In a fictional conduit space, language and function are recontextualized as the HalfLifers struggle to re-assess the nature of their mission while engaged in an eternal cycle of maintenance and communication routines.

West coast artists, Mike Mandel (b.1950) and Larry Sultan (1946-2009) became artistic collaborators in 1972 while both enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA program.

Shot in December 1969, this video documents a live performance by the Incredible String Band at the Fillmore East, NYC.

"The films of John Smith conduct a serious investigation into the combination of sound and image, but with a sense of humour that reaches out beyond the traditional avant-garde audience.

Walking Off Court is the story of the nervous breakdown of a tennis fan and his rising inability to find tennis partners.

Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality extends NRO’s Culture Capture series towards examining desires for monumentality and its dissolution, pursuing fantasies of removal by morphing monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogramm

In this 2006 interview, filmmaker Jem Cohen discusses his early interest in art, his family’s welcome antipathy towards commercialization, and his unconventional, anti-mainstream film practice. In particular, Cohen discusses his film This is a History of New York, and how this piece exemplifies his interest in the “territory of sensation” rather than simple visual descriptiveness. Cohen concludes by discussing the role of archiving in his practice, and how compulsive documentation of the quotidian and unexceptional can result in the empowerment of the everyday.

In the spell of one of the most exquisite pop songs I know, with the most rudimentary of animation skills, I sought to produce a smooth and rapid transition from innocuous kindergarten silliness to faux-Lynchian horror.

Actor Richard Marcus speaks directly and intimately to the viewer, relating a tale of personal loss, and then changing the subject to baseball. The video is about amateur vs. professional, personal vs. public space, and loyalty and self-confidence.

“Take back the airwaves: Mexico’s video art doyenne Ximena Cuevas books herself onto the tabloid talk show Tombola (Raffle), toying at first with whimsical deconstruction until she turns the whole affair on its head by seizing the televisual flow itself.”

The second in a series of cross-cultural symposia organized by Lucy Lippard, the four artists interviewed here—Jolene Rickard, Robbie McCauley, Judy Baca, and May Sun—discuss their work and its cultural contexts. Moderated by Lucy Lippard.

Following the premise that water will always find its level, the term Communicating Vessels describes the way liquid moves between conjoined containers: gravity and pressure conspire to keep the surfaces aligned, pulling the shared liquid back and forth

The title implies a relationship between the two persons in the frame of the image. The woman in the foreground appears somewhat sad, the man in the background concerned.

Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber) was an underground superstar in the East Village arts scene in the 1970s and early 1980s.

One of my weather diary series out in Oklahoma. The tone is wistful, the surroundings wispy (with some puffs of pungency). The TV is on and the porcelain is smeared with some residue atrocity from a previous passion.

Filled to capacity, each car of a 157 car train sounds a percussive note in this homage to John Coltrane. And not one coal train, but two.

Untitled for Technically Sweet was originally inspired by the Antonioni script of the same title for an exhibition curated by Yvette Brackman and Maria Finn and shown at Participant Inc.

Chief Waiwai recounts for his village the story of a trip he and a small entourage made to meet the Zo’é, a recently contacted group whom the Waiãpi “know” through video.

talkin' 'bout droppin' out examines the multiple reasons why 40% of students in New York, Boston, and Chicago drop out of high school each year.

A cinematic firestorm of found footage and pilfered Hollywood images, Mike Hoolboom’s hallucinatory Tom – described by the filmmaker as, "Cinema as déjà vu, or déjà voodoo" – pays mesmerizing experimental tribute to the life and work of friend

"Let Each One Go Where He May is the stunning feature debut of celebrated Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell.

Part bio, part memoir, Mom’s Move is an intergenerational film about mothers and daughters, women and photography, remembering and forgetting, and the tension between women’s private and public selves.

Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences.

Taking its name from the Jim Crow-era of black criminals staring at white women, this hand-processed, optically-printed amalgam reframes desire by way of everything from D.W.

"This video in two parts is a newcomer's portrait of Montréal, and focuses on two of my architectural obsessions: the Hydro Québec building and the Métro. I spent my first winter in Montréal in a cold, dark, first-floor apartment.

Super 8 footage layered with Sharpie marked lines and circles obscuring the image illustrates the story of the Cuthand’s experience with temporary episodes of migraine related blindness and his cousin’s self induced blindness later in life.

Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, Typewriter

The unusual combination of a sound like a singing saw accompanies sweet images of frolicking lambs in the meadow, galloping horses, and a strange boy, is eerily beautiful and pure.

Born in Los Angeles in 1933, Michelle Stuart spearheaded the use of non-traditional materials from nature in the early '70s, and has produced and exhibited her work internationally.

Nebula is a hallucinogenically immersive spectacle: a complex, long-form audio-visual composition, which pays playful homage to science fiction fantasies.

A compilation of five of Sadie Benning’s early works. In Jollies, Benning gives a chronology of her crushes and kisses, tracing the development of her nascent sexuality.

“The moon, the sometimes dark street, trees, it's warm […] at last, a certain eroticism possible (that of the warm night).” When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that

“When I moved to Hudson Valley, NY state in 1984 after being tied to Tehching Hsieh in his ART/Life: One Year Performance, I began meeting remarkable elders over 80, and sometimes 90, years old.

They called him Umbrella Boy when he started his business. After repairing umbrellas on the same city block for over fifty years, he became Uncle Umbrella, a man who earned the respect and affection of his neighbors and customers.

This extensive interview with California artist Doug Hall (b. 1944) provides unique insight into the culture and politics of experimental artistic production during the 1970s. Discussing the founding of the performance group TR Uthco, Hall offers context for his contribution to the field of video art, and shares stories of his collaborations with Ant Farm, Videofreex, and others. Ranging from his early years as an art student, to his romance with artist Diane Andrews Hall, to reflections on technology in art, this interview importantly extends the discourse surrounding topics of archive, performativity, and autobiography—subjects that have come to define the contours of video art today. 

RECKONING 4 is the second in a series of investigations into (among other things)

In Hyperthermia the cinematic body becomes overwhelmed by the luminous projection of outside political factors, causing the internal temperature of the celluloid to rise to dangerous levels.

It was 1990 and, although the iron curtain was falling, Soviet official control was still iron-fisted.

In the early 1990s, I went to a reading by Leslie Scalapino at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.

In Music on Triggering Surfaces, Bode constructs an interface between audio and video systems.

Photographer, theorist, and lecturer Victor Burgin lives and works in London.

This turgid potboiler was made with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute. It steam-rolls a series of overheated episodes to a colorful climax of redemption and moral rectitude.

The fifth in a series of cross-cultural symposia organized by Lucy Lippard, the four artists interviewed here–Tejana tableaux artist Santa Barranza, Taiwanese video and interactive installation artist Shu Lea Cheang,

A weeklong, episodic live-streamed landscape film that attempts to reimagine the genre of a road movie in Hong Kong. Each of the seven short films begin at exactly at the moment of the official sunrise in Hong Kong.

After the screening of his film Wai'á rini, the power of dream in other Xavante villages, the people of Aldeia Nova from the São Marcos reservation asked Divino to make a film on the same ritual, the Wai'á ceremony.

Palace of Pope is an experimental video composed of found photographs, original text and sound art.

Tour Without End is an experimental hybrid feature-length video work that casts real-life musicians, artists, and actors as fictional bands on tour; the piece evolves into a cross-generational commentary on contemporary culture and politics in the Trump era. Shot over the course of four years between 2014-18 at over 15 DIY music spaces in and around NYC, Tour Without End functions as a time capsule — made more apparent by the shuttering of many of its locations due to NYC’s rapid gentrification.

The work’s multitude of characters are legendary performers in the downtown NYC arts scene, including: The Wooster Group founder Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher (New York City Players), Lizzi Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance), Kathleen Hanna (The Julie Ruin), Brontez Purnell (The Younger Lovers), Eileen Myles, Alexandra Drewchin (Eartheater), Nicole Eisenman, K8 Hardy, Johanna Fateman (Le Tigre) Shannon Funchess (Light Asylum), JD Samson (MEN), Gary Indiana, Kembra Pfahler (Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black), Rachel Mason, Tom McGrath, Matthew Asti (MGMT), Becca Blackwell, Christen Clifford, Alessandra Genovese (Crush), Rogelio Ramos (Love Pig), Kenya Robinson (Cheeky LaShae), and Neon Music (Youth Quake).

Elizabeth Hess addresses issues of censorship, AIDS, war, feminism, and politics in general. She has written extensively on women’s issues, contributes to The Village Voice, and is co-author of Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (1986).

Wake is a cinematic dance collaboratively created by Eiko & Koma and James Byrne. It was filmed in special sessions during the premiere run of the living installation Naked, at Walker Art Center, November 2-30, 2010.

By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly.