Found Footage

The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2008 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Edited without commentary, the artists show an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Obama, who are marketed like commercial products. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the campaign TV spot, what becomes apparent is a consistent sameness of political issues amid complex, changing visuals.

This Is Not Beirut is a personal project that examines the use and production of images and representations of Lebanon and Beirut, both in the West and in Lebanon itself. It also records Salloum’s interactions and experiences while working in Lebanon, focusing on this representational process by a Westernized, foreign-born Lebanese mediator with cultural connections to and baggage from both the West and Lebanon.

Strained Andromeda Strain is a frame by frame re-edit of Robert Wise's 131-minute sci-fi biological thriller into a 7-minute anxious oscillation.

In Spank an eight-second film clip has been re-edited, frame by frame, into a 7 1/2-minute video, tranforming discreet gestures into suggestive, pulsating sequences. This deconstruction of narrative Hollywood cinema exposes and intensifies the authoritative relationship between a man and a young girl. 

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.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.

In 1939, Westinghouse made a film about a small-town family visiting the New York World's Fair. Trapped inside that film was a completely different film that shows a mysterious alternate universe, revealed by Bryan Boyce’s own patented brand of narrative deconstruction and evisceration.The outcome is an absurd and chilling drama of a family transfixed by the technological wonders that would soon transform consumer society.

Workers Leaving the Factory - such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this still-existent sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home?