Habit is an autobiographical documentary that follows the current history of the AIDS epidemic along dual trajectories: the efforts of South Africa’s leading AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign, struggling to gain access to AIDS drugs and the daily routine of the videomaker, a veteran AIDS activist in the U.S. who has been living with AIDS for more than ten years.
"Love at first sight, one night, down at Silverror’s Saloon!" Mickey R Mahoney and jonCates direct Silverror’s Saloon, the next film in the 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) Glitch Western series of films and games. Written by Emily Mercedes Rich and jonCates, this experimental film queers, glitches, and questions the Western film genre. We encounter characters caught in a glitched cinematic magic moment: a love scene. First dance with a stranger. Home and far from home.
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (b. 1955) creates sculptures and installations that intend to unify individuals through their relationship to memory, the body, and spirituality. Often referencing literature, psychology, biology, and history, his practice speaks of a shared humanity despite the world’s complexity. In this way, language acts as a metaphor, and the human figure a universal symbol. Plensa is perhaps best known for works that engage groups of people in public spaces.
Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary Queer discourse. Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality, dislocated from ‘real time’, into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss and anger is palpable.
An over thirty-minute static long take of a grass lawn in front of a lake. A camera is set still to capture a day trip of a group of people around the lake. The causal conservation suggests they are having a picnic on a breezy day, where a wind chime occasionally rings, alongside the random blowing of a horn. The video processing focuses on the keying of two distinct areas: the lake and the surrounding grass lawn and trees.
Appropriated network-TV footage of Jimmy Carter’s "I see risk" speech from the 1980 Democratic Convention meets Reagan’s gloomy inaugural ride through D.C.: "If you succumb to a dream world, you’ll wake up to a nightmare."
This title is also available on Presidents and Elections.
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.
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.
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.
September 24th, 2016, North Avenue Beach, Chicago. It was a sunny day. According to the weather report, the temperature was 75°F, with the barometer reading of 30 inches height and the wind speed of 13 miles per hour. The time was 2:27 pm, I was standing by the Michigan Lake. In my hand there was a waterproof camera that weighs 2.6 ounces. I pressed the record button on the camera and threw it into the lake. The camera sank into the lake immediately and embarked on a mysterious journey. During the journey, it was elevated, pressed, panned, rotated, and spun by the water.
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.
Phil Morton and Dan Sandin introduce video equipment and editing techniques to St. Olaf College students—a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. They display constant playful interactions, from deliberately making audio feedback to mimicking the feedback sounds with voice. The workshop is very laid-back and carefree which is typical of the '70s counterculture and DIY Video communities.
"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.
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."
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.
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
"'I am nice. I... am nice. I am... nice," repeats the narrator, in this personal and highly poetic exploration of the construction of self. Mirra favors repetition as the device for reconstructing the stage of development when a child learns its name. Like a bedtime story, the narrator unfolds the tale of a child who identifies herself as a bear. The story becomes increasingly complex as it moves from one voice to two, in which bear and child gradually become distinct entities and the haiku poetry of the child’s identification, 'I, Bear,' is ultimately forsaken for the name Helen.
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.
A trans performers enacts an improvised strip-tease in silence, adhering to directions of positioning and movement. The performance fails to reveal genitals. Perspective oscillates between three stages of distance from the subject; re-focusing and reframing the (lack of) genital revelation.
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.
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.
This 12-minute video by Tom Palazzolo and Chicago writer Jack Helbig tells the story of the recently discovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier. Though she was unknown in her lifetime, her extensive body of work is rewriting the history of post-World War II American street photography. The video, told from the point of view of Maier herself, recounts her life and work, from her childhood in France to her move to NYC in 1951 and subsequent relocation to Chicago, where the majority of her work was done.
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.
