Found Footage

The union of humankind and the camera is a long and sordid tale. This lyrical dance illustrates the inseparable nature of the two.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.

An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79) and TV genres (Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry, 1979) to reveal their subtexts.

Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art is a video catalog of the artist’s exhibition, performance and workshop in Montreal in 2003. Produced in the context of a retrospective exhibition at the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, the video presents a close view of Montano’s signture art/life counseling performance, interviews with participants, and views of the artworks in situ. It also documents Montano’s performance pedagogy during her all-night sleepover workshop which was collaboratively hosted by La Centrale and Rad’a.

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Steve Reinke has long been lauded for his irreverent, philosophical, and often acerbic works, which typically adopt the form of personal essays to wryly bend and reread wide-ranging topics, from pop culture, to sex, to theories of visual perception and beyond. Reinke’s video, included in the 2014 Biennial, Rib Gets in the Way, is narrated in the first person by Reinke, and addresses mortality, the body, the archive, and the embodiment of a life’s work.

What are all of these photographers trying to capture, and just who is collaborating with whom? This short piece could be a take on fame and the cult of the personality — or a tourist portrait with the audience as subject.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.

Second and Lee is a cautionary tale about when not to run. It uses archival reportage and voiceover recollection to trace through repetitive corridors of presumption, justice and judgment.

Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, was released June 27 2014. But for months ahead of the release, on YouTube one could already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.

In Danza Solar, Super8 archival footage of dancers is superimposed with 16mm views of the sun (suns). The film evokes a communal solar trance, both Andean and Mesoamerican. Part of a collection of works the collective considers "Shamanic Materialism," Danza Solar is a Mesoamerican spell unleashed.

In this faux-recreation of a home-shopping network, Al Gore and George W. Bush offer you a 'super-premium' collectible lamp commemorating the 2000 presidential election.

Since comets have been recorded, they've augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th Century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.

Presidential candidates are sold like commercial products and naturally television is the ideal medium. Political Advertisement depicts the evolution of political ads over the last 44 years, beginning with Eisenhower in 1952 (which was an unqualified success), and continuing up to the most recent ad campaigns for Ross Perot, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton in 1996. 

A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, what happens to our things after we are gone?

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 Rolling Stones. Placing cartoon images next to images of the war in Vietnam, Freed creates an appropriately surreal vision of American culture, and begs the question whether an anthropologist of the future would be able to decipher the truth of the age from such a confused mix of representations.

A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity.

The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology, and influence is told by piecing together 20th century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes of flute, acoustic guitar, and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey.

People enjoy my company connects the privatisation of telecommunications with techno-optimism, euphoria and online communication in the lead-up to the millennium.

The film explores the privatisation of the Irish state-owned telecommunications company Telecom Éireann from the viewpoint of shareholders communicating on early online forums. The event is contextualised within ideologies of technological emancipation in the pre-millennium period.

In 30 Seconds Hate, Fox News and Henry Kissinger want to kill you as a tribute to George Orwell’s 100th birthday. Suckers gives a half-minute history of Halliburton in Iraq.

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Ring attempts to exhibit the “sweet science” of boxing in an elegant way.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Workers Leaving the Factory — such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this still-existent sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home?

Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape.

Made in collaboration with composer Olivia Block, and by invitation of the Chicago Film Archives, utilizing solely films from their collection.

Filmmaker Cam Archer examines and explores his ordinary, suburban neighborhood in search of hidden truths, new narratives and a better understanding of his fading, creative self. Combining heavily degraded video with personal photographs and real life neighbors, Archer re-imagines the concept of 'home video'. In an attempt to distance himself from his subjects, actress Jena Malone narrates the piece as Archer in the first person.

Communists Like Us is an ambient music video made from a few seconds of archival footage of Mao Zedong applauding and members of the Red Guard chanting. The title Communists Like Us was taken from the 1985 text of the same name written by Felix Guattari and Toni Negri.