In this irreverent and hilarious videotape, renowned street performer Stoney Burke leads us on a subversive tour of the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston’s Astrodome.

With the Watergate hearings as a backdrop, quotes from various newspapers and magazines--including the story of Robert Smithson's death in a plane crash--build a picture of the confusing and tragic events of July 1973.

“On the surface, Rea Tajiri’s work reads like the standard deconstruction of appropriated popular media via text to which we have grown accustomed in the ’80s.

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was born in Kleve, Germany. After serving as a volunteer in the German military, Beuys attended the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture, where in 1959 he became a professor.

Billion Dollar Bimbo: A Musical is a story of a young Hollywood actress’s psychological roller coaster ride through loss and redemption. One day on set the actress witnesses her mother collapse in the middle of shooting.

In the film Mad Ladders, the prophetic ramblings of an unseen narrator recount fantastical dreams of the coming Rapture, as crystalline imagery of rolling clouds gives way to heavily-processed video of moving stage sets from The American Music

Doubling Forbidden Planet is a feature length reedit of the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet.

A Nazi battalion marches in red in front of the ominous floating hand from THE AX HAS FLOWERED.

Women with a Past brings together four 20th Century artists — Yvonne Rainer, Christine Choy, Martha Rosler, and Nancy Spero — in videotaped interviews, shaped and edited by Lyn Blumenthal to examine the art of documentary.

A video poem about the nature of social relations and mass media, Half Lies exposes the seemingly innocuous ways we distort truth.

In a fusion of text and image, Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and other broadcast reports to analyze their deceptive syntax and capture the confusion intentionally inserted into the news script.

Miranda July (b.1974) makes performances, movies, and recordings—often in combination.

"Playing like a series of overheard conversations, Life and People grapples with communication, language, and recitation by staging common situations—a doctor’s prognosis, a teacher’s report to a parent—in the director’s signature deadpan, but

Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body.

Pitayas are the sacred Mesoamerican fruits that grow on Mexican nopales, an ancient plant. This is the colorful body, the vibrant blood and the radiant skin of the open life.

It's not my memory of it is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents.

Concentrating on abstract shapes and color value, Animation 2 is a record of images manipulated through computer animation.

County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, digital video, exploring an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community, coinciding with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug.

Toxic pigments of lust stain an artist’s brush as he struggles against lurid colors on the canvas of his life, – a "life" in brick jungles wit sordid, dark alleys on neon-lit avenues where he got lost

In this work, Alfred Hitchcock's 128-minute film Vertigo (1958) has been condensed at the rate of one frame every two seconds.

Robert Colescott paints expressive parodies of Western masterpieces.

Linda Martinez stars in this sequel to the horror series, which relishes in colorful detail the misadventures of Sherry Frankenstein.  Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the viewer is plunged into a world of young and old as

In this episode of Glennda and Friends, Glennda Orgasm and Mark Allen drink at Marie's Crisis Café, a piano bar in Manhattan.

Based on a Story explores the widely-publicized encounter between a Jewish Cantor, Michael Weisser, and Nebraska's former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, Larry Trapp.

An excerpt from Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry Anslinger’s War on Drugs [University of Chicago Press (2016)] as written and spoken in voice over by Alexandra Chasin.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gustavo Vazquez, Daniel Salazar, Patrick Litchy, Jethro Rothe-Kushel

LYNDALE is a story of shifting family dynamics, told through the relationship of two brothers.

Each year, more women undergo treatment at hospital emergency surgical services as a result of family violence than rapes, muggings, and car wrecks combined.

Once Upon a Time is about these encounters of diaspora and the displaced ‘homeland’ and describes a personal tale of my own diaspora and traveling culture, which crosses the boundaries of nation-states and is located in between different geogra

Eiko & Koma's second son Shin Otake created this video for the occasion of the 2004 American Dance Festival Scripps Award ceremony. Shin edited and narrated the video to convey Eiko & Koma's history and the concepts behind their works.

Originally from Canada, Agnes Martin (1912-2004) moved to the U.S. in 1931. Martin lived in Taos, New Mexico from 1954 to 1957, and then moved to New York, where she established her name as an important minimalist painter.

Moving Stories strings together scenes of passenger aircraft in flight.  In this short study of the dramatic and narrative power of image and sound, Provost manipulates cinema language and reaches, though minimal means, a strong, emotionally loaded result.  With a limited number of images, an absorbing soundtrack, and a suggestive story line, the viewer's imagination is stimulated to the maximum.

A Pilot For A Show About Nowhere is a two-channel video that examines the politics of television viewership, incorporating footage from a number of sources to create a plurivocal narrative. 

Irradiation is the thermal emanation of vital heat, the ancestral support that immerses beings in the solar blood. This is the immersion of beings in the bloody solar flow that gives the intense color of our present time.

"A trance is a state of detachment with aspects of the ecstatic. Paradoxically, a trance can be induced by a surfeit of input or by its deprivation...

This video documents the history of U.S. community television and public access TV, using rare video clips from across the nation.

A short Flicker Film adulterated by some extra images shot in Malawi, Africa. FF was in answer to an assignment given by artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson who created the soundtrack to which I was asked to make a “Future Film”.

“The images mix fragments of the real and imaginary in a hermetic effort to express the [Breder's] quest for a visual text that is at once personal reflection and cultural criticism. ” - John Hanhardt, 1989

Ron Gorchov (b. 1930) is an American artist who has been working with curved surface paintings and shaped canvases since 1967.

A California winter turns the left coast into a brew of foaming festivities while landlubbers leap for joy in the spray of salty slurpings.

Video Data Bank is proud to present the wonderful work of artist Laura Parnes.

The San Francisco Art Institute's 100th anniversary is absorbed into this portrait of alumni in the heat of creation and pasta softening.

Segalove relates a tale from her childhood of a man's exposure with text (“the painter wagged it at me right here”), while an arrow blinks over a shot of the house where she grew up.

Ingrid Pollard is a photographer living in London. Her photographic works, generally of people and landscape, serve to provide a human context for issues of transmigration and “fleeting” identity.

The Diaspora Suite

A drama in six episodes involving psychological breakdowns, marital showdowns, and messy obsessions.

Talk Attacks is a 1983 single-channel video by the artist duo Ligorano Reese. Created during their time in Barcelona, this work delves into themes of miscommunication.

The supposed existence of a golden kingdom motivated numerous expeditions, and the belief remained in force until the 19th century, although its location moved from Colombia to the Guianas, as the process of conquest and colonization of the South Americ

"You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional."

--Cinematexas Festival (Austin, 2001)

"Three more sing-alongs, this time with swans, a snake, and the Red Army Chorus."

--L.A. Freewaves Festival

Holzer adopts the form and language of commercial messages to disrupt communication, presenting kamikaze texts that are designed to stimulate thought, with humor, and inspire a critical attitude in an often passive audience.