In a celebrity-obsessed culture, filmmakers often exploit the downfall of a star to amplify the emotional undertones of the fictional films in which they perform.

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.

Washington, D.C.-based African-American artist Sylvia Snowden paints what she calls “figural or structural abstract expressionist” works.

Though the use of fairytales and dark fantasies, these works combine the commonplace with the macabre to construct a new world of the subconscious.

In a fusion of text and image, Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and other broadcast reports to analyze their deceptive syntax and capture the confusion intentionally inserted into the news script.

The videopoem Reversed Mirror is a single-channel piece that presents a constant flow and transformation of images which oscillate and create ephemeral words, dissolving and emerging as new words.

The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991.

This is the clinamen of our times, sparkling bodies into the spiral vortex as well as its chaotic spatial present. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

German filmmaker Valeska and her crew—soundwoman Constanza and cameraman Albert—arrive at Maple Tree Farm during the Thanksgiving holiday of 1971 to film a piece for German TV on the Videofreex.

“Jesus Christ, look at the white people, rushing back. White people don’t care, Jack...” - Richard Pryor

(chatlandia) uses the public bathroom stall as format and metaphor for Internet relay chat lines (IRCs).

"I brought live reptiles, birds of prey and exotic flowers to a very stereotyped and neglected section of the city of St.

Sixty-five years after the Allied invasion of Southern France, the director's mother, Cecily Barker Finley, tries to recall her involvement as a social worker aboard a WWII Red Cross ship.

A portrait of an unnamed city in Italy. Sidestepping the tourist attractions that make the city famous, the film/video posits an almost-imaginary place that draws closer to the reality of its inhabitants.

In conversation with David Getsy — an art historian focusing on queer and transgender methodologies in sculpture theory and performance history — Cassils discusses their monumental performance artworks and inspirations.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past.

Gibbons presents a Son of Sam-like relationship between a man and his dog in which the man takes the dog to task for the terrible things he has made him do. Shot in Pixelvision.

75 people speak 50 languages sometimes simultaneously.

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death.

Framing the solo exhibition Prophetic Memory, this video remediates images of the NYC nonprofit art gallery, Artists Space, with the filmmaker’s grandmother's descriptions of how she would use her interior design

A young communist girl named Sharambaba resists her suitor in a carriage. She speaks of what he calls her "fantasy world". All of the dialogue is played backwards with accommodating subtitles.

This is the gaze that is reflected in the dark obsidian mirror.

In this interview, American artist, independent curator, writer, and experimental filmmaker, Vaginal Davis reflects on her initiation into the punk rock and art scenes of Los Angeles during the 1980s and 90s, her stylistic influences, and her ongoing efforts to theorize queerness and visuality. Caught between the opposing poles of Hollywood classicism and the rawness of punk, Davis defines her unapologetically gender-bending, campy, and at times aggressively critical performances as scenarios, rather than spectacles or entertainment.

Can You Move Like This: Black Fire films by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N.

There are times when concurrent multiple realities of place demand at least an attempt to determine who in fact has, and where is, this place in the sun. Hearts and Helicopters occurs at that moment in the lives of four people.

Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.

— Michael Robinson

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. 

A documentary video about the B.I.T.

The five videos featured here investigate video as a tool for storytelling and the construction of alternate identities.

The Grandmother recites the Mourners' Kaddish over her granddaughter.

Segalove relates a tale from her childhood of a man's exposure with text (“the painter wagged it at me right here”), while an arrow blinks over a shot of the house where she grew up.

A selection of Love Tapes — a collection of video recordings of 2,500 people from diverse backgrounds who share their personal feelings about love.

In May 2025, Wendy guest lectured for a class of international graduate students taught by filmmaker Irene Lusztig at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Here, a double morphology of conversion forces us to think about the trance of non-reconciliation, outburst and trance that go through the centuries of colonial violence until reaching us in the tension of an audiovisual disjunction: visible and enuncia

An intimate portrait of the artist at his home in San Francisco, this film delves into Mike Kuchar's life and work.

In a tape that stands out as one of the earliest examples of the use of appropriated television footage, Freed assembles a collage of images representing American media icons, from Mickey Mouse and Richard Nixon, to The Wizard of Oz and the Rol

A film about haircuts, clothes, and image/sound relationships.

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown.

Wojtasik's Nine Gates explores the possibility of transcendence through sexual passion: averting the gaze from the objectification of the other, the female body or the obscure enemy, to the vast and microscopic details of the body unknown to th

Theo Cuthand and his mother Ruth Cuthand have a candid conversation about Theo's last hospitalization for Bipolar Disorder in 2007.

Emory Douglas is a political artist and activist, producing revolutionary art for important political movements.

For 200 Nanowebbers, Semiconductor have created a molecular web that is generated by Double Adaptor's live soundtrack.

A video response to September 11th and the public dialogue captured on radio, including this call-in radio program’s discussion about whether Mohammed Atta’s last meal in a Pizza Hut undermined his proclaimed spiritual motive.

The earliest of Benglis's videoworks, Noise calls attention to the assemblage element of video by allowing the image to disintegrate into static between edits.

As regional character disappears and corporate culture homogenizes our surroundings, it's increasingly hard to tell where you are.

On April 30, 2019, Eiko and Alexis Moh, one of Eiko's collaborators in The Duet Project, visited the Manzanar Historical Site.

Gaijin = A non-Japanese person. In 1984 I celebrated my eighth birthday on my mother's island.

Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found by the artists within a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found.

The performers are seated around a pink octagonal table on pink, violet, and silver cinder blocks. One performer (Robert Stearns) stands up, recites the credits for the piece, and then says, “Do you believe in water?

Part bio, part memoir, Mom’s Move is an intergenerational film about mothers and daughters, women and photography, remembering and forgetting, and the tension between women’s private and public selves.