War

Shot in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, this essay uses transportation, video, and photography to examine images circulating in a historically charged, and presently war-torn and divided, Middle East. From images of camels in the desert to images of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the video looks at states of mind in relation to actual geographies. The video pays tribute to an unformatted and open-ended documentary approach, and examines modes of access to information such as travel, television and the Internet, while carefully displaying the resulting iconography.

¡Macho Shogun! was created by Reed Anderson and Daniel Davidson over a single weekend some time in 2000.  It's your basic monster-robot / destroy-city kind of video that we wanted to make when we were kids but never did.

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

This film uses the ‘old fashioned’ conventions of documentary film practice to stand history on its head. There is a narration taken from a radio lecture by Claude Lévi-Strauss entitled, “The Meeting of Myth and Science,” images from the Deutsche Wochenshau of June 25, 1940 that recorded Hitler’s dawn visit to Paris, images from American newsreels, a movement from one of Beethoven’s Rasumovsky Quartets. The film could only succeed, in my mind, if the imprint of prior usage of all elements was clear.

Made in Germany, October 14th, 2004

While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

Museum Piece is the second episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

For the November 13, 2015 opening of the Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki at Pioneer Works, Eiko performed her solo in honor of the Hiroshima Panels and their creators. Japanese-style painter Iri Maruki, born in Hiroshima, and Western-style painter Toshi Maruki, who went into Hiroshima city just three days after the bombing. The artists decided to paint the panels together, which illuminate the human experiences of the Atomic Bomb. They spent 30 years painting the fifteen Hiroshima Panels, six of which were on display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In okay bye-bye, so named for what Cambodian children shouted to the U.S. ambassador in 1975 as he took the last helicopter out of Phnom Phenh in advance of the Khmer Rouge, Rebecca Baron explores the relationship of history to memory.

Ireland, October 20th 2007

The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series and looks back at the events of the past six years.

Six Years Later is the eighth episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER is an ambient video essay of life in Baghdad before the invasion and occupation. Men dance, women draw and sufis sing as they await the coming of another war. In seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish).

Notes, gifts, promises, paintings, trash, and other ephemera from the city which is now hardly a city. What if Walter Benjamin didn’t kill himself, learned html, bought a camera, and thought himself useful enough to work in an impending war zone?

A video adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center, Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards. The piece addresses society, war, and personal mortality.

¡Macho Shogun! was created by Reed Anderson and Daniel Davidson over a single weekend some time in 2000.  It's your basic monster-robot / destroy-city kind of video that we wanted to make when we were kids but never did.

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties. Weaving in between multiple forms of choreography and documentation, Drills restages lockdown and active shooter drills, frames corporate and tech start-up office meditation, and reperforms Boy Scout drills from the 1917 Boy Scout manual.

“Now too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t count.”

--Toni Morrison, “Beloved”

Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this second reflection on photography and its people looks at the individual’s position within the context of war and how photographs become the sole record of that displacement, at the risk of them being dispersed as well.

Five improvisers are asked to ‘channel’ the psyche of Tony Blair. George Barber asks questions, and also feeds the improvisers anecdotes from various sources about Tony Blair’s life and experience as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The work’s unifying themes are: Tony Blair landing in the Iraqi desert at night; meeting George Bush, and the regrets of his key decisions.

Security Anthem’s requisite components came together relatively slowly. I’d known for years that I wanted to make something out of the Oto speakers’ most sinister, suggestive sentences. I’d taught myself to program music on a Game Boy using a cartridge I’d bought from a Swedish programmer, and I composed a sequence of ominous music that seemed well-matched to the speakers. I’d recorded John Ashcroft singing his self-penned song “Let the Eagle Soar” through a media player window, and I knew that it somehow belonged with the speakers and the 8-bit music.