Swamp Swamp and Wurmburth are each comprised of a series of tightly cropped shots of small, hand-made table-top sculptures or "sets". Paint and many other materials that behave like paint (i.e. lotion, shampoo, foodstuffs) are blown through these environments with plastic tubing and forced air. Each edited collection of shots makes an endless cycle of primal sludge and rupturing goo.
The unusual combination of a sound like a singing saw accompanies sweet images of frolicking lambs in the meadow, galloping horses, and a strange boy, is eerily beautiful and pure.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.
Dykes and trans guys take over the Jackhammer for a punk show.
This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.
In this video diptych, Snyder uses image and music to depict opposing forces in semi-abstract terms. Exploring processes of fracture and permutation, Hard and Flexible Music contrasts two groups of images, gridded architectural structures and fluid natural imagery, on opposite sides of the screen. The experimental music soundtrack carries two synthesized tracks with differing musical qualities.
This title is also available on Bob Snyder: Sound and Video 1975-1990.
The small cruelties of a subliminal fog roll in. A pandemic thwarts intimacy. Perched from their little planets, this cast of wildly colorful creatures question their futures and navigate the longing for connection.
This is the fifth collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke.
A queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago from the point of view of French writer Jean Genet. Along the way Genet will meet, amongst others, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, the Yippies, the Black Panther Party and the Chicago police force... Ultimately, the video is about the difficulty of aligning political and sexual desires.
Love Songs #1 is composed of three pieces that pose questions about urban culture, race, and politics. Found footage images are manipulated and juxtaposed with popular music; the effects are unsettling, ironic, and sometimes humorous.
The video opens with visual feedback and various sounds including snoring, whistling, and other generated audio. The video then slowly transitions into Phil Morton’s monologue and a solarized image. Phil is in front of video equipment racks at the Governors State University—a public university in University Park, Illinois. He starts by discussing events at the school, and then draws the viewers’ attention to the video waveform behind him as he sways. He says that “all things in the universe are so interconnected,” and ends up in laughter.
"You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional."
--Cinematexas Festival (Austin, 2001)
"Three more sing-alongs, this time with swans, a snake, and the Red Army Chorus."
--L.A. Freewaves Festival
This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.
A rural sunset at the edge of the water in WandaWega Waters. The natural rhythmic movement of the water’s surface becomes a highly colored abstraction in motion, a meditation on the intersection of nature and technology.
This single channel tape was created from a 4-channel live mix of 4 VCRs, an A/V mixer, and a sampler. Hypnotic music, idiosyncratic singing, and soft, yet insistent voiceovers accompany television images portraying notions of happiness, the work ethic, and social success in a subtly alienating video collage. "Repeat with me: I now feel confident about opening to others and projecting charisma."
Decidedly low-tech, this optical abstraction begins with a shot of an aluminum reflector inside a lamp; a lightbulb in the shot’s center flicks on and off. As the video plays on, nearly identical shots are superimposed, but at a steadily decreasing scale, resulting in an array of nested rectangles. The rhythmic blinking of intense light- accompanied by audible clicks from the plastic light switch- presents the viewer with a swift progression of blinding geometries, (with) dizzying effects.
-- Michelle Grabner, Artforum, May 2010
Fiber artist Claire Zeisler discusses her techniques, ideas on art, and training; the conversation is inter-cut with images from her 1979 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I... realized I cannot change my techniques too often. I would rather use techniques that I know and keep on perfecting them because I feel that in keeping on and perfecting them, I’m going to find something else to say,” Zeisler says in this interview with Rhona Hoffman.
Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.
This title is only available as an excerpt on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
Lines of Force opens with footage of a dramatic explosion. For most of the piece, the screen is divided, into a triptych at first, and slowly into horizontal and vertical bars. Electronically manipulated footage shows a man walking, a marching band, ferns, cartoons, a window, and a train arriving on a set of tracks. The naturally occurring lines in the array of images presented mirror the electronically created bars and lines that divide the screen. Natural scenes provide a respite from the frantic pace of the images.
Beginning with Phil Morton narrating in a Southern twang, he demonstrates how to flip a video with low cost—72 cents—on modification on the camera.
The Chocolate Factory is a suite of monologues in the voice of a fictionalized serial killer, one monologue for each victim. The camera, with an almost structuralist rigor, pans up and down simple line drawings of each of the seventeen victims. A Black Sabbath song, picked apart and extended, serves as punctuation and soundtrack. Reinke has described the video as, "My autobiography as Jeffrey Dahmer." But really, as the narrator says, "It's all about the victims."
This tape exemplifies Snyder’s early experiments with the image processor. Articulated patterns of alternating wavelength and amplitude of both sound and light are arranged to produce abstract compositions. Voltages processed by an Emu sound synthesizer are systematized through characteristic interval structures that affect the image processor’s functions.
This title is also available on Bob Snyder: Sound and Video 1975-1990.
Phyllis Bramson (b.1941) is a Chicago painter whose post-imagist style emphasizes content and the deeply personal. Bramson’s paintings are private scenarios that include figures (or performers) who carry out highly charged activities with strong psychological meaning. They perform in highly theatrical, Oriental settings of almost cubist space and acid greens, yellows, and reds.
In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor (IP), a modular, patch programmable, analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs. Sandin decided that the best distribution strategy for his instrument "was to give away the plans for the IP and encourage artists to build their own copies.
"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)
Using the image processor as it was intended as a performance instrument, Icron exploits the processor’s real-time capabilities: the image and soundtrack were generated through simultaneous improvisation, although the color was added later. The title of the piece is a neologism created by fusing "icon" with "chron" as a reference to the effect of temporal changes on images. Snyder combines iconographic elements of broadcast television with the structural features of music by deconstructing the face of a newscaster into scan lines.
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.
The video content—a live-feed image processing tape—shows intellectual discussion among SAIC Video Area students and faculty members. Instead of being a prescriptive monologue from school to students, Phil sits among the crowd and moderates the session. The decentralized and non-hierarchical academic setting—students and faculty sitting on the floor and cushions in a circle—is typical of the ’70s. At times, students burst into laughter, dancing, and lounging on the floor, hence creating a laid-back environment.
Why is this injured man driving around and around a shopping center parking lot? Just what is his Target? An atmospheric mystery tale that hints at a sad story.
