Consumer culture

A compilation of Anthony Discenza's Videoworks, made from 1997 to 1999.

As the expansiveness of video and its accompanying new technologies continues to transform our culture and our world, another historical tension is developing—not unlike the technological revolution seen at the last turn of the century. That tension is felt, analyzed, and articulated in all of these recent experimental videos—a tension oscillating between the expansive promise of global communications that inspire new freedoms and social patterns on one hand, and the use of new media forms to simply reinforce existing hierarchies and capitalistic power structures on the other.

Atomic Ed & the Black Hole tells the story of a scientist-turned-atomic junk collector known as Atomic Ed. More than 30 years ago, Ed quit his job making “better” atomic bombs and he began collecting what he calls “nuclear waste,” non-radioactive high-tech discards from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. As the self-appointed curator of an unofficial museum of the nuclear age called “The Black Hole,” Atomic Ed reveals and preserves a history of government waste that was literally thrown in a trash heap.

Spanish subtitled version available.

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973. This now classic video was shown in Southland Video Anthology in 1975 at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Curated by David Ross, it was one of the first museum surveys of video art in the United States.

An insert square of a man running is superimposed over a magnified mouth that speaks to him—first in nurturing encouragement, then with a no-win Mommie Dearest kind of criticism. Originally presented as an installation on six monitors, Deadline focuses on “the stress man feels in the urban environment,” using a range of digital video effects to stretch, compress, flip and fracture the image. Whereas Almy's previous video projects focused on details of behavior within interpersonal relationships, this piece shifts to focus on man’s larger relationship to society.

Brave new shopping worlds are being created. What have mall owners, architects, surveillance technicians, and supermarket workers done to turn human subjects into pure streams of consumers, into the perfect inhabitants of shopping mall paradise?

"Perhaps Cuevas' most chilling work, Cinepolis forecasts an image-driven invasion of everyday life, picture-perfect and unnoticed. This alien intrusion comes in the form of a fully branded consumerscape that cheerily foists fast food along with the fantasy. Irreverent and biting, Cuevas fights back with the only weapon available--images of the enemy, and the enemy’s images."

--Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive, 2004