Video History

Building a shimmering effect through a rhythmic collage, images of trees are spun, frozen, colorized and digitized by means of an imaging computer. The soundtrack shifts back and forth between mechanical and natural sounds as the jumping shifts of color and orientation, made possible by the computer, oddly simulate the effects of natural chaotic phenomena. The cumulative effect of the alterations is a dizzying sense of disorientation as nature is transformed and re-constructed through technology.

Martha Rosler

Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure

Reading the billboards, the cars, the people, and the graffiti of the street as cultural signs, Rosler extracts the network of social power and domination that determines whose culture gets represented where, asking whose culture is reported in the press and whose is forced to exist in the street?

Liza Bear

Satellite TV: Birth of an Industry (Parts 1 & 2)

Part of a cable TV series called Communications Update that aired on public access in New York City from 1979 through 1992, these tapes provide an early example of television made by artists. The series centered on the democraticization of the media. Birth Of An Industry covers a Miami satellite TV convention attended by thousands of backyard satellite TV entusiaists, inventors, and entrepreneurs.

Paul Kos

Riley, Roily, River

The seemingly groundless debate as to whether a river is "riley" or "roily" can be interpreted as an example of language's descriptive failure. A shouting match over how to describe the river has no effect; the face of nature continues unchanged. Riley, Roily, River graphically illustrates the gap of meaning that exists between the natural, empirical world and the language we use to describe it.

Nancy Holt

Revolve

“Nancy Holt’s Revolve, a videotape where the artist, off-camera, interviews her friend Dennis Wheeler who is dying of leukemia, uses his illness and mental reflection as a metaphysical site. Her interview is recorded from the perspective of three video cameras that each capture Wheeler from a different point of view. The three-point perspective was designed to give the illusion of infinity. Holt’s three-camera perspective grips the observer with the reality of the finiteness of death...

Bruce Nauman

Revolving Upside Down

The inverted camera catches Nauman standing at the end of the room, slowly spinning around on one foot, first head down in one direction, then head up in the other direction. The tape seems to be as much a trial of Nauman’s endurance as an exercise in becoming a human machine, some type of cog or mechanized weather vane.

Vito Acconci

Remote Control

Two performers, Acconci and a young woman, occupy two wooden boxes in separate rooms, connected via monitor, camera, and microphone. The situation is symbolic of a vicarious and distended power relation, a relationship built through and reliant upon technological mediation. Watching her on a monitor, Acconci coaches the woman through tying herself up, urging her to pretend he is winding the rope around her legs and neck.

Dara Birnbaum

Remy/Grand Central Trains and Boats and Planes

In a piece commissioned by Remy Martin, Birnbaum adopts the language of commercial advertising, using the body, gestures, and glances of a heavily made-up woman to create a scene of glamour and romance—while slipping in a disparaging narrative that touches on the actual use and abuse of Remy Martin's product. Birnbaum sets up a typical commercial, then allows the fictive narrative to intrude, upsetting the advertised fantasy with a dose of unpleasant reality.

Vito Acconci

The Red Tapes

The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a “topography of the self,” constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.

Richard Landry

Quad Suite (Six Vibrations for Agnes Martin, Hebes Grande...

Capitalizing on the visual aspect of musical performance, Quad Suite explores the essential link between the image of music and its sound. In Six Vibrations, the camera is riveted to a close-up of the four upper frets of Landry’s guitar, maintaining an image of the sound easily identified with the gridded field paintings of Agnes Martin. In Hebe’s Grande Bois, Landry improvises on a bamboo flute as the camera frames his mouth, again in extreme close-up, in the center of the screen. There is something sensual, almost obscene, about Landry’s lips.

People's Communication Network

Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison

Two years after the riots and deaths at Attica, New York, a community day was organized at Greenhaven, a federal prison in Connecticut. Think Tank, a prisoners' group, coordinated efforts with African-American community members outside the prison walls to fight racism and poverty. The event was documented by People's Communication Network, a community video group founded by Bill Stephens, for cablecast in New York City, marking the first time an alternative video collective was allowed to document an event inside prison walls.

Vito Acconci

Pryings

This extraordinary performance carries a wealth of associative meanings in the sexual dynamics of privacy and power-man and woman pitted against each other in a struggle for mental and physical control.

Vasulkas Inc

Progeny

After seeing an installation of Steina’s Machine Vision, involving mechanized cameras moving to pre-programmed patterns, sculptor Bradford Smith suggested that his work be used as the subject of a video investigation. Slowly panning over the encrusted surfaces of the sculptures, Steina’s camera records a fantastic landscape of twisted figures and gruesome armor. The varying speed, orientation, and distortion of the images transforms the three-dimensional sculptures into a visceral four-dimensional experience.

Linda Montano

Primal Scenes

Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and sexuality. Primal Scenes is an excellent example of women’s erotica, focusing on a woman’s experience of her body as both sexually powerful and deeply mysterious.

Dara Birnbaum

Pop-Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skate

The "cross-over" in Olympic Women Speed Skating is juxtaposed against General Hospital's whites in reverse angle shots. A couple tries disparagingly to reach an understanding. Skaters continuously return to the starting line. Frustration and exertion combine with originally scored soundtracks of disco, rock, and jazz.

Video History

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