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.
Timely concerns about the future of video, artists’ complicity in the money making system of the ‘establishment,’ and the effect of the camera’s presence on personal encounters, is discussed and debated in this late night video produced by David Cort, Chuck Kennedy, and Skip Blumberg.
The Nothing That Is stems from the environment of our streets, both the “virtual” and “other reality” which inhabits them.
A huge isolated rock in the midst of the desert in Australia: Ayers Rock. I produced two contrasting films around this rock: Moments at the Rock was shot with an amateur video camera, amazing color changes, and time-lapsed compressed sequences; A Rock in the Light, edited with the music of Haruyuki Suzuki, is more visually structured, following the passing of time from the sunrise to the sunset.
--Takahiko iimura
"Takahiko iimura's Air's Rock is an ultimate landscape film."
--Katsuhiro Yamagucki, artist and author
Parry Teasdale, David Cort and Chuck Kennedy visit The Kitchen in New York looking for Shirley Clarke, and bump into Steina and Woody Vasulka who are overseeing a show in progress. A few doors down they find Shirley in her studio, dressed in white and full of energy.
Ten thousand women marched down New York's Fifth Avenue on August 26th, 1970, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote. The march was part of a "Women's Strike for Equality" organized by veteran feminist leader Betty Friedan.
In this interview Cecilia Dougherty describes her work and her explorations into family interactions, outsider psychology, role-playing, lesbian sexuality, and popular culture. Her videos Grapefruit (1989) and Coal Miner’s Granddaughter (1991) work from within mass culture norms to create a lesbian dialogue within the “normal”—what Dougherty calls “the life of the ordinary lesbian and her working-class family.” Her more recent vides explore lesbian identity within a separate social sphere.
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 work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative, and musical connections between images and sounds, linked by the random discoveries of the tape samples.
In the 1960s and '70s, Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) emerged as one of the most important experimental filmmakers, creating structuralist works such as Zorns Lemma (1970), Poetic Justice (1972), and Nostalgia (1973).
A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person.
In 1964, Steina Vasulka (then Steinunn Bjarnadottir) married Woody Vasulka, a Czech engineer with a background in film. They later moved to New York where, with Andreas Mannik, they founded the Kitchen, a performance space dedicated to new media. The Vasulkas collaborated on a series of video works whose imagery arose primarily through the manipulation of the video signal at the level of the electron beam itself.
Morayngava: the “design of things.” Yngiru: the box of the spirits, the films, just like xaman dreams. This is how the Asurini define video, which has just arrived in their village. After discovering that it is possible to store their images, the old men lament that they never stored images of their ancestors and decided to register the initiation of a xaman, a tradition threatened by new times.
Directed by Virginia Valadão and Regina Müller.
In Assurini with English subtitles.
Trip is inspired by the main oeuvre of architect Raine Karp--the concert hall designed for the city of Tallinn between 1975-1980. Considered the most important building realized in Estonia, Linnahall is a time capsule preserving the utopian ideas of centralized power and of egalitarian modernism, and an example of how architecture can stir public emotions in our times of corporate dominance.
This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clarke.
The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.
In this interview video and performance artist Nancy Buchanan discusses her feminist and political work. Buchanan comments upon the advantages of video over performance in terms of accessibility—the ability for her videos to circulate and reach audiences she physically cannot, and their brevity and completed form—and her strategies to create an atmosphere for change. This Video Portrait features two of Buchanan’s videos in their entireties: the anti-nuclear weapons work An End to All Our Dreams (1982) and the more straightforwardly feminist Webs (1983).
Cutting to the core of cinematic realism, Fountain presents the plot-less character of human encounters. In a string of moments with the people who have presented themselves to Cumming’s camera for over twenty years, Fountain allows the accidental and the absurd to dominate our impressions. Storytelling is evacuated in the process.
Circle's Short Circuit is an experimental feature-length work with neither a beginning nor an end—the film can be viewed from any random point. It moves through a circle of five interlocking episodes that describe the phenomenon of interruption in contemporary communication through various forms and modes, investigating causes, consequences, and side-effects. Genres shift along the episodic path of this circle, moving from documentary to essay, through collage, simulated live-coverage, and silent film.
Return of the Black Tower was conceived as a 'response' film to John Smith's 1987 classic short experimental film, The Black Tower.
"Barmy, baffling and weirdly funny,... an elliptical, satirical examination of contemporary belief, as much as it is about the problem of art as an incommensurate, incommunicable experience."
— JJ Charlesworth, Time Out London
This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clarke.
The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.
Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents, accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel — an optical dimension created to move through time, and between tepid and tropic encounters.
I just got this tattoo — you can see it's still healing, the edges are raised like some sort of fancy business card — to mark the completion of this, Series One of my on-going project, Final Thoughts. So, on one wrist, facing fistward, a skull and, on the other, still tender and healing, a ghost. Let them be the mascots for the series, little cartoony avatars.
"This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher. Farocki's admiration for Straub was so great that he said of Between Two Wars, Perhaps I only made this film to earn Straub's recognition." In this observation-driven film, Farocki documents the fulfillment of his wish. The film shows Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film Klassenverhältnisse (1983). Anyone who has seen Farocki's documentary of the shoot will never forget these short scenes.
A rumination on Time, with a capital "T". Time and its ravages, which really just means its progression, its nature. Set off by an "old" poem, a T.S. Eliot poem that's literally haunted me for 30? or 40? yrs
... even before I became an old man myself.
(It's an old man's rumblings, and it never fails to move me. I used a quote from it in a film I made 25yrs ago, and the book still calls to me from its place on the bookshelf, its pages yellow, dry as bone.)
An early example of video erotica from the Videofreex. A group of naked people lounge around smoking and listening to music. A male and female couple is making love on the floor in a room full of monitors.
1. The idea that a film about a city, a quiet, architectural film no less, can tell us anything that we don’t already know about urban life at this point in our new century is perhaps a bit arrogant. But the city is an organism that changes constantly; our knowledge of it is provisional at best. So a film that examines the urban environment under the cloak of darkness must presume to reveal a reality that we don’t know, and tries to dispel projections and fears that are for the most part located in the imagination... in a memory of film, television, or the novel.
