Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent.

"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture.  These projection surfaces in turn alternate with images of a rock band whose music continuo

The violent surgical act of a boy’s circumcision is contradicted by the peacefulness of his facial expression. Proud to join the world of men, the boy is trying his best to be brave. Yet can the passage to adulthood be that simple?

Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He’s had ten days off in twelve years and loves what he does.

“In Baldessari’s wonderful Inventory, the artist presents to the camera for thirty minutes an accumulation of indiscriminate and not easily legible objects arranged in order of increasing size and accompanied by a deadpan description — only to have the sense of their relative size destroyed by the continual readjustment of the camera [in order to] keep them within the frame. Who can forget Adlai Stevenson’s solemn television demonstration of the ‘conclusive photographic evidence’ of the Cuban missile sites, discernible over the TV screen as only gray blurs?”

In Bataille, fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon are subject to a mirror effect. A scene in which two samurai fight each other becomes a cosmic field of monsters where horror and pain evoke beauty and joy.

In this short but provocative tape, recorded August 4th, 1971, Carol Vontobel “interviews” Nancy Cain who is speaking about her “coke addiction problem” under the pseudonym Nancy X.

The Diaspora Suite

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.

Originally commissioned by University of Dortmund to be installed during Internationalen Bach-Symposium. The video is based on the Robert Schumann song of the same name and continued to evolve as an ongoing piece.

Notes for a DejaVu is a paramnesic experience of the images where Jonas Mekas still lives and we can hear him comment on the memory of an imaginary trip to Mexico. This film is shot with an expired 16mm celluloid during a popular protest.

In collaboration with DonChristian Jones.

Inspired by Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs.

This video examines the iconic World Wide Web branding of the global marketplace, which creates disconnection and contrasts with the labor system in society.

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.

How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain's Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy.

Most of the moving images produced for science, industry, commerce, and medicine are seen only by specialized audiences, and are then discarded soon after they are made. Rumour Of True Things is constructed entirely from such moving image ephem

Made at the time of the 1988 presidential election, this piece is about media power and market censorship.

Woman, monster, animal? A portrait of a woman's face, the movement slowed down and reversed, the grotesquely made-up face examined in close-up.

A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of center.

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).

My Only Idol is Reality is a video work created from an excerpt of Season One of MTV’s The Real World. The piece uses repetition as a framework for abstraction

Curated by Lebanese video artist Akram Zaatari, and originally presented by the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Radical Closure features works produced in response to situations of physical or ideological closu

In 1959, Jean Seberg stares into Raoul Coutard’s 35mm camera lens and then turns – the closing frame of Godard’s Breathless is the back of her head. For the film it is a closing. For her character it is less clear. Is it a refusal? A denial?

The performers are seated around a pink octagonal table on pink, violet, and silver cinder blocks. One performer (Robert Stearns) stands up, recites the credits for the piece, and then says, “Do you believe in water?

After the ominous attack that the paramilitary and police corporations carried out on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, the student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano remains in a coma until today.

Ike is about a person showing their special gift — if pushed. The truth, fiction and lore of a brick thrower with deadly accurate aim.

Cast: Deondre “Champ” Jones, Derron Everson, Anthony Jerrell Jones.

Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, AIDS activist, and film and videomaker.

ḤARAM is an essay film portraying the urgent contemporary situation at the Haram Al Sharif/ Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jerusalem reflecting on the growing Temple Mount Faithful movement whose goal is to build the Jewish Third Temple on

Phyllis Bramson (b.1941) is a Chicago painter whose post-imagist style emphasizes content and the deeply personal.

This single channel tape was created from a 4-channel live mix of 4 VCRs, an A/V mixer, and a sampler.

A montage of architecture and cabaret, juxtaposing a second hand view of New York as refracted through this artist's eyes.

In this 2014 interview, South African artist Kendell Geers (b. 1968) discusses the function of magic, myth, and memory in his work. Beginning at childhood, Geers charts the path he has taken in his understanding of his own biography as a site of resistance. This interest in the use of personal biography culminated in 1993 with his decision to change his date of birth to May 1968 as a way to reference both the May 1968 student protests, and the fact that 1993 was the first year that South Africa had participated in the Venice Biennale since 1968.

From the crashing waves of a wintry Pacific to the haunted vestibules of a Bay Area mansion, allow entry to this motley crew of ravished revelers who bring their choppers down on an assortment of improvised bon-bons.

Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal's Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life — with all of its unnameable and enchantingly fragmented specifics — and the gravitational u

In a garden of roses and memorabilia from darkest Africa, a man and woman ponder the joy of cooking and the companionship of cats. Goodies for the guts abound in this visual essay on feline friendship and far away places.

The HalfLifers exhume cinema’s favorite incarnation of mindless, decaying mortality, the Zombie, in the hopes of breathing new life into this misunderstood figure.

"This is an experimental virtual reality artwork, and while it offers opportunity for interaction, calling this a game goes too far. It is a disappointment simulator, a best-artist-ever-all-the-time artist simulator, a hospice simulator.

A newsletter that turned into a film about hands (fast forwarding through slow times).

A documentary fiction inspired on the first accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by colonizers, missionaries, and scientists.

As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.

Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was born in New York and attended Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Hofmann School to study painting.

Originally constructed using a Super 8 camera and a walkman, Manipulation/Dictation investigates processes of lesbian seduction, betrayal, and the expectation that both parties can still be friends later.

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

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

This short piece introduces the visual artist German Bobe. A narrator explains Bobe’s background in various media, stressing that his work—the media he chooses and the themes he revisits—presents a synthesis of the concerns of his generation.

Through the memory of a high school classmate, footage from a film for teenagers called Be Popular, a video dating tape, and performances by political and entertainment figures, So, You Want To Be Popular? examines how cultural stereot

Crush consists of six chapters, the first five portray the transport, bending, piercing, and crushing of various vehicles, cars and trucks.

Dark Sun Squeeze is a darkly meditative exploration of a sewage treatment plant, revealing the hidden rhythms and bizarre journey of raw human waste.

Zachte Berm (from Weiner’s film Plowman’s Lunch) sits with her back to the camera in front of a large mirror—her face, covered with shaving cream, is seen in its reflection.