance action: he blows up a balloon with his nostril until it bursts in his face. He then repeats this action with his other nostril. Alternating nostrils, he continues to blow up the balloon until it bursts. With each iteration his exhaustion visibly increases; he gasps for breath, almost to the point of passing out.

Intertwining fiction and documentary, Ballplayer is a candid story of a man's life and a subtle examination of male culture. Partially adapted from a Garrison Keillor short story, How Are the Legs, Sam?, the narrative begins with the pained recollections of a man (Richard Marcus) jilted by his...

Writes Pearlstein: "In this piece, language and image function as a visual onomatopoeia. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Evolution functions as a metaphor and structural principle throughout: the evolution of a thought, a word, a form, the species and so on. This gets played out through...

"In Bambi's Beastly Buddies, Bambi and skunk embody innocence, vulnerability and love. I lit Bambi on fire to a refrain from Beethoven's Ode to Joy, on the morning of May 11, 2004, when I read that Nick Berg, an American telecommunications contractor, was beheaded by Islamic militants on live video. I felt Bambi's incineration symbolized the times we live in." — Ellen Cantor

"With Bamboo Xerox, I found another strategy to move my audience and break illusions. I photographed bamboo (my favorite grass) from my backyard and then xeroxed both sections of living bamboo and the photographic stills of the bamboo. After editing the film, I had the entire six-minute film blueprinted as a black and white scroll. I stretched the scroll horizontally around the theater space so that the audience could see the film frame by frame before they saw the projection." — Barbara Hammer

This tape negotiates the personal and cultural dynamics of being hapa, or Amerasian. Coming from a "mixed blood" background, Fulbeck weaves together personal narrative and media imagery to examine cultural icons, practices and assimilations from both the Chinese and American sides. Telling...

With its sinister and grotesque imagery, Bands is the most powerful and brutal of these early works. Starkly lit and isolated before the camera, Bozanich straps rubber bands across his face, distorting and slicing his flesh until it bleeds. The artist's self-mutilation becomes an emblematic howl of pain and despair.

"A stationary video camera obliquely frames a domestic setting: an open doorframe, a wall decorated by a woman's portrait, a closed door leading, perhaps, outisde. A spotlight trained on the scene, however, creates a sense of drama and suspense. Suddenly, human breaths are heard; the spotlight...

Selected Works I exemplifies Buckner's use of image-processing techniques to create dynamic visual expressions that manifest heightened states of consciousness and transform the electronic into the organic. In Hearts, vibrant heart-like forms pulsate with intense color and rhythm over a...

Selected Works II continues Buckner's explorations of image-processing techniques to portray the intangible levels of mental and spiritual energy. In The Golden Pictures, she animates everyday objects to startling effect, as they become fantastic visualizations of the energies of "inanimate"...

Using a hand-held camera, Hammer initially shot on 8 mm stock. Her second film—created in 1968 while the artist was still married (her married name was Barbara Ward)—programmatically shows the desecration of a graveyard. Though only at the beginning of her development as an artist, she already disturbs the peace of the dead, confidently erecting a monument to herself amid them: "Barbara Ward Will Never Die." The young filmmaker stakes her claim to a place in history.

Barbie wants to be the perfect lover for Ken, but there is alcoholism and anger and the consequent violation of their actual love. Based on a text called Alcoholism: The Merry-Go-Round of Denial, Barbie struggles throughout to retain her innocence. Consequently, the style of the video is handmade and childlike. The songs in the video, by Willie Nelson and Julie London (which I lip-sync), become the interior dialogue between Barbie and Ken." — Ellen Cantor

Shot in rural Nova Scotia, Barking is infused with a sense of mystery, the anticipation that something is about to happen. Suggesting an off-screen narrative, the scenario carries an unsettling implication of the limit of vision and the power of what is not seen.

In Barricade to Blue, Myers creates a metaphorical landscape with television monitors, flooding two congruent spaces with blue light. Depicting a transition from mundane reality to a mystical plane, she uses the blue light to evoke associations with "the aroused blue of sexuality...the blue of cold and dying...the transitional blues of the body passing into a state of bliss."

This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos' Soap Opera Series,in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap...

Hill's early formalist works explore the manipulation of electronic color and image density through processing. 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 Bathing Hill transforms the traditional image of a bathing figure by subtly integrating color video and digitized, re-scanned stills.

Bell-Smith terms his re-edit of Eisenstein's iconic 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin a "sort of Cliff Notes condensation of the original narrative." He separates the film into its original shots, with each shot sped up or slowed down to the exact same length - one half of a second - and a frame of white added at each cut. The soundtrack was replaced with a minimal, one-second dance-beat loop synced to the cut; the result recalls dance visuals and music videos.

Baldino records French artist Ivan Polliart as he watches the last part of Battleship Potemkin with his young son, Witold. Father and son sit on a couch together; the television is off camera. The viewer hears the soundtrack (in French) to Battleship Potemkin as Ivan reads the subtitles and explains the film to Witold.

Writes Kuchar: "Large and lumpy things chomp on chunks of matter made animate by techno-bipeds of the biosphere."

Terry Riley represents a continuous flow of musical ideas, from "In C" to this enchanting rag that dances and circles and absolves humanity of all evil by turning all thoughts to a state of enlightened delight. My response was to fashion a particle animation "video mandala" that morphs from a "Lawrence Welk on acid" beginning through a rainbow in curved air. -John Sanborn

Elliot Caplan's 35-mm film adaptation of Beach Birds, a dance work originally choreographed for the stage, begins with Merce Cunningham outlining his approach to dance for the camera, and thus his vision for how movement behaves and how we see it. He explains that the piece is choreography...

Continuing his investigation into the intersection of culture and technology in the context of the hand-made, here Arcangel explores the "mash-up," in which music fans digitally merge two songs to create unexpected hybrids. Arcangel's experiment pushes this practice into the realm of absurdity, pairing wildly different tracks — live footage of the Beach Boys and a contemporary music video by the rappers Geto Boys — based on the similarity of their bands' names.

"The soundtrack begins with the artist stating the conditions: 'An artist may construct a work and/or a work may be fabricated and/or a work need not be built. I elected five possibilities for videotape.' One sees the artist come over the horizon at a rocky beach and throw a piece of wood. The...

Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik, the haunting Beatles Electronique reveals Paik's engagement with manipulation of pop icons and electronic images. Snippets of footage from A Hard Day's Night are countered with Paik's early electronic processing.

Beaver Valley opens with the image of a cleaver striking a baby doll and the deadpan spoken question, "Wouldn't I make a good mother?" Representations of women on television, in commercials and in Hollywood movies are then intercut with footage of a nude woman, contrasting the female body with the meanings that are projected onto it.

In Because We Must, Atlas continued his collaboration with British choreographer Michael Clark, the enfant terrible of the dance world in the 1980s. Based on an original stage production at Sadlers' Wells Theatre in London, this is an ironic, irreverent work that is as entertaining as it is provocative. The extravagant stylization and burlesque humor that pervade the choreography, costuming and staging are mirrored by Atlas' focus on the theatricality of the performance and the artifice of the behind-the-scenes narrative.

One of four new episodes of Peggy and Fred in Hell completed since 2000, Bedtime sees a sustained use of found footage and integrates archival images—factories, military personnel, trolly rides, and explosions—with scenes of Peggy and Fred in their home. The film continues Thornton's meditation on the perils and potential of technologies, made playful and absurd by the narratives of her protagonists.

Three highly intellectual, highly sexual, visually playful digital works, charged with humour and political power. Hammer plays with the tools of digital processing mixing up the ‘straight love story’ by queering love and seduction through pixels gone astray.

Transforming individual lives into fictive texts, Geller illuminates the complexity of human nature in this layered, nonlinear narrative. Paralleling human and animal behavior, he intercuts three stories, building a seamless narrative from their visual and aural relationships. A horse racing...

Before, During, After is a collection of collaborative works that reference the devastating events of September 11th in New York. Levinas in Yorkville overlays images of Yorkville in upper Manhattan with text and music. In The Ambiguous Coil Gorewitz responds to the tragic events and their effects on New York. He writes: "After the panic, a tentative response."

Shot in Morocco, Beggar's Prayer abstracts naturalistic imagery of the Moroccan landscape through image processing. Gorewitz's abstraction and reconstruction of the image both mirrors and alters Islamic and early Hebraic art's "geometric repatterning of non-representational motifs."

Writes Kelley: "BEHOLDEN TO VICTORY is an edited video version of the full-length super-8 film Hail the Fallen. It is a 'war movie' genre picture. This film is normally presented in an active way — the act of screening the film is theatricalized by requiring the audience to wear costumes, and...

Composed entirely of film scraps salvaged from a closed Beirut cinema, this is a collage of sensational visions. Writes Ed Halter: "Outtakes appears to be a ready-made...pre-filled with Ahwesh's signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said."

In this densely textured work, Torres constructs a multilayered metaphor that transcends culture, time and place. Ruins of the abandoned Spanish town of Belchite and archival footage of the Spanish Civil War are juxtaposed with the ruined buildings and icons of the contemporary urban landscape of...

Horror and humor merge in Condit's incredulous, wide-eyed narration of a bizarre and lurid tale, which unfolds as a subterranean nightmare of male/female relationships. Condit's account of her discovery that her boyfriend had killed his former girlfriend and hidden the mummified body in their...

Lampert writes, "Chelsea thieves market, Sunday morning. Overloaded front table, sunglasses, cell phones, Viagra (sold by the pill, $10), assorted hot goods. Inaccessible back table, more of same, two 35mm film cans marked BENETTON. 'Excuse me, what's in those cans?' 'Twenty dollars.' 'Is...

A piece from the incremental Benetton series (2004- present). Premiered at the Kitchen in either 2005 or 2006.

"Bent Time is influenced by scientists who have noted that light rays curve at the outer edges of the universe leading them to theorize that time also bends. The film is accompanied by Pauline Oliveros' original score for voice and accordion, Rattlesnake Mountain." — Barbara Hammer

"Between the video and its shadow falls the wall." — Stuart Sherman

Berlin 1990 travels the streets and the political landscape of the recently re-unified Berlin. In the tumultuous atmosphere of 1990, we watch Berliners walk through check points manned by soldiers, past street vendors selling sausages and "actual" pieces of the Berlin Wall, and watch as they...

Writes Kobland, "It's a letter to Berlin; a graveyard meditation (with The Wall as its marker). I spent eight months in Berlin (West) as a DAAD fellow; a true guest worker, in 1986-87. I wanted to respond in some way to this strange place. I wanted to describe the landscape of Cold War Berlin, which immediately means dichotomy and invoking the imaginary; the landscape that isn't there as well as the one that is. The only spoken text in the tape are a segment of the John F. Kennedy 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech, given at the Berlin Wall in 1962, and fragments of radio news reports, from both DDR and Bundesrepublik broadcasts."

From 1995 to 1997, Bernadette Corporation constituted itself as an underground fashion label based in New York, complete with a head designer and four well-received runway shows. Drawing on the vernacular of local subcultures, from recent immigrant communities to the downtown fashion scene itself, the label's collections can be seen as a self-consciously critical examination of social codes and their expression through industrial nexuses of power and money. The shows documented here send up the spectacular nature of the fashion industry, incorporating such trappings as bear-costumed mascots, troupes of high-school dancers, and jets of fire.

Berry Face combines a techno beat with repeated flashes of colorful, hexagonal lights and zooms from a face fashioned of red berries and a blond wig.

Chat écoutant la musique (Cat Listening to Music)

This first tape in the Bestiaire trilogy provides Marker's beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, with his "most widely acclaimed" screen role. As Marker recalls, "He was fond of Ravel (any cat is) but he had a special crush on Mompou. That day (a...

Writes Ahwesh: "Working through my archive of accumulated video footage, I pretended it was found footage from anonymous sources. What began as a tribute to Bruce Conner of the period of Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, with their deliberate pace and bittersweet memory of home, ended as a dedication to my father as I wound my way through miscellany with distance and another aim."

During an artist's residency in Spain, Peter d'Agostino performed video walks through Cordoba's three architectural monuments: The Great Mosque, Alcazar, and Synagogue, looking up with the camera toward the ceilings. When he began to edit in September, 2001, the events of 9/11 were unfolding on television. Reflecting on a 'culture of tolerance,' d'Agostino provides a rich blend of cultural, historical and aesthetic associations meant to resonate with viewers during two key historical epochs: Spain during the the 10th century and during the present era of global crises at the outset of the 21st century.

Between Earth & Sky: MX I / pyramids is a video triptych from a suite of ten walks Peter d'Agostino performed in Mexico City and its surroundings, the east and west coasts, and the U.S. border. Created in the form of a video triptych, MX I is composed of juxtapositions- looping, repeating and repositioning of sounds & images to accentuate and combine the natural and cultural aspects of the walks.

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Between the Lines examines the "invisible mechanisms" that control and contextualize media information. Analyzing a news report to demonstrate how facts are mediated by television's limits, Muntadas focuses on the role and responsibility of the reporter — the person between the facts and the...

Bi-Coastal is a self-promotional TV spot.

The artists collaborated with Dean Winkler on Big Electric Cat, one of their first experiments with image-processing using computer graphic and Paintbox systems. To music by Adrian Belew, they synthesize animation and video into what Sanborn terms a "seamless and effortless trip through psychedelic techniques, hypnotically in tune with the song."

Big Market is an evocative travel journal and a formalist study, as Jonas transforms time and space in a document of Budapest's marketplace. A multilayered portrait of place is conveyed through images of the market's produce displays, transaction rituals, faces and gestures, as well as the city's...

In this narrative performance for video, Burden tells the story of his relationship with a truck named "Big Job." To relate his autobiographical monologue, he sits deadpan before the camera with moving images of the truck behind him. Writes Burden, "During a six-month period, while the artist...

Bilder der Berührungen features a full-length experimental film, Syntagma, within a digital sound-and-image-scape that includes film and video sequences, photographs, quotations and poems, drawn from Export's extensive body of work.

Callas writes: "This videotape is an electronic rendering of a form of proto-televisual iconomania: the creation of haphazardly sourced private pictoral scrap books or 'bilderbucher.'" Continuing in his frenetic appropriation and re-casting of historical icons and symbols, Callas references Hans...

"Burp — it's spring!" —; Stuart Sherman

Award-winning choreographer/dancer Bill T. Jones' "new wave" choreography of the 1980s often featured video, text, and autobiographical references, with costumes and sets by noted downtown artists. This 1982 program features four powerful performances by Jones at The Kitchen. This document, which includes artist Keith Haring creating his iconic drawings as part of the performance, represents a snapshot of the early 1980s dance scene in New York.

In this rare and intimate portrait of Bill Viola, shot in Rio de Janeiro as he was installing his exhibition at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, the artist speaks of his work, life and family. Excerpts from Viola's tape The Passing and the installations Tiny Deaths, Heaven and Earth, and Science...

This illuminating documentary is a comprehensive view of the life and work of Woody and Steina Vasulka, pioneers of electronic art. From the late 1960s in New York, where they founded The Kitchen, to their present home in New Mexico, the Vasulkas trace their involvement with video and their...

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 nine parts. An hour after he finished, the house was demolished; segments of the facade were taken to Art Park and dumped.

In Binocular Menagerie, Thornton plays with vision, perception and transformation. A series of images of animals—a virtual menagerie of birds, reptiles and mammals—is framed within a format of two circular windows. Each animal's movements on the left are remapped into an elegant abstraction on...

With this montage of still images, Lampert leads the viewer on a tour of Leeds, the third largest city in the United Kingdom, using the city's trashcans as his guideposts. Here, the refuse and everyday objects—floppy disks, soda cans, styrofoam take-out containers—become sculptural and oddly...

The décor for BIPED is an exploration into the possibilities of motion capture technology. The movements (but not the physical appearances) of the dancers were transposed into digital images. Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar collaborated with Merce Cunningham to make a new piece of virtual choreography. The dancers involved in the motion capture process were Jared Phillips, Jeannie Steele, and Robert Swinston. — Merce Cunningham Trust

In this evocative formalist exercise, Lucier explores light in relation to the material properties of video. Aiming a laser directly at the camera's eye, she burned the vidicon tube. Changing the focal length of the lens and moving the laser, she records the optical effect of the camera's light perception and absorption. The resulting configurations, set to Alvin Lucier's electronic score Bird and Person Dyning, become an abstract calligraphy of light. Lucier's technology-based, visual records of refraction and reticulation refer to the Impressionists' empirical observations of changes in light over a measured period of time.

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." Bits is an abbreviated study of minutiae, textures and patterns, in which Hill explores editing techniques and rhythm.

Employing single-frame edits from broadcast television, the artists construct a rapid-fire media barrage of sound and image in Black & White.

Note: For preview only.

Note: For online preview only.

"Pixel, pixel, little video, won't you tell us when you're boring and when you're not?" — Stuart Sherman

This compilation of thirteen early black and white performance tapes from the 1970s reveals the nascent development of the themes, the raw physicality, and the performance personae that mark McCarthy's well-known later works. In several pieces, McCarthy uses his own body as a tool to examine the...

In this film, Nauman applies black makeup to his testicles. The action was recorded with an industrial high-speed camera capable of shooting between one thousand and four thousand frames per second.

Writes Harris: "Black Body is an attempt to come to terms with the contradictions inherent in the experience of blackness and maleness in this country. Drawing on representations of the body in makonde carvings of Tanzania, East Africa, Black Body explores the body's physical and psychic...

In Black Celebration, Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in urban black neighborhoods in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create an incisive counter-reading.

Gorewitz employs an ancient metaphor drawn from Jewish ritual in Black Fire. The light of a flame used by Jewish mystics as a source of contemplation is transposed by Gorewitz into a collage of ominous, erupting images. Juxtaposing scenes of urban decay with pastoral landscapes, he ultimately transforms the screen into a burnished, glowing icon that echoes the ritual's origin.

Sondra Perry's videos and performances foreground the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential. At once abstract and representational, the video Black Girl as a Landscape articulates Perry’s stated interest in the possibility of abstraction as a way of creating dimensionality that connections individual bodies to larger visual and environmental ecologies.

In his early works, Hill explores the structural and organic relation of linguistics to electronic phenomena. Black/White/Text is a linguistic deconstruction that represents the syllabic structure of words as text on the screen.

Blessed Avenue is a tribute to the artist’s late mother. Songs she recorded on cassette tape and her drawings for a fantasy QVC line of domestic products are catalysts for a clubby, S&M-themed Hieronymus Bosch-inspired music video performed by Satterwhite, Juliana Huxtable, Lourdes Leon Ciccone...

Writes Kelley: "BLIND COUNTRY is a collaboration between myself and filmmaker Ericka Beckman. It was inspired by the H.G. Wells short story The Country of the Blind, which was a favorite of mine as an adolescent. I was both fascinated and repulsed by this tale of a man having to give up his eyes...

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

A short encounter between the artist and a man on a North African street is slowed down, forcing the viewer into an intimate relationship with the subject and the shifting emotion...

"Flicker: White and black alternating frames."

Writes Norman Yonemoto, "In the novella Blinky The Friendly Hen (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to...

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Assuming the role of visionary CEO Guy White, Musson pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app—co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. The app, a blank white screen intended for infinite scrolling without the friction of content, is offered as an “American-sized solution to an American-sized problem.” The interface appeases social media users’ desire to be “connected” by distilling it into one core feature: the sensory feedback of physically caressing a screen. The sole content of the Blockedt! app, a “white void,” sends up digital start-up culture's fixation on flashy, stop-gap solutions and sleek aesthetics—anodyne all-white interfaces that implicitly, perhaps inadvertently, convey whiteness as a default.

Blocking documents General Idea's 1974 performance at the artist-run center The Western Front in Vancouver, one of a series that began with the Miss General Idea Pageants of 1970 and 1971 and became part of the extended project The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion. Here they "rehearse" the audience staging and reactions in preparation for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant.

This legendary film features artist Jack Smith in what Jacobs calls "a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950's, 40's, 30s disgust. " Jacobs did little of the shooting himself, instead drawing on two unfinished films shot by Bob Fleischner. With its dissociative editing strategies, wild costumes, and scraps of music and voiceover, this baroque portrait deserves Jonas Mekas' recommendation as "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema."

With reflected images of classic American myths and ideals Melitopoulos suggests that many cultural assumptions, reinforced by mass media, are obsolete, and that notions of geopolitics must be revised.

Seoungho Cho transforms a sublime natural landscape into a stunning abstraction through precise electronic manipulation. Writes Cho: "Blue Desert is one in a series of ongoing visual struggles with Death Valley, a specific desert landscape which I have worked with since 1992. It is also not the last piece, as I have every intention to continue producing works about Death Valley. Death Valley has been quite simply my favorite place on the earth since my first visit in 1992."

Blue Film No. 6: Love Is Where You Find It is a found porn flick: a threesome. Hammer excises the male part, retaining the two women and an amusing digest of voyeuristic platitudes.

The story of the Argentine tango star Carlos Gardel is retold in a (computer graphic) theater in which his 1935 movie is projected. If the tango is "a sad thought one can dance," then we are offered the spectacle of romance as compensation. The battle of the Marne and the cooling towers of an...

Produced as a music video for New Order's song Blue Monday, this witty and dynamic piece fuses Breer's vivid animation and Wegman's humorous tableaux with his dog Fay Ray.

With Blue Moon Over, Weiner extends his text-based works into a digital realm, positing aphorisms and epigrammatic phrases that investigate language, acquisition and desire. Employing a visual system that suggests flowcharts, horizon lines and diagrams, Blue Moon Over is structured as a series of seamlessly animated sequences of drawings and text fragments. Through subtle manipulations, Weiner engages in linguistic tricks and metamorphoses that visually manifest his conceptual inquiries.

This formal study of reflections of light and shadow in water is accompanied by the ambient sound of trickling water. In Blue Mountains, Australia, Hoover gradually freezes the image, while the audio continues unabated.

Created in response to the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1984, Blue Swee is a protest against government policy at home and abroad. This powerful collage of appropriated material draws from sources that include 1960s' civil-rights footage, demonstrations recorded in the South Bronx, and archival images of soldiers.

In this conceptual performance, Davidovich "paints" on an electronic canvas in the three primary colors of the color wheel, by covering a TV screen with adhesive tape: first blue, then red, then yellow.

Writes Lampert: "Little diary moments from my hard drive that show but do not tell who, what and where I was in my on and off time around 2008-2011. Don't blink or you might miss Steve Dalachinsky, Gelitin, Richard Foreman, John Zorn, my father, my nephew, Fidget the cat, Dani Leventhal, Liz Coffey, Tom Jarmusch, Metamkine, Willem Defoe and others, myself included. Very dramatic ending."

Rist's body is the canvas in this surreal montage. Unflinching displays of the artist's own menstrual blood are juxtaposed with images of gemstones, while swooping, close-up shots of Rist's arms and legs are followed by archival footage of lunar fly-bys, suggesting the ease with which visual culture has abstracted the female body into a beautiful but alien natural phenomenon.

In Bob and Jill (Pt. 2), the relation between fact and fiction in the personal and popular narratives of everyday life is rendered in an assemblage of soap opera conventions, performance and documentary. Opening with on-screen text that relates "The Story So Far" ("Jill crashed the Volvo..."),...

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

Ken Jacobs describes Bob Fleischner Dying: "Bob allows his sick and fading image to be caught in stereo photography. A man of mystery, so banal in some ways, so unexpectedly 'on' when the situation demanded. The cameraman for Blonde Cobra and much beloved by the next generation of NY film-makers."

This is a newly restored version of a visceral "movement-event" from 1967, in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, creating a physicalized corporal collage.

Body Count addresses social conditioning in relation to America's culture of violence. Reeves and Hilton juxtapose children's warplay with radio transmissions and news reportage from the Vietnam War, and images of John F. Kennedy, corpses and marching cadets.

Palestine calls Body Music I "a study in the vocal-physical responses of a species caught in an enclosed square room." He begins this ritualistic piece by banging his knees against the floor. As his momentum accelerates, he then hurtles himself with intensity against the walls.

Produced at Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy, these works are seminal performance-based exercises. Body Music I is "a study in the vocal-physical responses of a species caught in an enclosed square room." In Body Music II Palestine creates a frenetic visual translation of physical movement and energy.

Produced at Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy, this work is a seminal performance-based exercise. Palestine wanders through the labyrinthine hallways of a villa, recording with a hand-held camera. Moving faster and chanting into the space, he creates a frenetic visual translation of his physical movements and energy.

In a series of witty, minimalist exercises that are introduced by inter-titles (Touching, Boxing, Feeling, Hearing, Tasting, and Walking), VALIE EXPORT explores the relationship between word and action.

In Body Tracks, Mendieta stands, arms raised, with her back to the camera. Moving down the wall, she tracess two blood streaks with her hands. This piece introduces the tree motif and trough form that re-occur in Mendieta's work.

Body/Voice is an early performance based work recorded in 1985, and compiled and edited by the artist in 1996.

Bon Voyage was commissioned for a live theater and video event in Tokyo by the Island Theater group. Generated entirely from live Japanese television, this work isolates traditional and contemporary cultural gestures as signs, utilizing a two-frame animation technique developed on the Fairlight CVI.

Wearing silver heels, fishnets and long, red satin gloves, Baldino attaches a Slinky between two bookends with a power drill. Performing as if she were a magician's assistant, she presents a magazine to the camera and wedges it in the Slinky. The bookends and Slinky collapse.

This interview is with Carlos Montanez, Director of The Mobile Market food distribution program at Henry Street Settlement.

Booty Melt, a mash-up of re-edited YouTube clips and original flash animation, explores the conflation of cartoon violence and real or implied violence in the pop vernacular. Ciocci finds hybrid monsters of caricature/reality in hip-hop fashion and emulative teen culture (viral videos of teens dancing and lip-syncing to hip-hop). Just as errant Looney Tunes become sinister symbols in the everyday, YouTube flattens identity, and, as Ciocci explains, "makes cartoons out of everybody."

Born to be Sold is Paper Tiger Television and Rosler's acerbic and witty interpretation of the notorious "Baby M" case, in which a natural — "surrogate" — mother and father of a baby fought each other for custody of the child. Rosler assumes various roles of the participants in the controversy,...

Borrowed Time, which Gorewitz refers to as "a video dirge for my father," combines highly personal subject matter (including a helicopter ride over an active volcano) and the artist's own music, all synthesized through wildly vivid and frenetic electronic image manipulation.

In this vivid transposition of contemporary music for television, Cahen "responds" to the complex musical transitions of Répons, a work by French composer Pierre Boulez. Performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain and conducted by Boulez, the intricate Répons was designed for an ensemble of...

In this film, Nauman bounces his testicles with one hand. Shot in extreme close-up, the work is one of Nauman's "Slo-Mo" films which are shot with an industrial high speed camera.

For this videotape, Nauman turned the camera sideways and positioned it so that his head is cropped from the frame and his body is presented from neck to ankles. As he stands in the corner, his back to the wall, he appears to be lying down; falling backwards into the corner and then pushing...

Nauman, his head cropped from the frame, is shown bouncing in the corner of his studio. Here, however, the images were recorded with a fixed camera that was inverted rather than turned on its side.

In this film Nauman bounces two balls in the center of a square marked by tape on the studio floor. He throws them as hard as he can, trying to maintain a specific pattern, but the balls ricochet out of control as his moves become correspondingly jumpy and unpredictable. The film was shot with a...

This interpretation of Bow Falls is a collaboration in accord with the Earthscore Notational System. This notation assumes that there are patterns in waterflow that can be communicated electronically. Paul Ryan uses handheld camerawork, slow motion, reverse motion and negative color fields to...

Beauty, laughter, exuberance and shyness are revealed through simple gestures and glances. To look at a surprised or bemused expression on a face and to record that expression through the camera entails a certain amount of staring. To record=to stare. In the poetic sense, this stare permits...

An homage to Op-Art, Brain Operations was inspired by an optical illusion produced by checkered tiles on the artist's bathroom floor. "When editing 16mm film, I had reached for a strand and closed my hand on nothing," Jacobs explains. "I had visually coupled similar-appearing frames, popping them forward in space. It was a life-changing moment...I'm staring down and the tiles come up almost to my nose." In this work, he opts for squares and diamonds—"tilted squares"—which produce the same chimera of depth, at the convergence of sightlines.

Super-8 camera held out before him as shield and surrogate, Acconci pushes through a landscape of dense reeds and overgrowth. Break-Through records this search for a pause or clearing in what, for the viewer, amounts to an abstracted and scarcely differentiated visual field.

LoVid works with discrete sound and video signals to visualize the discontinuity of time. Using analogue electrical noise as a signal for both, LoVid unlocks an "entrance" into the digital space, manifested in vibrations of color and the hypnotizing alternation between movement and stasis.

The screen is empty: the artist stands off-screen — he breathes in and out, his stomach moving into and out of the frame.

Breath Text is a powerfully simple performance in which VALIE EXPORT creates tension by breathing compulsively.

Bridge Visitor's subject matter relates to what is known as a "legend-trip" in folkloric studies. In this case the legend-trip refers to the ritualized journeys taken by teenagers to "spooky" locales in search of darker knowledge. The tape plays with various adolescent infatuations with Satan....

The artist fixes a hole in a brief case, only to turn it around and reveal that it is missing one side.

"In this video the artist states that it is a public freehold work which demonstrates what could be art within his responsibility. Like Beached it was also shot in a marshy area near the sea and in sequences that are separated by dissolves. One sees five different actions that are related to...

In this short and beautiful piece, Jacobs creates a flicker effect by editing close-up footage of a stream together with sections of black, producing a sense of constant movement that never progresses. The frame of the image shifts from vertical to horizontal and then slowly rotates 360 degrees,...

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City landmark, the Brooklyn Bridge. Emphasizing its strength and beauty, Jonas locates the bridge as an iconic site in this meditative, cryptic study of...

The scene is Brussels, a summer afternoon, and the city seems suspended, silent, waiting. A young girl reads a letter from a friend who is away from the city on vacation. André then opens the narrative—fiction? document?—into a journal of the city in summer, which she presents as an urban landscape of open, empty spaces, from pastoral parks to corporate plazas. Brussels' architecture, and its residents engaged in the transactions of daily life, are the essential elements with which André establishes a mood, a sense of time and place.

This meditative video is a philosophical investigation, a travelogue of sorts, and, ultimately, a probing essay-film. Kobland pairs lingering shots of urban scenes, industrial installations, deserts, and other evocative landscapes with fragmentary ruminations from filmmakers such as Fassbinder, Bergman and Tarkovsky. Floating over images virtually evacuated of human form or movement, these questions and digressions call up a beautiful and melancholy world.

The golden, barren landscape of Death Valley, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the luminous and mysterious texture of Buoy. Cho reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, once the floor of a vast sea and now traversed by tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho's camera, vertical "strata" pattern the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho's composition.

Writes Gorewitz: "Bush Blinks is based on internet pictures that collected on my computer while I was in Israel during the spring mixed with a few digital stills I shot there. At first I was playing with the 'blink' filter in the editing software, making it look as through Bush and other world...

Writes Gorewitz, "But It's True, which began insistently chanting itself in my head in the spring and summer of 2013, is a set of lovestruck variations in which the last line of each stanza forms a refrain which changes slightly from stanza to stanza. In addition, cento-like, But It's True incorpora...

The exuberant irreverence and wit of Butterfly characterizes Paik's stream-of-consciousness visual and conceptual techniques. In a vibrant image/music collage, he ironically juxtaposes high-cultural artifacts (the aria from Madame Butterfly), contemporary avant-garde icons (Laurie Anderson) and...

In this visually minimalist work, Cho pursues an associative connection between a Buddhist drumming ritual and the pulsing drum solo in Iron Butterfly's famous psychedelic rock song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." In Cho's unexpected intermixing of the mesmerizing Buddhist ritual drumming and Iron Butterfly's iconic hard rock classic, he frames the drummer so that his movements resemble those of a butterfly beating its wings in air.

Button Happening is Nam June Paik's earliest extant videotape, and possibly his first tape ever. Recorded in 1965 on the day he acquired his first Sony Portapak camera, this previously unknown work has recently been rediscovered and restored. Recorded on computer tape, this technically fragile...

This ambitious live satellite link-up of Japan, Korea and the United States features interviews with Keith Haring and architect Arata Isozaki, and performances and works by Philip Glass and the Kodo Drummers, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Lou Reed. In an extraordinary section, a...

Kobland presents meditative work that speaks to memory, identity, and the relationships between individuals and experiences that transcend space and time. A hypnotic gallery of images—postcards, domestic spaces, window sills, personal belongings—float across the frame and fade into one another, constructing strata of associations and anonymous histories. Kobland composes a loose and pensive narrative in stream-of-consciousness style that appears as white text at the base of the frame, much like subtitles to the artist's solitary contemplation.

Writes Lucas: "Cable Xcess is a public service announcement/infommercial which informs viewers about the consequences of long term exposure to electromagnetic fields. I perform as both spokesperson and case study, transmitting a pirate broadcast through my body (body as satellite), educating...

Ant Farm's well-known site-specific installation, the Cadillac Ranch, was commissioned by Texas millionaire Stanley Marsh III. Ten Cadillacs, vintage 1948 to 1963, were buried fin-up in a field off Route 66 in Amarillo as an ironic celebration of the "grotesque and wonderful" tail-fin as the ultimate expression of wasteful design in American culture. In a 1984 postscript, the artists address the piece's evolution from a conceptual sculpture to a public roadside attraction, rusted and graffiti-covered.

This feature film traces the history of the 50-year-long collaboration between choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Award-winning filmmaker and Cunningham collaborator Elliot Caplan brings together rare footage from the Cunningham and Cage archives, interviews with principal figures involved in the collaboration, and candid documents of their art and lives. The result is a revealing portrait of the two men and their spirit of adventure and iconoclastic thinking.

This video documents Cake Walk, an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant's pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), at its second (downtown) location on Franklin Street. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance which...

Camera, Monitor, Frame is the first installment of Takahiko Iimura's "Video Semiotics Triptych" (the other two works are Observer/Observed, made in 1975, and Observer/Observed/Observer, made in 1976). The work analyzes the fundamental components of video: the camera, the monitor, and the frame, focusing on the role of each within a system of video as analogous to the functions of vision and speech.

Roberta Smith writes in The New York Times, "Ms. Kahn is seen with a bloodied nose, a viking helmet and a large wedge of rubber Swiss cheese, rambling around Los Angeles, talking to the camera, Ms. Dodge and us. The one-sided conversation turns variously competitive ('You should have been there...

These two works, which complete Gillette's series of tapes produced for Classical Video, are visual translations of Johann Pachelbel's composition, Canon in D Major. Each resonates with a different evocation of the music. Canon 1 depicts rich landscape imagery in a joyous, sensuous...

In Canon: Taking to the Streets, Birnbaum breaks with traditional documentary format. Using tools from the low-end and high-end of technology, she episodically views recent events of student activism in the United States. This is a study of the 1987 Take Back the Night march on the Princeton...

Cantaloup is an informal documentary on the Vasulkas' Digital Image Articulator, an imaging device they designed with Jeffrey Schier. Using a cantaloup and the three artist/designers as source material, Steina explains the capabilities of the machine, including its real-time imaging ability and the articulation of images in a digital code

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

Jacobs digitally animates a Victorian stereoscopic photograph of a 19th-century factory floor, crowded with machinery and child workers. He isolates the faces of individuals and details of the image, as if searching out the human and the particular within this mechanized field of mass production. Space appears to fold in on itself as Jacobs activates the stereograph; the agitated image flickers and stutters, but the motion never, in fact, progresses.

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

Ken Jacobs writes: "An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief."

In her earliest film, which has been newly transferred to video, Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music. Ruggles is seen enjoying pie a la mode and ruminating on subjects ranging from Christmas to his incomplete opera The Sunken Bell. The hand-painted film stock heightens the impressionistic vitality of this snapshot of the 84-year-old composer.

An actress rehearses for a role as Lampert's great, great, great, great, great Aunt Chana Kozehovich. Following Lampert's direction, Golum adjusts her inflection and characterization as she delivers a melodramatic monolog describing life in late 1700s Siberia.

The still photograph is transformed and reframed in time in these exquisite collections of thirty-second "video postcards." An image of a city appears to be captured as a traditional postcard, frozen in time. Suddenly the photograph is "released," electronically brought to life for one...

Collaborating with artists Dike Blair and Dan Graham, and musician/composer Christian Marclay, MICA-TV crafts an ode to the urban and suburban architecture of the contemporary American cultural landscape.

Catch 44, co-produced by Nam June Paik, fuses Cage's compositional precepts with the immediacy and real time of video. Cage is seen performing and preparing for the program "WGBX: A Telecast for Composers and Technicians," presented by the Boston public television station WGBX-TV (Channel 44)....

Cats is a plotter drawing produced in an edition of 20, created by Cory Arcangel exclusively for Electronic Arts Intermix's 2018 benefit art auction. Purchase inquiries should be directed to info@eai.org. Price: $1500.

Catscan is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann's previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of...

A photographic session in which the artist as "ballerina" is photographed by the "photographer" in a set of stills intended to represent her in the appropriately glamorous and correct positions, after only three months of ballet training. The tape juxtaposes the truth of the "still" image, adequate for 1/125 of a second, against the video camera's more extensive duration. The cropped reality photographed is compared to the "truth" of the video camera.

A vivid hybrid of dance, performance and special effects featuring performers Robert Ashley and Julia Heyward, Cause and Effect was produced with REBO High Definition Studios and exhibited as a 35-mm short at the New York Film Festival and the Venice Biennale.

An alternative to corporate music videos that mass-market young female musicians, Celebrations for Breaking Routine documents girl bands in Liverpool and Basel recording original songs commissioned by Lucas. This video is part of a larger project in which Lucas traveled to cities internationally recognized for their music scenes and invited young girl-led bands to write songs about the future. These community-based collaborations resulted in alternative visions of female empowerment and identity in a media-driven culture.

Celebrity Author comments on America's celebrity-conscious media culture through a satirical recreation of a low-budget talk show.

LoVid continues their investigation into the intersections between the organic forms of bodies and nature and the inorganic world of technology and electronics. cell-a-scape visualizes the juxtaposition of media with physical objects, geographic spaces, and human culture, and foregrounds the porous boundaries between the "reality" of nature and the constructed experience of technology.

In Cellardoor, Donegan makes a direct connection between her plastic bottle mask and a camera. She holds the bottle mask by its handle and pans the room as though she were operating a video camera. The perspective shifts between a static shot of the artist and the searching gaze from inside the plastic bottle.

CENTER JENNY is one of four movies to date completed in 2013 by Trecartin, first shown as a work in progress at the Arsenale of the the Venice Biennale. Since settling in Los Angeles in 2010, Fitch and Trecartin have designed and built a modular maze of sets on a soundstage with the help of Hollywood technicians who have rigged the space with lights and hydraulics enabling it to move and change for different projects.

In Centers, Acconci faces the camera, his head and arm in close-up as he points straight ahead at his own image on the video monitor, attempting to keep his finger focused on the exact center of the screen. In pointing at the image of himself, Acconci is also pointing directly at the viewer — an action that is paradigmatic of the psychological dynamic of Acconci's work in video.

"In Addendum: Autism, the artist faces the stationary camera in direct address; she confronts the viewer one-on-one, her head filling the frame in close-up. Her mouth slightly open, Dara Birnbaum stares with unblinking intensity into the camera. She performs a series of anxious gestures: she runs...

"In Adandoned, the first in the Chaired Anxieties series, Birnbaum enters a studio space that is empty except for a wooden folding chair. Barefoot and in jeans, the artist is seen from the neck down; her face is glimpsed only briefly. Performing in front of a fixed camera, Birnbaum enacts a...

"In Slewed, the second exercise in the Chaired Anxieties series, Dara Birnbaum again performs alone in front of a stationary camera, The artist's interactions with the wooden folding chair take on a heightened physical and psychological intensity. Birnbaum is first seen from the waist down,...

The artist assembles a jerry-rigged chandelier. She then hangs it upside down and illuminates it.

We see the celebration of New Year's Eve with fireworks in 1988, repeated exactly in 1923, in 1908, and in munitions explosions in 1812, as well as an air attack in World War II — and there is no difference in the image. Meanwhile, a group of women tries to remember the words of the third stanza...

Juxtaposing two restagings of a melodramatic scene from The Who's rock opera Tommy, Donegan analyzes how media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In Donegan's almost psychedelic renditions, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of foil, plastic, police tape, and rescanned video images of Ann-Margret. First actress Garland Hunter enacts the scene, and then, in a silent version, Donegan herself takes the role.

In this restaging of a scene from Tommy, The Who's rock opera, Donegan analyzes the ways in which media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In an almost psychedelic rendition, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of foil, plastic, police tape, and rescanned video images of Tommy star Ann-Margret.

In this restaging of a melodramatic scene from Tommy, The Who's rock opera, Donegan analyzes the ways in which media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In an almost psychedelic rendition, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of foil and rescanned video images of Tommy star Ann-Margret. In this silent version, Donegan herself takes the role.

To create Channels/Inserts, Cunningham and Atlas divided the Cunningham Dance Company's Westbeth studio into sixteen possible areas for dancing and used chance methods based on the I Ching to determine the order in which these spaces would be used, the number of dancers to be seen, and the events that would occur in each space. Atlas employed cross-cutting and animated mattes or wipes to indicate a simultaneity of dance events occurring in different spaces, as well as to allow for diversity in the continuity of the image.

This close-up document captures the eclecticism and offbeat vibrancy of the New York performance art and music scene of the late 1970s and early '80s, featuring performances created for video by Don Cherry, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Jackson MacLow and George Maciunas.

Gigliotti's close-up documents capture the eclecticism and offbeat vibrancy of the New York performance art and music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Chant a Capella includes performances created for video by Don Cherry, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Jackson MacLow and George...

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

In Artists' Portraits: Antonio Muntadas, produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the artist discusses the theories and systems that inform his work: "We are surrounded by two landscapes: one environmental, and the other a media landscape we get from television." This portrait also features documentation...

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

To create this dense pop collage, Bell-Smith overlaid the first twelve parts of R. Kelly's soap opera/song cycle, Trapped in the Closet, playing them simultaneously. He writes, "I wanted to take this cultural object and amplify its peculiarity by folding the song and narrative onto itself." The result is a thick blur of overlapping forms and ghostly voices atop a plodding beat, all building to a chaotic crescendo and release.

Nine Person Precision Ball Passing is a synchronized dance performance by avant-garde choreographer Charles Moulton. Choreographing with the camera, Blumberg transforms this collective feat via computer processing into a tic-tac-toe grid of repeated images.

Larry Miller's tribute focuses on the last years in the life of avant-garde cellist and performer Charlotte Moorman. Miller captures Moorman performing despite her illness. A remarkable segment features a 1989 performance for the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where Keith Haring fills in for an...

In Charmant Band, the barely suppressed violence of vom Bruch's rapid-fire video switching is mirrored by his dynamic, reductive imagery. In an aggressive collapse of the personal and historical, vom Bruch repeatedly inserts the "live" image of his own face into fragmented film footage depicting...

Writes Kuchar: "A woman in purple holds up a glittering array of collected technology while groovy people eat tainted flesh on a sabbath reeking of gunpowder. Cats chomp down on tepid tidbits while balding behemoths squat amongst dilapidated sectionals designed for the pads of a pachederm. A...

"I've got to stop drinking — less." — Stuart Sherman

The artist creates an absurd interpretation of a wine and cheese plate. At one point she replaces the stem of a wine glass with a pencil.

This highly stylized narrative, told with black humor, is both a parody and an homage to the omnipotence of the clichés of Hollywood cinema and television advertising. A collaborative effort by Hámos and Berlin filmmakers Marian Kiss and Ed Cantu, this studied pastiche of popular genres and media...

In Cheryl, Donegan's starting point is the appropriated audio of a self-motivating corporate monologue by a woman named Cheryl. A model of forced enthusiasm, this stand-in repeats a litany of retail clichés and self-encouragements; the audio is coupled with a flow of low-res images, taken from the Web, of cheaply made, kitschy consumer items.

In Gag, Donegan sits, hands behind her back, clutching a baguette between her knees. She chews and swallows the bread until only a stub remains. In Guide Donegan uses her hands and fingers to chart a path of "footprints" on paper, only to immediately smear and obscure the prints with water and a...

In these three performance-based, gestural works, Donegan uses her body as an art-making tool to subvert traditional modes of painting and play with notions of identity and art history.

Children's Tapes is a classic early video work, a seminal investigation that translates the aesthetics of minimalism, performance, perception and real time into the vernacular of the everyday. With ingenuity and wit, Fox constructs phenomenological dramas from the science of the quotidian....

Rosler creates a kind of whirling music-video burlesque to offer icons and reminders of the conjunction in Chile of U.S. corporate presence, popular musical strains, and victims of political terror. Chile, at the southernmost end of South America, is on the fast track to admission into the...

Thornton's continuing fascination with technology finds an unlikely expression in these digitally manipulated film sequences, in which a chimpanzee's pratfalls come to stand in for the human experience of media.

This space and texture work, created specifically for video, is a tour of the skyline and domestic interiors of New York's Chinatown.

Produced in response to what DCTV felt were inaccurate media portrayals of New York City's Chinatown, this award-winning, often startling portrait of an immigrant community probes beneath the tourist's-eye-view to uncover the complexity of an inner-city subculture plagued by poverty and...

In this playful cooking video, Chinese chef David Yang demonstrates the ancient art of noodle making. Beginning at the end of the story, Blumberg first presents the process of noodle making backwards — a cleaver jumps into the chef's hand; strands of noodles swing wildly in the air. When the...

Selected Works exemplifies Lord's approach to social critique through humor, as he uses conventional television forms and devices — the commercial, the public service announcement and the talk show — and subverts their content. Celebrity Author comments on America's celebrity-conscious media...

Chott el-Djerid is a remarkable study of perception and transcendence. Viola writes that "Chott el-Djerid is the name of a vast dry salt lake in the Tunisian Sahara desert where mirages are most likely to form in the midday sun. Here, the intense desert heat manipulates, bends and distorts the...

Jacobs' first 'Nervous Magic Lantern' performance (1990) paired with a soundtrack by Harrison Birtwistle (1971). Ken Jacobs writes: "Magic Lantern performance (a work for one projector) recorded to video. Mesh of clockwork sounds by Harrison Birtwistle. 'The movie projector's a kind of clock', the artist Ed Bachelor said. Somewhere inside the machine beats a Piranesi space, shaped and given dimension by a string of exposures of a seated woman undulating gravity-free. Who is this alluring lady of this filmstrip-tease? I call her Dinah, because the name contains a d, an n, and an a. Dinah Ovum! She is waiting, she is confident, she is radioing for help. Her message: 'Let us gestate, love.'"

In Cinderella 2001, Hodel pushes her usual performance-to-camera work with a more developed dramatic structure. The result is a vibrant performance tape with an unnerving, compulsive narrative that explores issues of image and obsession.

Artist Cindy Sherman first came to widespread attention in the early 1980s with evocative photographs that simulated film stills. Posing as "B" movie characters, she cast herself as director, producer and protagonist, masquerading as a startling range of female identities. The stylized scenarios...

This early work belongs in the company of Paik and Yalkut's classic collaborative "video-films." To the accompaniment of the abrupt sonic interjections of Fluxus-affiliated composer Takehisa Kosugi, Yalkut's film records brief, masked views of human actions. Reminiscent of Beckett's theater, as well as the minimal movements of 1960s avant-garde dance, Cinéma Metaphysique is a study in gesture and stillness, noise and silence.

Jacobs documents New York in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, from the emergency workers and crowds around Ground Zero to the spontaneous memorials in Union Square. He records the process of gaining access to his own apartment, just blocks north of the Trade Center site, from which smoke was still rising. Jacobs' camera returns repeatedly to the empty sky, gazing as if in disbelief at the void.

Yalter purposefully intercuts images of herself (a woman of Turkish descent) with a succession of modern Arab women protesting in the streets. With an evocative soundtrack of women's voices, this arresting collage of visuals and spoken text conveys the multicultural aspect of today's Europe.

The 1970's saga of heiress Patty Hearst's abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army — and her subsequent transformation into a gun-toting radical — is told as an absurdist drama of countercultural alienation. The tape's raw, deliberately home-made execution provides an abject theater for the...

Foreman produced City Archives, a labyrinthine collage of image and language, at the invitation of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The tape centers on the perspective of an outsider — the foreigner as Other — towards a city and its artifacts. Foreman's signature visual and verbal puns and...

City Slivers is a formal investigation of New York's urban architecture. Created to be projected on the exterior facade of a building, it was shown for the first time in the open air exhibition ARCADES and later in the Holly Solomon Gallery.

A documentation of one of Acconci's most notorious performances, Claim Excerpts is a highly confrontational work, an exercise in self-induced, heightened behavioral states, and an aggressive psychological exploration of the artist/viewer relationship.

Donegan sits behind a pane of glass. She places a clear cellophane hood over her head and paints the cellophane "face" a vivid orange. She then presses and rubs the painted mask against the pane, smearing it with color and obscuring the view of her face through the glass. When she exits, she leaves behind a remnant of the mask, a literal "face painting."

Compiled by Graham, this survey features video documentation of ten installations, including a series of the architectural sculptures that the artist terms "pavilions." Typically composed of transparent or mirrored glass, and often placed outdoors in public sites, these structures further Graham's investigation into public and private spaces and invite a dialogue between the viewer and the environment. The documentation spans twenty-five years, from Present Continuous Pasts (1974) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, to the 2008 For the Daughter of Jeppe Heim/Splash, from a private collection in Australia.

Hayward has described her work as a confluence of narrative, emotion, melody, and light, with her dialogue informed more by the way people think than by the way they talk. In Classic Conversations, Heyward narrates a series of cultural images and references, pondering life's minutiae and situating them within the fabric of larger cultural dilemmas.

Classical Frieze documents Antin in the process of creating her large-scale photographs, which reconstruct scenes from ancient history and mythology as seen through the lens of 19th-century salon painting. In her photographic recreations, which she terms "still movies," Antin constructs elaborate tableaux that evoke aspects of the contemporary world. Set against lavish villas, swimming pools and landscapes in Southern California, the behind-the-scenes apparatus of elaborate costumes, props, crew and cast suggests the production of a Hollywood historical epic. Mixing extravagant decadence with knowing anachronisms, Antin visits ancient Rome by way of Fellini.

On a trip in anticipation of an around the world motor scooter tour in 1973, Hammer and her ex-husband traverse the Mendocino coast on their motorcycle – Hammer filming all the while from the rear seat. Light reflections, creative camera perspectives, and Hammer's signature self-inclusion mark this early film.

Abstractions of light, hand shaped mattes, radical exposure changes and the subjective body of the filmmaker mark this early film of Hammer with filmic language that reappears in her later work. Shot in Northern California on the Sonoma Coast and in the woodlands, the beauty and sparkle of silent Super8 is breathtaking and wondrous reminding the viewer of a time before depletion and pollution marked the landscape.

In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.

Writes Shimizu: "I used to work as a photographer hired by a website to promote NYC and the Hamptons nightlife. The promoters would hire the people I worked for to send me over to their party to take photos of the people there. I would go to 2-3 different clubs a night, 4 nights a week. The range...

Club Vanessa is a video about "real love" in the form of a sex tape. "Club Vanessa, a video about the present, begins with me fantasizing about what our lives will be like in the future. That we would have a lot of lovers, that there would be real love, but no jealousy. We were trying to reinvest ourselves in this 60s utopian vision and explore in which ways these ideals have affected us. Also, we were reinvesting ourselves in the feminist history of body performance, reanalyzing the female experience as an object of sexual desire." — Ellen Cantor

A percepual exploration of the Massachusetts coastline, in which Ryan uses reverse color and negative imaging to abstract and formally examine the environment.

Coast of Cape Ann is a perceptual exploration of the Massachusetts coastline, in which Ryan uses reverse color and negative imaging to abstract and formally examine the environment. Using the Hudson River basin as a foundation for his study, Ryan presents a blueprint for a television channel...

This video-dance collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas, was shot in the vaulted Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Exemplifying Cunningham's idea that dancers operate autonomously, Coast Zone's choreography is mirrored in the fragmentary nature of its filmic technique. Soloists move within and are traversed by ensembles of two or three dancers that break off from one another and then reassemble, bringing to mind shifting sands or the ebb and flow of a coastline that the title of the dance and its music evoke.

Rocks and tides create an array of waterflow patterns. These flow patterns form "chreods," a word meaning "necessary paths." This numbered series of twenty-one video renderings of "necessary water paths" along the coast of Maine was produced from 2003-2005. The artist sees these chreods as...

Superimposing images of ropes, chains and vanities that act as portals to the ocean, nautical ships, and Sizzler salad bars, a rambling seaman conjures carnal stories of succulent seafood cast up from the deepest ocean depths, prepared in overflowing and dripping thick butter. Situated just beyond the lapping coast, tales of tight-shorted sailors begin to creep in.

Kuchar writes: "The portrait of a colorful, urban warbler and the Technicolor people who revel in a realm of melodious platters: vinyl platters and exotic poo-poo platters."

The artist reconnects two sections of a broken coffee table.

In Cold Pieces, Cho focuses on water, drawing from this broad theme an extended investigation into the mutability of pure form; water, after all, has no particular shape or size, only infinite variation. Characteristically, Cho's images telescope in scale, from rain-droplets on a puddle to...

Alternating between square and rectangular video canvases, Hubbard's camera frames from above, capturing material deconstruction and abstraction in aspect ratios akin to a Jackson Pollock painting.

This survey of the performance and video works of Marina Abramovic and Ulay spans 1975 to 1986. The thirty programs range from the artists' individual performances and the Relation Work of the 1970s, their videos and performances of the 1980s, and their final collaborative project on the Great Wall of China.

A study in analog imaging and the relation of sound to image, Color Fields Left merges moving bands of color with electronic sounds in an increasingly complex pattern.

In Color of Silence, Gorewitz digitally alters footage of a desert valley on the San Andreas Fault to produce a visual landscape of deeply saturated color that melts, shifts, and dissolves; the harshness and emptiness of the landscape liquifies into color and abstraction.

In Color Pieces, Hoover manipulates the movement of light and shadows on surfaces and the human figure, allowing subtle changes of hue and texture to create spatial ambiguities.

Color without Color explores a condition called Achromatopsia. Baldino writes, "I have long been fascinated with color and am equally fascinated by the lack of it. Or more specifically, living in a world of color, but not the color one sees. By learning from my complete achromat collaborators —...

"My 1980 production of three hours of material, from which Combat Status Go (as well as the somewhat longer Beholden to Victory and the full-length Hail the Fallen) has been drawn, involved a set of approaches that have been central to the development of all my work in the 1980s. Central to this core of premises has been a conception of the viewer as an active contributor to the performance of a work, a premise that engenders completely new principles for constructing images, scenes, and entire pieces. Combat Status Go has a game, not a story—the game of an Officer and a Private. The Officer may use harsh language, for instance, while the Soldiers have no names. But the rules are for the viewer: as you watch, you see interpretations of the rules, 'played' by real people, with room for the audience to play, too. The 'war film' genre context is a conceit which functions to label the roles as heroic; what reduces heroism to irony is not the nerdiness of the 'heroes,' but the attitude of contempt that is induced within the audience. The idea that a film (videotape) should or could manipulate viewer attitudes in this way is novel and perhaps injudicious. A corresponding problem in literature concerns the unlikeable protagonist, who makes the book unlikeable too. However, the idea here was to open a pathway into a new (and more dignified) culture, in which viewers are aware of efforts to sway their attitudes and respect (in return) opportunities that are afforded for them to control these affinities themselves. But then, what is the relationship between: —the audience and the Soldier? —the audience and the actor? —the director and the actor? —the director and the work? The director must protect his friend the Soldier from the baleful and obscenely intrusive gaze of the ogling Audience. The Audience is an officer corps: they disapprove, as the Officer actors do, of the Soldier(s), the Soldier actors; and in fact, they disapprove of the work itself. It is my duty to my cast (to my work) to be sure that you do disapprove of them; this is the measure of the heroic stature that this tape wants for them—for them, the Soldier, played by many actors, always harassed by their damn Officer, but always yielding and good natured. Combat Status Go is a work designed within an economy of distrusts and of abuses of authority; in particular, the respective abuses of our authoritarian roles as director (on the one hand) and as viewer (on the other). Combat Status Go, Beholden to Victory, and Hail the Fallen are scintillating failures—they transfer the 'Officer' attitude effectively to the audience. The normally ductile viewers (complicitous with the narrative) respond appropriately with contempt for the film (!) on the basis of their disapprobation of the childlike Soldier characters. Some viewers who were actual war veterans, though, reported that the demeaning atmosphere of the film was 'accurate.'" —Tony Conrad

The remains of a Gordon Matta-Clark piece in the basement of 112 Greene Street: a closet-like space with a window — viewers look in on their way through the gallery's ongoing exhibition. The walls are covered with mirrors. The artist, naked from the waist up, is alone with three roosters; he tries to gather the roosters up into himself, covering the roosters over with his body — the roosters scratch and claw and try to get away — gradually they become used to him, his body becomes their home.

In this three-part work, d'Agostino focuses on the complex infrastructure of urban mass transit systems, drawing linguistic parallels to the visual image to investigate signs and their relation to structures of communication. In PARIS (Metro), d'Agostino uses the Metro's closed-circuit...

In Comma Boat, we're stuck in a mock-authoritarian fantasy--a power trip. The film centers around a director-character played by Trecartin who oscillates between feelings of omnipotence and self-doubt. As if a post-human, post-gendered reincarnation of the Fellini character in 8 ½, the director gloats and frets about professional and ethical transgressions. "I know I lied to get ahead," he admits at one point. "I've made up so many different alphabets just to get ahead in my field."

Comma Boat is one of four movies to date completed in 2013 by Trecartin, first shown as a work in progress at the Arsenale of the the Venice Biennale. Since settling in Los Angeles in 2010, Fitch and Trecartin have designed and built a modular maze of sets on a soundstage with the help of...

In Command Performance, Acconci attempts to replace himself with the viewer. He lies on his back with the camera gazing down on him and begins a hypnotic incantation in which, cajoling, pleading, insulting, fantasizing, he tries to seduce the viewer to take his place in the spotlight. As the tape progresses, Acconci is driven further and further into his fantasy, where he becomes increasingly agitated. He is alternately comedic and cruel, sadistic and seductive as he confronts the relation of artist and viewer, self and other.

Hill's investigations into sign system—particularly as enunciated in the form of spoken language—join with his early concerns with montage and the idea of the cut, to produce a concise performance on the nature of television.

To create Commercial, subtitled "one-minute adventures in the world of TV," Hámos and Christoph Dreher taped thirty hours of programming from Berlin television. This appropriated footage of slasher films, Westerns, cartoons and educational programs is set to the music of The Residents. Nine of the "commercials" are collected here.

André re-organizes time, rhythm and sound in her portrait of the new music composer/pianist Walter Hus, constructing a study of the process of composing. Playing on the title's double meaning — "composition" and "composite" — André isolates musical gestures and fragments time, recomposing Hus' evolving composition. In this vividly realized document, André establishes a formal analogy between the compositional process of Hus' music and her own methodology of image-making.

Computer Movie No. 2 is a CGI animation created in advance of video-editing software. CTG programmed graphics on an IBM computer, filmed the screen with a 16mm camera, and assembled the frames as an animated film.

"Originally intended as one scene in a larger work concerned with the metaphorical destruction of the viewer (through demolition of the camera), Concord Ultimatum unexpectedly became the occasion of the larger project’s demise. In addressing the camera mechanism itself as a subject, and even offering to exchange positions with it, this performance dismembered at one stroke most of the aporias of the materialist/structuralist position in film theory. On the other hand, this work revealed no point of access to the visual image; its situationist grounding in a particular structure of events, which placed voice and performance at stage center, simultaneously won me over to the video medium and stripped me of visual tools (until Combat Status Go)."

ConCreep is a portrait of the ambitious New York street musician of the same name, who uses household implements to create an infectious drum sound. Although continually moved on by the police, he manages nevertheless to earn a solid income and build a fan base.

With this abstract digital video, Murata presents viewers with a field of seething colors and line, within which a suggestive, Rorschach-like formation manages to retain its structure even as it is in a constant state of flux. The mesmerizing tableau that results is accompanied by a cyclical, dronelike sound track.

Through an innovative juxtaposition of text and appropriated archival footage, Cokes deconstructs the male gaze in cinema and moving image culture. The imaging/reimaging of Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan of Arc serve as models of this fragile construction, while a scathing commentary of...

With wit and savvy, Kalin combines text, graphics and flowers with musical and political quotation to comment on the disjuncture between a conservative, medicalized discourse that describes homosexuality as both "unnatural" and "dangerous," and the possibilities of liberation involved in...

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.

Heyward articulates a poetic monologue alongside a surreally spinning Venus de Milo, while performing vocal acrobatics and toying with the meanings of words in a stream-of-consciousness diatribe on patriarchy, sexuality, cultural and religious mythologies, and normative femininity.

A woman, a man, and a beach on the North Sea are the basic elements with which André constructs an elegant fiction of a couple, and deconstructs the codes and gestures of desire and betrayal. In her formal, rhythmic compositions, André observes the intimate detail and familiar gestures of the everyday with striking visual acuity.

Constipation is a performance Lampert worked on between 2010-2012 that featured the last rolls of Kodachrome film he shot before the ultra-colorful celluloid format was forever discontinued. None of the footage from that piece appears in this trailer.

Constricted Light explores concepts of illumination, both literal and metaphorical. Gorewitz writes: "According to the Zohar, a source text of Kabalistic mysticism, we live in a world of indirect light."

Contacts is one of a series of tapes in which Acconci creates a controlled performance situation to explore the limits of a private space. Applying intense mental concentration and intuition, he uses the body as a vehicle to explore perception and interactive communication.

In search of the offbeat and extraordinary aspects of "ordinary people," Blumberg has often documented regional American culture. Here, he and co-producer Jules Backus celebrate the idiosyncracies and pride that distinguish small-town America, taking to the road like portapak-toting precursors to...

"To have the most original moment of a culture represented as a living being," Ulay wrote, the artists began a series of works, compiled in Program 1, in which they attempted to evoke the essence of a culture through a symbolic representation of time, place, and people. The "sacred...

Contour Ploughing refers to the farming practice of plowing or planting perpendicular lines across a slope, following its contours to minimize erosion. From afar these ruts coalesce to form sprawling topographical designs across landscape, echoed in the computational patterns constituting LoVid’s composition.