Technology

Fashioned out of home movies recovered from failing hard drives, this glitch-art video makes comparisons between different forms of memory - suggesting that, while error and decay may keep us up at night, they might also be the way we put our ghosts to bed.

-- Evan Meaney

Laura Parnes

County Down

County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, digital film exploring an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community that coincides with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. Mirroring rave culture and the unbridled optimism around technology during the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically embraces its own destruction.

Videofreex

Tuned In, Turned On! Videofreex Tape the World

Formed in 1969 at the legendary Woodstock Music Festival by David Cort and Parry Teasdale, who met while taping the events with the newly available Portapak video equipment, the Videofreex (also known as "the Freex") were one of the very first video collectives. After working together to pitch a program to the major broadcasting station CBS, they toured the country interviewing counter-cultural figures of the day, including Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther party, and Abbie Hoffman, so called leader of the Yippies.

Videofreex

Probably the World's Smallest TV Station -- Video Television Review: Lanesville TV

The town of Lanesville, NY was home to the Videofreex for more than ten years, and their house was know as "Probably the World's Smallest TV Station." This overview details the regular activities of the collective and their work, and includes examples of productions they made for the Media Bus project. Russell Connor hosts the program and interviews various Media Bus members.

Includes:

Videofreex

Money

Taped on Prince Street in Soho, New York, Skip Blumberg creates a one-word performance. Shouting the word "Money" over and over, he attracts the attentions of New York's finest. The crew attempt to explain to the policemen that there is no public disorder as the streets were empty when they began to tape.

The video is an unwitting early example of the reaction of the state to the use of video cameras on the streets.

Videofreex

Mes and Youse

A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person. The exercise is repeated by Nancy Cain and Bart Friedman as the music speeds up.

Brent Coughenour

Ouroboros: Music of the Spheres

Ouroboros: Music of the Spheres is Chapter 3 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.

"Positing a linear continuum, with 'nothing' at one end of the spectrum and 'something' at the other, at what point does 'nothing' become 'something?'"

Daniel Eisenberg

The Unstable Object

What do a luxury automobile, a cymbal, and a wall clock all have in common? What are the diverse attachments and experiences produced by those who make these things and those who consume them? What exchanges take place through the object itself—sensually, esthetically, abstractly? We often forget that most of the things we use are made by the labor of others, often in distant places, living dramatically different, diverse lives. What do these objects mean to them? How does their labor, their aspirations, their sense of alienation or satisfaction connect to ours?

Evan Meaney

Ceibas: Epilogue - The Well of Representation

In part a remake of Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! (1979), in part a repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology; The Well of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean.

-- Evan Meaney

Evan Meaney

Ceibas: We Things at Play

We have come to this place of meaning together, celebrating our un-remaindered completeness. Yet, in our wake endures a long procession of stowaways: misspoken sounds we unconsciously omit, the limitations of our alphabet, the ignored gaps of an imperfect analog, and most recently, these forgetful bits of the virtual. We celebrate the lineage of our information as we celebrate one another, not realizing that the loudest affirmations might come from these unacknowledged, unavoidable participants. With each generation, they say a little bit more, speaking a little bit louder.

Jennifer Montgomery

Notes on the Death of Kodachrome

This piece purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. But it has other agendas of reclamation and personal reckoning that are its true subject matter.

Semiconductor

Black Rain

Black Rain is sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO. Here we see the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME's (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth.

Donigan Cumming

Too Many Things

Too Many Things visits the world of objects--their accumulation and dispersal--and their creation of cummunities of curiosity. The title is somewhat ironic. My work has always fed on things as the symbolic and incidental expressions of human presence. For a photographer, or a filmmaker, there can never be too many things; the camera likes to ferret them out and hang onto them, just as some people do. "Piled-up structures of inference and implication," as Clifford Geertz described ethnography's places of study, have also been my sites of activity as an artist

Edward Rankus, John Manning, Barbara Aronofsky Latham

AlienNATION

“Mining an ironic vein by turning technology against itself, AlienNATION undercuts the sociological ramifications of modern living. It is an astounding compendium of sci-fi images, textbook diagrams, special effects, and studio props, which together build multiple readings of the alien, the mysterious, and the obscure in American culture.

The New McLennium

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.

Technology

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