In a guided meditation progress is posed as a godly icon for worship. The inseparability of the human labor-spirit connection is probed.

My Failure to Assimilate muses on the profound sense of melancholy that sets in after the end of a relationship.

A trip to the Marin headlands at the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay headlines this video diary. The viewer gets to eves and eye drop on various verbal and real time activities that are of a wet nature now and then.

An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shores. A group of students and teachers play and invent games revitalizing their language. A visitor wanders in a quixotic chronicling of earthly and supernal terrain.

This video collects public service announcements created by a number of independent producers, including Jem Cohen and Michael Stipe of R.E.M.  Powerful and provocative, these PSAs address issues such as organic farming, abortion rights, street har

1.1 Acre Flat Screen is a 45-minute video about a year-long effort to improve a lot of 1.1 acres of desert land in Utah, which we purchased on September 4th 2002 on eBay.

In Laser Games with Shirley Clarke, the Videofreex visit the apartment of independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

Two young women confront careers in a world of violence, lust, and show-business. This student/teacher co-production I made at the San Francisco Art Institute is a colorful collage of digital dementia.

A rock. Buildings. Trees. Nothing happens. But something is always moving. People walk by. Time passes by. Seasons change. The Earth’s tectonic plates are in constant but imperceivable motion, which slowly move apart or crash together.

In January 2001, the KEN BURNS’ JAZZ promotional blizzard hit New York City.

The Luminous Image was an international exhibition of video installations held in the fall of 1984 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

In Dreams and Autumn is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

The Politics of Breathing: Tear Gas.

Partially Buried explores a web of genealogical traces. In this work the artist probes the notion of sites of memory as well as site-specific work by focusing on the location of Kent, Ohio.

The 2008 iteration 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

Nathan Lyons (b.1930) has contributed to the field of photography as a critic, author, curator, educator, and photographer.

Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this second reflection on photography and its people looks at the individual’s position within the context of war and how photographs become the sole record of that displacement, at the risk

Hotel Diaries is an ongoing series of video recordings made in hotel rooms, all of which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events.

With the Watergate hearings as a backdrop, quotes from various newspapers and magazines--including the story of Robert Smithson's death in a plane crash--build a picture of the confusing and tragic events of July 1973.

The planting of the "cempasuchil" for the celebrations of the "Day of Death" is one of the last jobs that the Ayotzianapa normal students did before they were brutally disappeared, with small Lomokino 35mm cameras, which we had to compose-hit several ti

Karen Finley is well known for her confrontational monologues, often performed in clubs and bars, which exploit the stereotype of the hysterical woman to address the sexual and political taboos associated with femininity.

The title gives a bitter meaning to the uneasy image of a woman who is brushing her hair over her face with fierce movements.

The violent overreaction to 9/11 and to the revolutions of the 1960s cannot be explained only with fear and politics.

“On the surface, Rea Tajiri’s work reads like the standard deconstruction of appropriated popular media via text to which we have grown accustomed in the ’80s.

Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression refl

A psychedelic portrait exploring epistemologies of Seminole alligator wrestlers. Considered a staple of Florida tourism, alligator wrestling has been performed by members of the Seminole Tribe for over a century.

This single channel tape was created from a 4-channel live mix of 4 VCRs, an A/V mixer, and a sampler.

An insert square of a man running is superimposed over a magnified mouth that speaks to him — first in nurturing encouragement, then with a no-win Mommie Dearest kind of criticism. Originally presented as an installation on six monitors, Deadline focuses on “the stress man feels in the urban environment,” using a range of digital video effects to stretch, compress, flip and fracture the image.

Buffalo, New York, which was once a prosperous city, is home to several architectural masterpieces built in the late 19th century to the early 20th century, such as the Darwin D.

In 1991 Montano met a Hindu couple at Ananda Ashram, the meditation center she attends in upstate New York. Since then, the three have become friends. Mr. and Mrs.

Nebula is a hallucinogenically immersive spectacle: a complex, long-form audio-visual composition, which pays playful homage to science fiction fantasies.

Juliana Huxtable was born in Texas and studied at Bard College, NY.

Jeremy Blake (1971-2007) used digital media to create works that function on a flexible spectrum between being more painting-like or more film-like.

"Pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the center of the screen — I keep narrowing my focus into my finger.

Video Data Bank is proud to present the wonderful work of artist Laura Parnes.

Richard Schechner is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of numerous books including Performance Theory (1988) and The Future of Ritual (1993), and editor of The Drama Review. This interview with Na

In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force.

A soft-focus close-up of mouth and lips is set to the sounds of lovemaking. A soft-porn video on how easy it is to get porn.

A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.

Set in Charlottesville during the early 1990s, an aspiring writer finalizes stories for the latest issue of Pride, a student-run newspaper at the University of Virginia.

Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

This collection highlights three works from Parnes’s 1990s-era, revealing the artist’s innovative use of appropriation and experimental film techniques to comment on the aesthetics and politics of popular culture.

Roger Brown's (1941-1997) quirky, stylized paintings were influenced by such disparate sources as comic strips, hypnotic wallpaper patterns, medieval panel paintings, and early works of Magritte. His work is epitomized by a series of claustrophobic urban scenes with their drop-curtain-like gray clouds and cardboard-box apartment buildings, suggesting an amalgamation of boyish enthusiasm for model making and adult despondency. In 1996 he donated his apartment, complete with all of his belongings, artworks, writings, and automobile to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where it is on public display.

In this video, Glennda and sex activist Chris Teen attend the opening of Dress Codes at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.

“A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal. Blackness/void cluttered by growing ephemera.

Marcia Tucker (1940-2006) was a curator, writer and art historian, known for founding the New Museum of Contemporary Art after her dismissal from her curatorial post at the Whitney Museum of American Art, due to creative disagreements.  Tucker served as the visionary director of the New Museum from 1977 to 1999, during which time she organized major exhibitions like The Time of Our Lives (1999), A Labor of Love (1996), and Bad Girls (1994), and edited the series Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art.

Pulling Up Roots is the emotional journey of a woman who is navigating the tenuous strain between the past and the future.

Turn It On, Tune It In, Take It Over! is a portrait of freedom of expression at the dawn of the Electronic Age.

In Bataille, fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon are subject to a mirror effect. A scene in which two samurai fight each other becomes a cosmic field of monsters where horror and pain evoke beauty and joy.

Repurposing an ancient confessional video diary made about 40 years ago, this 11-minute narrative creates a poignant and humorous conversation where both ‘selves’ question, enlighten, and warn one another about things in life that really matter.