HalfLifers: The Complete History, 1992 - 2010
02:07:30 | 2 DVDs
Collection: Single Artist Compilations
Tags: Body, Death and Dying, Food, Future, Humor, Media Analysis, Performance



HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends and fellow media artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony M. Discenza. Embracing a gestural improvisation-based performance style and championing a rigorously low-fi aesthetic, HalfLifers engages a shifting region of speculative fictions, from play therapy and improvised crisis re-stagings to zombie architectural systems and psychic sandwich surgery.
This 2-disc compilation gathers together for the first time all of the HalfLifers single-channel work produced between 1992 and 2010, and features rarely-seen documentation of several large scale media installations. Also included are excerpts from early projects created prior to the official formation of the collaboration, along with the complete text of a 1999 Film Comment essay, "Quest for What: Jim Supanick Locates the HalfLifers in the Video Badlands."
HalfLifers projects have been presented at venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Pacific Film Archive; the New York Video Festival; the Chicago Underground Film Festival; Video_Dumbo; the Impakt Festival; the Stuttgart Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media; EMAF; and many others. Their work was recently included in the book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the Bay Area, 1945 - 2000.
Included Titles
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: expedition/travel, food, future, humor |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: family, humor, performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: camp, food, humor, performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: humor, music, performance |
Collection: Single Titles Tags: body, death and dying, humor, media analysis, myth, performance |
Exhibitions + Festivals
LACE, Los Angeles, January 20, 2011
Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, February 18, 2011
Chicago Underground Film Festival, June 6, 2011
Zombie-Proof House, DiRosa Gatehouse Gallery, Napa, CA, June-September, 2011
HalfLifers: And Who Shall Rescue the Rescuers?, Video_Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY, September, 2011