Partially Buried explores a web of genealogical traces. In this work the artist probes the notion of sites of memory as well as site-specific work by focusing on the location of Kent, Ohio. Partially Buried references the year 1970 during which the artist Robert Smithson produced his site-specific work, Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University. By chance the mother of the child in the video was present also in Kent State in May of that year, studying experimental music. In May of 1970, four students were shot while attending a rally protesting the U.S.

A call and response to impermanence.

A video essay set in the Mexican-U.S. border town of Ciudad Juarez, where U.S. multinational corporations assemble electronic and digital equipment just across from El Paso, Texas. This imaginative, experimental work investigates the growing feminization of the global economy and its impact on Mexican women living and working in the area.

Media artist Cyrille Phipps has been involved with numerous alternative media and lesbian activist projects, including Dyke TV and the Gay and Lesbian Emergency Media Campaign. Her video projects include Respect Is Due (1991), Black Women, Sexual Politics and the Revolution (with Not Channel Zero, 1992), Our House: Gays and Lesbians in the Hood (with Not Channel Zero, 1992), Sacred Lives, Civil Truths (with Catherine Saalfield, 1993), Dreaming Ourselves...

Bracketed by the Fall of Berlin Wall and the Collapse of the World Trade Center, a decade that saw the ossification of the neoliberal project, the rise of third-wave feminism, the proliferation of digital media, and even, perhaps, the “end of history": postmodernism; the emergence of internet; the commercialization of gangsta rap, and independent film; AIDS activist; digital cinema, the Gulf War; rave and riot grrrl cultures; reality television; MTV. A new diagrammatic system.

Pochonovela is a bilingual, bicultural blend of Latin America’s and the United States’ most popular television genres—the telenovela and the sitcom, respectively. The humor and madness of life in East Los Angeles are captured here in performances by members of the Los Angeles-based comedy troupe, Chicano Secret Service, and other U.S. Latino actors. This provocative comedy touches on political, social, cultural, linguistic, and family issues attendent to the cross cultural life of Mexican Americans living near or on the border—both psychologically and geographically.

Poison Ivy is an energetic activist response to conservative ideologies and their ‘Contract On America’.

Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been documenting the selling of the American presidency since 1984, and have expanded and updated the series with every election. Political Advertisement 2000 features ads from the 1950s up to the 2000 campaign. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the TV spot, what emerges is the political strategy and manipulative marketing techniques of the American televisual campaign process. Political Advertisement 2000 includes many rare spots, some never before seen.

Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been documenting the selling of the American presidency since 1984, and have expanded and updated the series with every election. Political Advertisement 2000 features ads from the 1950s up to the 2000 campaign. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the TV spot, what emerges is the political strategy and manipulative marketing techniques of the American televisual campaign process. Political Advertisement 2000 includes many rare spots, some never before seen.

Tom Poole is an organizer of many things. Counting arts administrator, media facilitator, and activist among the many titles he has held over the years, Poole currently brings all these capacities to bear as the executive director of the Pittsburgh Community Television (PCTV) station. In his contribution to the On Art and Artists series, Poole discusses his early foray into media activism as a member of the video art collective Black Planet Productions.

An up-close compilation of interviews and discussions with people living with HIV in the early 1990s. 

Created and commissioned for Little Sun, Fast Forward short film series exploring a sustainable world. For this project over 100 interviews were conducted in five destinations throughout Ethiopia; teachers, brokers, farmers, students, engineers, carpenters, soldiers, merchants, taxi drivers, cashiers, security guards, housewives, managers, nurses, designers, cameramen, accountants, pharmacists, architects, mechanics, technicians, retirees, and more.

In Post Queer Pride 93, Brenda and Glennda attend the New York City Queer Pride Parade. This video marks the return of Brenda after her relocation to Florida, and Glennda interviews her about the queer scene and gay activism in the South. At the parade, they conduct interviews with queers about the postqueer movement, the leather and SM scene, feminism, and capitalism.

Primavera is a frenetic experimental animation that documents the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests as they intersect in springtime Brooklyn. Shot during isolation on a phone, the video explores the effects of imposed distance on touch and intimacy, the proximity of an invisible virus and invisible deaths, and the revolt against the racist, corrupt systems that commodify, exploit and render their most vulnerable citizens disposable.

The PSA Project No. 1-15 is a series of fifteen videos that speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the act of war.

In Queens on the Media Scene, East Village drag queen Linda Simpson (of My Comrade zine) joins Glennda to discuss the explosion of drag in the mainstream media, and the pair interview passers-by on the streets of Midtown Manhattan. They discuss the rising acceptance of drag in the mainstream, in part due to the media presence of RuPaul; the potential taming of drag or its normalization; and an ambition to preserve the more taboo aspects of drag expression in the face of increasing popularization.

This alternative commercial promotes the aggressive democratic use of home video equipment to record local news of community activism and other events that don’t make the headlines for political reasons. This video urges citizens to break the state’s control of information and reclaim their power.

Music by Elliot Sharp.

This title is also available on Paul Garrin Videoworks: Volume 1.

Joe Sacco is a cartoonist who has contributed to a wide range of comic magazines including Drawn and Quarterly, Prime Cuts, Real Stuff, Buzzard, and R. Crumb’s Weirdo; he continues to illustrate the semi-regular Painfully Portland cartoon strip for the Willamette Week. He was a recipient of the prestigious American Book Award in 1996 for his work Palestine (1996), which combines techniques of eyewitness reportage with comic strip storytelling.

This interview depicts American writer, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman (b. 1958), discussing becoming a writer, her novels, and her long-term collaboration with filmmaker James Hubbard on projects devoted to gay liberation and AIDS activism. Born in New York to a Holocaust-surviving family, Schulman grew up in an era where women were not considered important.

Scenes from an Endless War is an experimental documentary on militarism, globalization, and the "war against terrorism." Part meditation, part commentary, Scenes employs recontextualized commercial images, rewritten news crawls, and original footage and interviews to question received wisdom and common sense assumptions about current American policies.

In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Brenda and Glennda lead a group of drag queens on a trip to Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City. Intended to be a drag queen gambling getaway and a public stage for drag visibilty, the trip turns into a moment of protest and reflection incited by homophobic discrimination. The group is kicked out of the gambling area for supposedly wearing excessive makeup and inapprorpiate, flashy attire — somehow unlike and worse than that of the casino's showgirls and other heavily powdered female patrons.

A collage of informal interviews and short clips, this collection of material comes from guerilla TV excursions at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Conducted off hand, usually amidst crowds of other journalists, the footage oscillates between slight antagonisms, genuine interest, and tongue-in-cheek play. The sheer breadth of participants being engaged with, however, is quite impressive as the soon-to-be First Lady, Jesse Jackson, David Dellinger, Bella Abzug and Jerry Brown all make appearances.

In this interview, Indian artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968) discusses his role in the initiation of the Raqs Media Collective, a Delhi-based artist collective, active since the 1990s. At the time of this interview, Raqs had been creating documentaries, art installations, and educational programs for eighteen years. Sengupta likens the driving force of Raqs to that of a game of catch, a process generated by a back-and-forth dialogue mobilized through writing and in-person meetings. As children of the late sixties, Sengupta explains how and why the members of Raqs, (himself, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula) share an interest in investigating mass communication, technologies of visibility, and the significance of memory and travel. It is also for this reason, Sengjupta explains, that the Collective’s work is committed to fostering rigorous research in addition to art-making endeavors.

On the eve of the 1984 Presidential election, Jenny Holzer used a truck equipped with a sound system and an 18-foot Diamond Vision electronic board to display images, statements, and man-on-the-street interviews. This tape presents a tightly edited version of the art, texts, and interviews that occurred throughout the day.

During my residency in New York I was designing a computer virus, which would contaminate computers through a screensaver that read “there is so much love in this world”. In the meanwhile, inspired by the illusionary democratic representation system in the United States and triggered by the indifference of the New York public to the presidential campaign, I went out to the streets to distribute fliers that carried this virus sentence. People of New York reacted in different ways to this action, which had similarities with many other hand-out actions common in big cities.