“A short image-processed work, Thousands Watch deals with the issue of nuclear suicide.
Found-footage video about the destruction of the environment by man-made forces.
A commissioned portait of Pamplona, a small city in the North of Spain, shot and edited there in under 2 weeks. The film is a humble set of observations of place, people, atmospheres, and local rituals.
Blumenthal constructs a loose narrative around the sexual evolution of a woman (played by Yvonne Rainer) through a stunning collage of images appropriated from TV and film. Certain images come to dominate this effusive stream—tall buildings, sex scenes, an Elvis movie, the courtroom, fireworks. Doublecross pits the indeterminate, disruptive power of the erotic against the rigid, normalizing structures of family, law, marriage, popular culture, movies, and music—societal institutions that codify sexual relations.
In his signature photographic style, Donigan Cumming eulogizes a dying friend through his exploration of “culture” in all its manifestations: 1. culture: a particular civilization at a particular stage 2.
Featuring Arnold and Ahneva from Wendy Clarke's One on One video series, this video dialogue deeply connects the pair through discussion of Black brother and sisterhood.
From the performance by the same name, by Suzanne Lacy, Stan Hebert, Councilwoman Sheila Jordan, Frank Williams, Officer Terrance West, Mike Shaw, and Annice Jacoby, Oakland, 1995-6. Suzanne Lacy worked alongside youth activists, city council
This is the state of mind in the post-Covid quarantine. This is the state of the body into the pandemic vortex. This is our post-Covid eyes. Part of the Hauntology and Post-Covid series.
An excerpt from an episode of On Our Own, this video features the roommates preparing to "get crazy, cut loose, and celebrate the day." The incessantly ringing doorbell incites Joe to poison the "punks" outside by injecting kitchen chemicals in
Andries Botha (b.1952) creates sculptural forms made of found objects and natural materials which serve to interrogate the natural and social order. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout Africa and Europe. Botha lives and works in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Employing the 'case studies' of Helen Keller, Genie the 'wild child' and Angel at My Table author Janet Frame, Goss's extraordinary video contemplates the struggle to be heard, to break free from the prison of the incommunicable self.
Breakfast of Champions is an installation created in 1991 by the artist duo Ligorano Reese, comprising Nora Ligorano and
In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Brenda and Glennda comically debate changing the name of their show to Drag Queens for Jesus, in order to convert all the secular homosexuals to Christianity
“Ursonate 1986 is the result of a transference process which utilizes computer and video technology to transport a 1932 phonetic poem, Ursonate, by the German artist Kurt Schwitters into a contemporary context.
Designed as the centerpiece of Eiko & Koma’s three-year Retrospective Project, Raven is a radically scalable work.
Performed by my graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this one act play that I had written gets the best production values that $500 can afford.
In Nibbles, George Kuchar crafts a mini-travelette documenting his adventures around Cape Cod. Shot primarily in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Kuchar visits friends and takes every opportunity to sample the local cuisine.
"Renwick recounts a sad time in her life, when a friend was dying and she suddenly became aware of the presence of crows... [Renwick] craft[s] a lyrical and moving essay that works its magic through poetic accretion rather than narrative logic."
— Holly Willis, L.A. Weekly
Peggy and Fred, sole inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Earth, weather a prairie twister and scavenge for sense and sustenance amid the ruined devices of a ghosted culture.
28.IV.81 (Descending Figures) comprises footage Harris shot at a performance of Christ’s Passion, staged as an attraction in a Florida amusement park…This flimsy display of devotion is shown up by something g
All forms of human sport become sites for sexual play and celebratory eroticism.
Contains Videofreex tapes Buzzy and the Flute, Buzzy at the Gaslight, Buzzy at the Videofreex Loft, Buzzy Linhart at the Record Plant
Adapted from a performance by the same name, this courageous video fuses autobiographical material with information about how an alcoholic family perpetuates addictive behavior.
Doubling Forbidden Planet is a feature length reedit of the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet.
Setting her pixelvision camera on herself and her room, Benning searches for a sense of identity and respect as a woman and a lesbian.
The 2016 installment in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2016 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strat
Part of a campaign initiated in 1989, this video is a component of Gran Fury’s plan to raise consciousness and advance medical and federal reform on AIDS policy.
"This movie was collected for four years before being sprayed scattershot over 28 minutes of psychic mayhem. The line between living and dead is a frontier crossed and re-crossed here.
From the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the innards of a castle of contraptions, this video explores the creative bric-a-brac of several entities who pioneered a wired frontier filled with fire wires and fire water. Join them as they schmoo
During her graduate studies at Hunter College, Alice Aycock (b. 1946) began to forge links between personal and more inclusive subject matter and form. In her quest for contemporary monuments, Aycock wrote her Master’s thesis on U.S. highway systems.
Les Levine has had a longstanding involvement with media. His works-video, installations, public posters, and other forms-have often dealt with the effect of images on our lives.
In Final Exit, an aged one is confronted with his options in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence, increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers, or go quietly before resentment overwhelms sentiment?
Set to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl band from Washington), Sadie Benning's Girl Power is a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the 1990s. Benning relates her personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes as a story of personal freedom, telling how she used to model like Matt Dillon and skip school to have adventures alone. Informed by the underground “riot grrrl” movement, this tape transforms the image politics of female youth, rejecting traditional passivity and polite compliance in favor of radical independence and a self-determined sexual identity.
In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein receives a call from surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparks a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism, and shamanism.
The later 1950s and early 1960s saw the development and proliferation of radically new forms of dance driven by a desire to understand the essentiality of movement divorced from traditional, balletic and modern syntaxes.
The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. A metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence.
Framed is the second installment of the longer piece, Video Bites: Triptych for the Turn of the Century.
In collaboration with DonChristian Jones.
Robert Colescott paints expressive parodies of Western masterpieces.
Eiko's first piece without a human.
"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory.
In this 1996 interview, African-American sculptor, printmaker and designer Valerie Maynard (b.1937) describes growing up in Harlem in the mid-20th Century and her awareness of the importance of community during her upbringing. Recalling the prominence of the Baptist church in her early life, Maynard discusses how religion brought her into contact with local politicians who impressed upon her the importance of affecting change. The artist notes how an early affiliation with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and her brother’s incarceration propelled her interest in social justice and the workings of the judicial system.
Detail is indeed a detail. It is an excerpt from Mograbi’s feature film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, where human conditions face military situations.
Actions speed up, slow down, and run at regular speed. The usual props are there, as is a wet dog. Subtle nuances are revealed as the behavior of the anxiety-laden protagonists is rendered, for once, in real-time.
This video was made as the end-credit sequence for a film version of Ron Vawter's performance piece, Roy Cohen/Jack Smith, by Jill Godmilow. Ron was an extraordinary actor and extraordinary man.
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.
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.
Prestidigitation before the age of the pixel. Very lively stop motion and open shutter piece, shot on Super 8, with all effects done in camera – but transferred to video for ease of viewing.
Video Data Bank is proud to present the pioneering work of Bio Artist Eduardo Kac. This three-disc box set features art works that expand the limits of locality, light, and language.
An episode from a Lebanese TV series entitled "Image + Sound." Each episode in this groundbreaking series is based on paralleling TV news images alongside staged even