John Cage’s work has had an immeasurable influence on 20th Century music and art, and his formal and technological innovations were tied to his desire to push the boundaries of the art world.

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein receives a call from surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparks a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism, and shamanism.

If you lived here you’d be home by now occurs during the years of Williamsburg Brooklyn’s overheated real estate market, just before the 2008 financial bubble burst.

Best known for her carved wooden heads wrapped in black leather affixed with zippers, glass eyes, enamel noses, spikes and straps, Nancy Grossman (b.1940) is accomplishe

The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.

A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her reach to a subject she is outside of.

“It is curious that in the most important periods of one’s life, one never keeps a diary. There are some things that even a habitual diary-keeper shrinks from putting down in words—at the time, at least.

An evening-length collaboration work with the celebrated avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. The stage set is by Eiko & Koma and the lighting is by David Ferri.

This film is about a five-day seminar designed to teach executives to "sell themselves" better.

Filmed directly from the screen of a smartphone using a language translator app that has been told to translate from French into English, Steve Hates Fish interprets the signage and architecture in a busy London shopping street.

®™ark is an organization dedicated to bringing anti-corporate subversion and sabotage into the public marketplace.

It's the season of joy once again and this video depicts the tasty and the troublesome in big, heaping spoonfuls.  Witness a social whirlpool of whipped confections and stripped confessions tastefully prepared in soupy symbolism.  See man and

Poet Leticia Plotkin's final poem, intended to praise the ancient deities who control one's fate, turns instead into a bitter damnation scribbled in venom.

Multiple sources of feedback-generated computer animations mixed with images and sounds from electronic oscillators via an analog video switcher. The sound is delayed with Max/ MSP.

In this interview painter Robert Ryman (b. 1930) describes his artistic influences, recounts his work process, and assesses the use and meaning of painting, both in the 1960s and the 1990s.

Based on a painting depicting St. Bernard receiving milk from a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Words: Donald Kuspit

Performer: Heidi Bartlett

Sound/Camera: Hans Breder

Post-production: Adam Burke

How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain's Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy.

NYC: A morning walk to the Esplanade near where the Towers had been — just to watch and record water taxis ferrying people between New Jersey and New York City — then riding across a piece of handmade canvas scanned into the computer.

Sphinxes Without Secrets is an energetic and transgressive acount of outstanding female performance artists, and an invaluable document of feminist avant-garde work of the 70s and 80s.

Video Data Bank is proud to present the pioneering work of Bio Artist Eduardo Kac. This three-disc box set features art works that expand the limits of locality, light, and language.

A troupe of male and female jugglers and musicians perform for a growing crowd in Central Park, New York, led by Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli.  The sun is shining, and the troupe are skilful, playful, and flirtatious. 

The Diaspora Suite

BIT Plane is a highly compact spy plane, wingspan 20 inches, radio-controlled, video-instrumented and deployed over areas of scenic interest. Due to its refined dimensions, BIT plane is able to enter territory inaccessible to other aircraft.

Following the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, the filmmaker examines the boredom of everyday life in a besieged country.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

A 3D video cover version of Michael Snow's seminal structural film Wavelength (1967).

The artist stalks and serenades Joe Dimaggio in her car as he strolls the docks, unaware that McGuire is secretly videotaping his every step.

Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends.

Filmed in Susan Mogul’s Los Angeles multi-ethnic working class neighborhood, Highland Park, Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary, is an insider’s view of how home and neighborhood are constructed in everyday relations.

In Love Tapes: Two Museums, speakers from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, Connecticut) and The Museum of Modern Art (New York) share their thoughts and memories of love.

In 1959, Jean Seberg stares into Raoul Coutard’s 35mm camera lens and then turns – the closing frame of Godard’s Breathless is the back of her head. For the film it is a closing. For her character it is less clear. Is it a refusal? A denial?

Vito Acconci (b. 1940) is known as a conceptual designer, installation and performance artist.

This very funny video plays with the identification of the camera as phallus, as an instrument of power and domination intruding upon reality; never an innocent bystander, it is always the organizing locus of events.

This is the liturgy of the sacred fangs, a forgotten syntax of ancient scripture. In the secret of the ritual fangs the holy syntax used to be a dance. A germinal dance of the language.

This compilation is a fresh, witty, and compelling addition to video’s rich legacy of media deconstruction.

Possibly In Michigan is an operatic fairytale about cannibalism in Middle America. A masked man stalks a woman through a shopping mall and follows her home. In the end, their roles are reversed when the heroine deposits a mysterious Hefty bag at the curb. Like Condit's other video narratives, Possibly In Michigan shows bizarre events disrupting mundane lives. Combining the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, she constructs a world of divided reality.

Spanning two years of protest and resistance, this video chronicles the politically-motivated police harassment of the homeless population in Manhattan’s Lower East Side; including suspected arson, illegal eviction, and the demolition of buildings that

An old Russian Akula submarine, armed with ballistic nuclear missiles, is assigned a new captain. But Captain Pavel seems to care very little for Navy protocol.

In the wake of Lord of the Universe, TVTV planned to cover the impeachment of Richard Nixon, but, unfortunately, Nixon resigned.

A political composition on natural resistance. These images are an expiring breath in danger of extinction. These images become extinguished, consumed: a drop, a pure intensity which only appears when falling.

in complete world is a feature-length documentary made up of street interviews done throughout NYC.

A Sly and the Family Stone tarmac arrival as a point of departure.

This title is only available on Can You Move Like This: Black Fire.

Joyce Kozloff was at the forefront of the 1970s pattern and decoration movement—a feminist effort to incorporate typically “feminine” and popular decorative arts into the fine arts.

In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sang the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause.

Hal Foster is Professor of Modern Art at Princeton University, and has written and edited numerous influential books on postmodernism, art, and culture.

Dó is an audio/visual synthesis between a dual screen video installation and a sound installation which was developed in collaboration with the Portuguese-Cape Verdean rapper/music composer Chullage.

Just a Soul Responding is a four-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the four channels presented in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only. 

“I may have to get a back up career.” I mull over what I might do if I don’t make it as an artist. What if I lose my eyes?

The tapes in Facing the Self: Program 2 are organized around the appearance of the female form, particularly the face.

Commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for the occasion of Eiko receiving the Sam Miller Performing Arts Award. Premiered at LMCC’s A Toast to Downtown on December 9, 2020. Shot at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island.

In the midst of the 2011 revolution in Cairo, a few beduins listen to their car's radio near Jericho, a place which looks like the end of the world.