Music

Target

Why is this injured man driving around and around a shopping center parking lot? Just what is his Target? An atmospheric mystery tale that hints at a sad story.

Video Data Bank

Stephen Vitiello: An Interview

Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello creates sonic installations that function to give a physical form or space to audio. He has also composed soundtracks for film and media artists such as Nam Jun Paik, Tony Oursler, and Dara Birnbaum. Interview by Kate Horsfield.

Suzie Silver

A Spy (Hester Reeve Does The Doors)

Continuing Silver’s interest in combining performance and video, A Spy is a gender-bending and thought-provoking mixture of pure visual pleasure with disturbing undercurrents. As Reeves lip-syncs to a Doors’ song (“I am a spy in the house of love. I know the dream that you’re dreaming of, I know your deepest secret fear...”), we see a new manifestation of Jesus walking in a video field of pulsing rainbows, amoebic forms, and B-movie girls in black panties—suggesting the desires we try to hide from ourselves and others.

Dan Sandin

Spiral PTL

Short for "Probably The Last" (of the series), Spiral PTL uses the image processor like a musical instrument to create variations on a spiral, transforming its basic form into an ever-moving gyro. The movement is synchronous with an audio track that varies from electronic buzzes and Space Age voices to the quiet sounds of running water.

Jem Cohen

Spirit

Patti Smith asked if I would do a short film to accompany the release of her version of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. As neither of us are fans of the music video format or industry, we approached the project as a short film, with no lip sync, that would simply try to get at the heart of her version of the song. I shot in Super 8 film and pulled a few things from my archive. The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask.

Bob Snyder

Spectral Brands

[This] is my first attempt to construct a video piece using one set of generative intervals for both sound and color. All of the color in the piece is orchestrated in brightness ‘octaves’ corresponding to the registration of the pitches in the soundtrack. Each hue from a circle of twelve corresponds to one of the pitches of a tempered scale. The articulation of the piece consists of a series of loudness and brightness ripples which move across the piece in speed relationships derived from the hue and pitch proportions.

Emily Vey Duke, Cooper Battersby

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.

Lawrence Weiner

Some Things History Don't Support

A structure of Lawrence Weiner.

Photography: Moved Pictures; Computer Graphics: K. Hassett; “A New Pair of Shoes”, “Ships at Sea”, “Sailors and Shoes” Music: Ned Sublette, ASCAP; Lyrics: Lawrence Weiner, BMI

This title is also available on Lawrence Weiner: There are Things that Move Outside of Motion.

George Kuchar

Solstice

Solstice is a music video illustrating the feelings inspired by this holiday song written by a young man I met in Atlanta, Georgia, Andy Ditzler. My students and I, at the San Francisco Art Institute, concocted the visuals to accompany the tune and the result should evaluate all those suffereng from blues of every shade and intensity.

George Kuchar

Snap 'n Snatch

A sort-of music video that focuses on and under young women and men engaged in focusing video and movie cameras on other young men and women.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

Susan Mogul

Sing, O Barren Woman

Sing, O Barren Woman, part documentary part music video, satirizes and celebrates a taboo subject--voluntary childlessness. Susan Mogul gives voice to ten women who are childless by choice (or default) as they come out as non-mothers speaking and "singing" about the stereotypes of the "barren" woman. "Never mentioned in public or given a voice, we’re invisible women who made a provocative choice." These various refrains crescendo to Susan’s humorous song of sexual innuendo "Baby, I Still Can Conceive." This is the first U.S. film or video on voluntary childlessness.

Bob Snyder

Winter Notebook

This tape exemplifies Snyder’s early experiments with the image processor. Articulated patterns of alternating wavelength and amplitude of both sound and light are arranged to produce abstract compositions. Voltages processed by an Emu sound synthesizer are systematized through characteristic interval structures that affect the image processor’s functions.

This title is only available on Bob Snyder: Sound and Video 1975-1990.

Lawrence Weiner

Wind and the Willows

A structure of Lawrence Weiner.

Graphics and Computer Editing: K. Hassett; The Song: “Wind and the Willows” Music: Ned Sublette, ASCAP; Lyrics: Lawrence Weiner BMI; Cover Photo: Alice Weiner

This title is also available on Lawrence Weiner: There are Things that Move Outside of Motion.

Cecelia Condit

Why Not A Sparrow

Why Not A Sparrow is about a girl who enters a fairy tale land where the distinction between human and other animal species is blurred. In this kingdom, survival and extinction are on the tip of every birds’ tongue.

"An Eco-Fable about a girl, a rare bird, who experiences the pleasures and perils of another animal kingdom." --Big Muddy Film Festival, 2002

Laurie Anderson

What You Mean We?

Strapped for time due to her busy schedule of personal appearances, Anderson creates a rather clumsy looking clone to take over and keep up her artistic production. Anderson plays both parts, pitting the chain-smoking, productive male half against the laid-back female half. In the end, one highly successful clone begets another clone, a situation spoofing the rise and fall of the '80s art star.

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