I borrowed this absurd phrase from a sign posted on the conductor’s booth in the Washington, D.C. subway. The language of civil service here borders on unintentional parody, with its blankly polite tone and bureaucratic single-mindedness. I.G.G.B.S.R.A.U.C. revisits my 1992 tape Nation, and features a dense chorus of faces and voices. These strangers ask us to consider the question, 'Who is the public?'
— Tom Kalin
In the early 1990s, I went to a reading by Leslie Scalapino at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. I could not understand the writing, which can seem difficult and unwieldy to a reader unaccustomed to language poetry, and understood less the more I tried. After a certain point in the reading I stopped trying to figure it out and I let the words seep in. My reward was an effortless understanding of how her poetry works.
It is TIME at a street corner in London... A collaboration between filmmaker Roderick Coover and writer Deb Unferth, this short marks the textual disintegration of the speaking clock in an unnerving portrait of technology, power, and the urban environment.
The seemingly groundless debate as to whether a river is "riley" or "roily" can be interpreted as an example of language's descriptive failure. A shouting match over how to describe the river has no effect; the face of nature continues unchanged. Riley, Roily, River graphically illustrates the gap of meaning that exists between the natural, empirical world and the language we use to describe it.
As an ominous voice guides us through Best Is Man’s Breath Quality, we are confronted by dense and complex images and sounds that appear and disappear before us. From primates engaging with their reflected selves to glowing jellyfish drifting through deep and dark oceans, our visual perception of the human figure is decentered, leaving only the grain of analog and digital voices recognizable to our senses.
A Song from the Cultural Revolution is a stuttering music video composed of appropriated footage of Bill Gates’s testimony before the U.S. Senate. Gates’s hand gestures have been re-edited, frame-by-frame, into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) signs for a text from “Methods of Thinking, Methods of Work,” Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (New York: Bantam, 1967).
This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.
"Fusco revives and embodies the chimpanzee animal psychologist Dr. Zira from the original Planet of the Apes films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In her Skyped-in introduction, esteemed feminist theorist and technoscience philosopher Donna Haraway explains that Dr. Zira narrowly escaped death in the third film and has been living in hiding, observing human behavior through visual culture. In her lecture, Dr.
This compilation is produced with "myself" as the sole object, as well as the material of the performance (except two videos with Akiko iimura). The videos are not just documents of the performances, but works of video-art made specifically for utilizing the video system, including the camera and monitor, as part of the performances. The collection also questions the identity of oneself in video, having tense relationships between words and images, and asks who is "I" and what "I" means.
DVD includes:
Self Identity, 1972, 1:00 excerpted
An unseen narrator weaves a textual “map of moral acupuncture” as two BDSM scenarios unfold between queer sex workers and their partners. Archive, architecture, land, sky, and touch bind the historical to the present. Where/what are the slippages between subversion and re-inscription? Liberation and retention? Real and fantasy? How do BDSM practices thicken historical narratives around bodies, sex, and power?
Encoded Facial Gesture #1 is a frame-by-frame animation of two mouth gestures that have been encoded into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchanges) to spell out a brief text by Sigmund Freud on paranoia.
This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.
Playing off the notion of “interactivity”, Utopia poses itself as a video game plugged into the social consciousness of contemporary California. The viewer/player seemingly makes choices from the menu offering utopian or dystopian realities; however, the score is always the same: the winner loses, and vice-versa. Features Rachel Rosenthal as the host of a macabre interactive game that pushes the boundaries of performance and interactive media.
Adapted from psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in the Islamic outskirts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, How to Fix the World brings to life Luria's conversations with Central Asian farmers learning how to read and write under the unfamiliar principles of Socialism.
Colorful digital animations based on Max Penson's photographs of collective farmers play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Uzbekistan in 2004.
Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.
“In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voiceover appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes—not prescribes—the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ (suppressed by structural film) to play word against picture and chance against order.
Taking its title from a poem by Paul Celan (translated as “sleeping den”), this montage is the result of a script that reconfigures over two hundred lines of English subtitles, lifted from films ranging from Battleship Potemkin and Persona, to The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. The disconcerting soliloquy on love and insomnolence is deliberately attempted in the original French, German, Russian, Italian, and Swedish.
"This video in two parts is a newcomer's portrait of Montréal, and focuses on two of my architectural obsessions: the Hydro Québec building and the Métro. I spent my first winter in Montréal in a cold, dark, first-floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee and watching the disk on the electric meter spin faster and faster, all the while wondering how I would manage to pay the bills. At night, I lay in bed and looked at the enormous illuminated 'Q' on the Hydro Québec building and wondered how much it cost to keep it lit every night.
alexia is an experimental video about word-blindness and metaphor. Word-blindness is a condition that usually afflicts people who have suffered a stroke, causing them to lose the visual recognition of individual letters but perceive the entire word, or vice versa. Metaphor is here discussed in its function to reveal and obscure perception. Divided into five short sections, the video draws a pattern with the motif of the finger and the moon to ruminate on language and blindness.
After the shrieks and howls of Hymn of Reckoning, I felt that I needed to close out the Oto trilogy with a gentle flashback, to a 1980s sunset beach on a tropical island. The bulk of this video’s work was in animating the speech-bubbles so that they’d blend in with the VHS scene. Playing the scene once and ending the piece felt too fast and fleeting, and I feared that nuances in the conversation would be lost, so I approached it like a verse in a simple, one-part song: I repeated it once again, with just the slightest modifications to its sonic textures.
Partially Buried Continued is a meditation on ways in which one’s associations to history, location, and genealogy become tangled in a subjective web which makes it complicated to separate history from fiction.
The Source is a Hole poses a web of loose connections and liminal associations to sculpt a treatise on transexual mourning. As a series of love letters, stories recount the authors own inception at the 1982 world’s fair, his attempt to remove a lodged tampon, his cravings for bottomless eros, and a barrage of tangential encounters, spanning the everyday, to performance reenactment, to science fiction cinema analysis and drag.
"The video Emission found its origin in three performances which I wrote between 1988 and 1991. In their original form, the performances dealt with sex, romance, and communication technologies. The video elaborates upon these themes to speak of how human beings exist in a margin between nature and technology, and works towards confounding any simplified analysis of this worn-out duality.
Acconci sits with a man and a woman before a microphone. The man and the woman read from two different texts (novels by Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler), and Acconci repeats everything the man says. From time to time, an off-screen voice asks Acconci something about what the woman has been saying, and he tries to answer. The focus of the tape is the relationship between modes of attention, direct and peripheral, in a situation where simultaneous strands of information are being presented.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
“To master the one-minute time span requires considerable discipline, and few pieces, if any, had been shaped as genuine miniatures—most having the appearance of being extracts from larger works. The notable exception was John Smith’s Gargantuan, which was not only the right length for the idea, but actually incorporated a triple pun on the word ‘minute.’”
— Nicky Hamlyn, “One Minute TV 1992”, Vertigo (Spring 1993)
"A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian."
— Elaine Paterson, Time Out London
Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.
"In the free space of the commodity, I digitally took apart moving image sequences and re-animated them into an encoded montage to create a metaphor of experience where the viewer feels like a fiber optic cable has been hard-wired into their consciousness — a look where the image is simultaneously visible and invisible. My hope was to create a work that re-presented information as a kind of subliminal narrative that critiqued the currently popular technotopian rhetoric."
— Les LeVeque
