Composed entirely of film scraps salvaged from a closed Beirut cinema, Beirut Outtakes is a collage of sensational visions. Writes Ed Halter: "Outtakes appears to be a ready-made...pre-filled with Ahwesh's signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said."

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with videos of virtual reality demonstrations. Writes Ahwesh, "The tropes of the garden, the originary moment of self knowledge and gendered awareness of the body...is mimicked in the early experiments with virtual reality. The metaphors used in our cutting edge future are restagings of our cultural memory of the garden..."

Produced in close collaboration with the engineering research center MIRTHE (Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment), Warm Objects is a portrait of the world in uncertain and paranoid times. Utilizing MIRTHE's imaging technology and infrared photography, Ahwesh transforms scenes of everyday incidents into glimpses of our world through an alien lens.

You Are My Sister is Atlas' video visualization of the song by the acclaimed Antony & the Johnsons. Antony's haunting anthem is paired with Atlas' processed images of thirteen "NYC Beauties," whose close-up portraits turn in hypnotic motion. These images were originally processed and projected live by Atlas for the performance piece Turning, a collaboration with Antony & the Johnsons that merged the artists' distinctive and dramatic styles.

Bell-Smith and Pandian's re-edit of a 1989 Paula Abdul music video was created from a lo-res Web video, creating a look that references YouTube hobbyist remixing and fan edits. In their version, one line of the song - "I like to smoke" - is seamlessly substituted for other lyrics, turning the rote rhetoric of the original pop song into an absurdist dialogue. By exploiting the song's structure, they not only call attention to that structure, but also question the cultural environment within which it was created.

Bell-Smith terms his re-edit of Eisenstein's iconic 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin a "sort of Cliff Notes condensation of the original narrative." He separates the film into its original shots, with each shot sped up or slowed down to the exact same length - one half of a second - and a frame of white added at each cut. The soundtrack was replaced with a minimal, one-second dance-beat loop synced to the cut; the result recalls dance visuals and music videos.

To create this dense pop collage, Bell-Smith overlaid the first twelve parts of R. Kelly's soap opera/song cycle, Trapped in the Closet, playing them simultaneously. He writes, "I wanted to take this cultural object and amplify its peculiarity by folding the song and narrative onto itself." The result is a thick blur of overlapping forms and ghostly voices atop a plodding beat, all building to a chaotic crescendo and release.

Writes the artist: "The idea behind these pieces was to re-imagine the approaches to photography and the archive Ed Ruscha displayed in his books, through the lens of a post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google image search age." To do so, Bell-Smith arranged images sourced from the Internet into three Powerpoint slideshows.

In this work, Bell-Smith combines three found elements: an industrial video designed to fix stuck pixels in computer monitors, an animation of a sunset and a New Age soundtrack. In doing so Bell-Smith interrogates the purported transcendence of psychedelia and New Age techno-hippie-dom, while bringing into play the history of brainwashing videos and seizure-inducing strobe effects.

The TV Commercials is a recent compilation of Burden's four legendary television interventions, which date from 1973 to 1977. For each of these conceptual projects, Burden purchased commercial time on broadcast television and aired his own subversive "ads." Included are TV Ad: Through the Night Softly; Poem for L.A.; Chris Burden Promo, and Full Financial Disclosure.

Upon receiving a series of photographs taken from an ATM security camera, Calle becomes involved in a perplexing fifteen-year investigation. She manages to steal three surveillance tapes and interacts with strangers, bank employees, and a pawn shop merchant in an attempt to clarify the meaning of money, security, and the anonymous photographs.

In 0, Seoungho Cho literally counts cars speeding down a freeway. The interwoven and digitally rendered content — cars, the sounds they produce, numbers superimposed upon them — creates a dynamic investigation of the mechanics of the moving image.

I Left My Silent House begins in a meditative mood, with black and white images of people in the subway, and then is transformed into a colorful journey across dramatic open spaces, before returning once again to the city. The video's driving electronic soundtrack and dramatic image processing give it an intense yet somber tone.

Cokes continues his investigation of the uses of appropriated text and pop music as a form of political critique. Statements on the Iraq war and Bush's "war on terror" by Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Richard Clarke, among others, are displayed as on-screen text against flat bands of color; the graphic presentation and accompanying pop soundtrack suggest commercial advertising strategies.

Evil.10 features an excerpt from Slavoj Zizek's text Welcome to the Desert of the Real set to two music tracks by The Notwist. Written just after September 11, 2001, Zizek's text discusses potential meanings and consequences of the tragedy and questions common responses to the event. He reads the destruction as an unacceptable act and an opportunity for critical reflection, responsibility, and change in historical U.S. economic and political policies in relation to the world outside its borders.

Evil.6 animates an edited transcript from George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he outlines his case for the invasion of Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The text is juxtaposed with video images and sounds from Intelligence Failures by Benj Gerdes, which isolates only the pauses between sentences from the same televised speech.

Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates project, which dates from 1973-74, addresses issues of property, ownership, and urban spaces. For this project, Matta-Clark purchased fifteen small, unusable odd lots — termed "gutterspaces" — that were being auctioned off by the city of New York. Although the artist collected extensive archival documents relating to the properties, his plans for using them were never realized; after his death the lots reverted to the city. This historical footage, shot by video artist and cable television pioneer Jaime Davidovich, documents Matta-Clark as he visits one of the sites in Queens.

In Cheryl, Donegan's starting point is the appropriated audio of a self-motivating corporate monologue by a woman named Cheryl. A model of forced enthusiasm, this stand-in repeats a litany of retail clichés and self-encouragements; the audio is coupled with a flow of low-res images, taken from the Web, of cheaply made, kitschy consumer items.

Donegan applies an obscure, appropriated Yoko Ono monologue to a banal setting. A young woman casually meanders through a shopping mall while Ono recites vague personal observations and The Beatles are heard recording The White Album. Donegan's edits and transitions are disjointed and out of sync with the woman's banal actions; the "cinematic" effects and dense soundtrack, transform the mundane into a chaotic internal monologue.

Refuses began as a visual extension of Carolyn Bergdahl's poem Fuses (after Carolee Schneemann), which speaks to Schneemann's taboo-shattering 1964-66 film. In Donegan's silent collage of seemingly disparate images culled from Internet searches and home video footage, each new clip directly corresponds to a word in the Bergdahl poem; the apparent stream of consciousness is governed by a rigorous set of rules.

Blocking documents General Idea's 1974 performance at the artist-run center The Western Front in Vancouver, one of a series that began with the Miss General Idea Pageants of 1970 and 1971 and became part of the extended project The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion. Here they "rehearse" the audience staging and reactions in preparation for the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant.

In Loco, General Idea reflects on their formative creation and muse "Miss General Idea." Clips salvaged from a purported 1968 film showing glimpses of the mythical Miss General Idea are interspersed with video montages of General Idea artists Bronson, Zontal and Partz, dressed as poodles (an iconic General Idea motif) and meditating in a wilderness.

Graham produced this short video to accompany an architectural model of his Yin/Yang Pavilion at MIT for the 2006 Sao Paulo Biennale. Graham's 2002 Yin/Yang Pavilion is made of concave and convex two-way mirrored glass — a material that creates constant fluctuations between transparency and reflection. The pavilion is activated by viewers who move through its curving spaces to experience anamorphic reflections of the sky, surrounding objects and landscape, and the superimposed images of other spectators.

Holt and Smithson's first collaborative experiment with video takes the form of a humorous bi-coastal art dialogue. Joined by their friends Joan Jonas and Peter Campus, the artists improvise a conversation based on opposing — and stereotypical — positions of East and West Coast art of the late 1960s. Holt assumes the role of an intellectual conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid back Californian driven by feelings and instinct.

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson collaborated on this seminal film, which viscerally confronts issues of perception and process. The action of the film is direct: Holt walks through the tall grasses of a swamp while filming with her Bolex camera, guided only by what she can see through the camera lens and by Smithson's verbal instructions. The viewer experiences the walk from Holt's point of view, seeing through her camera lens and hearing Smithson's spoken directions. Vision is obstructed and perception distorted as they stumble through the swamp grasses.

Jacobs digitally animates a Victorian stereoscopic photograph of a 19th-century factory floor, crowded with machinery and child workers. He isolates the faces of individuals and details of the image, as if searching out the human and the particular within this mechanized field of mass production. Space appears to fold in on itself as Jacobs activates the stereograph; the agitated image flickers and stutters, but the motion never, in fact, progresses.

Ken Jacobs writes: "An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief."

Gift of Fire devotes fetishistic attention to what is probably the first film in history: Louis-Aimé-Augustin Le Prince's 1888 footage of traffic crossing Leeds Bridge. Jacobs continues his intellectual and scientific experimentation with cinema history and visual phenomena by displaying the footage in anaglyph 3-D color, intercut with contextual text and other legendary film scenes, such as the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

"1903 hand/horse drawn street carts on New York's Lower East Side. Tiny movements evolve in place, caught between 2-D and 3-D."

"RAZZLE DAZZLE is an early Edison shot cut off at its head and tail and along its four sides from the continuity of events like any camera-shot from a bygone day; no, like any camera-shot, immediately producing an abstraction. This abstraction pictures a great spinning maypole-like device lined with young passengers dipping and lifting as it circles through space... Early stereopticon images also appear, digitally manipulated to reveal their depths. A digital shadow falls upon the scene and yet, grim as things get, as our crimes and failures then and now commingle, the movie proceeds with a cubist/abstract-expressionist zest."

Ken Jacobs writes: "Stereograph of the crowd at the opening of the US Centennial Exposition of 1893. It turns into a movie. Into an enormous rugged and craggy 3-D landscape.... before the people return and the scene is righted again. Many laws were broken in the making of this movie, beginning with laws of gravity."

In October 1989, estranged friends Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith died within a week of each other. Ken Jacobs met Smith through Fleischner in 1955 at CUNY night school, where the three were studying camera techniques. This feature-length work, first performed in 1989 as a live Nervous System piece, is a "luminous threnody" (Mark McElhatten) made in response to the loss of Jacobs' friends.

Ken Jacobs writes: "Early stereograph of dancers at rest. One leans forward to display her bosom. The stereo-camera preserves their youthful presence forever."

Winter in Miami 2005 is Kubota's touching tribute to her husband, artist Nam June Paik, who died at their home in Miami in January 2006. This intimate piece features previously unreleased sound recordings of Paik at the piano in his New York home in 2005, playing haunting compositions that he wrote in 1945, when he was thirteen years old. Layered footage of Kubota and Paik, sitting together in Miami in the winter before his death, takes on the resonance of memory.

This newly assembled work is a rare document of a 1976 Matta-Clark performance in Berlin. The piece begins with the following statement: "In 1976, as part of the Akademie der Kunst and Berliner Festwochen exhibition 'Soho in Berlin,' Gordon Matta-Clark went to Germany with the intention of blowing up a section of the Berlin Wall. Dissuaded by friends from such a suicidal action, the result was the following performance." The film records Matta-Clark as he stencils 'Made in America' on the Wall, affixes commercial advertisements over graffiti, and has a run-in with the police.

In this episode of her ongoing narrative performance series, Moulton's alter-ego Cynthia seeks solace from her troubles by putting together a puzzle and shopping for light-up waterfall decorations. The combination of these activities helps Cynthia to solve the puzzle of self-discovery.

In this episode of Whispering Pines, Moulton's character Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture. While Cynthia performs her nose-pore cleaning routine in front of the mirror, a sphinx appears and sings a song from the animated movie "The Last Unicorn," which laments becoming a woman.

Moulton again performs as her alter-ego Cynthia in the latest episode of the Whispering Pine series. Fueled by the sugar-free drink Crystal Light, Cynthia methodically fills a vase with alchemical home decorating items. Once her project is completed, Cynthia is again left to dwell in her thoughts. Suddenly a ladder grows out of the vase. Cynthia climbs the ladder and, through a trap door, enters an ecstatic rave complete with a techno remix of the Crystal Light commercial music.

Takeshi Murata employs precise digital processing to create astonishing hallucinatory visions. In Untitled (Silver), Murata subjects a snippet of footage from a vintage horror film (Mario Bava's 1960 Mask of Satan, featuring Barbara Steele) — to his exacting yet almost violent digital manipulations. The seething back and white imagery constantly decomposes and reconstitutes itself, slipping seductively between abstraction and recognition.

Dating from the sixties and compiled by George Maciunas (1931-1978, founder of Fluxus), Fluxfilm Anthology is a document consisting of 37 short films ranging from 10 seconds to 10 minutes in length. These films (some of which were meant to be screened as continuous loops) were shown as part of the events and happenings of the New York avant-garde. Made by the artists ranging from Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell to Yoko Ono, they celebrate the ephemeral humor of the Fluxus movement.

Pearlstein explores relationships among psychology, ritual and religion. The piece was filmed within an installation by Simon Foreman. An interior white cube bathed in intense light is viewed through a square window; a 70's kitsch picture depicting Christ hangs discretely on the back wall of the ancillary space. Pearlstein takes up Foreman's consideration of the relationship between Christianity and modernism, while also instigating interactions between psychology and the search for alternative consciousness, ritual and religion.

In September 1975, photographer Marc Petitjean documented Matta-Clark as he made one of his major "building cuts" in Paris. Created for the 1975 Paris Biennale, Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect was a spiraling cone-shaped cut through a pair of 17th-century buildings on rue Beaubourg. Slated for demolition as part of the "urban renewal" of the Les Halles district, the buildings were adjacent to the Centre Pompidou, then under construction. Petitjean records Matta-Clark's two-week process and interviews him at the site.

This video was created and released into distribution as one work in a solo exhibition that Price held simultaneously at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York in September 2006. The video serves as a sampler of Price's editioned videos to date, all of which have been sold through the galleries. Here, fragments of sound and image from the editions have been brought together, yielding a montage that, while bordering on incoherence, provides access to these publicly unavailable artworks. Price juxtaposes disparate authors, editing strategies, and histories, yielding a work in the essay-film tradition, at once lyrical and messy, highly-edited and arbitrarily composed.

In this new video work, Rosler presents a short but incisive statement. A mechanical toy figure dressed as an American soldier plays "God Bless America" on a trumpet. The camera pans down, revealing that the toy's camouflage-clad trouser leg has been rolled up to uncover a mechanism that looks uncannily like a prosthetic limb.

"The 'Americana I Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972... With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking 'material,' utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook's apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair...."

In her earliest film, which has been newly transferred to video, Schneemann presents an abstracted portrait of the American composer Carl Ruggles, known for his irascible personality and finely-crafted atonal music. Ruggles is seen enjoying pie a la mode and ruminating on subjects ranging from Christmas to his incomplete opera The Sunken Bell. The hand-painted film stock heightens the impressionistic vitality of this snapshot of the 84-year-old composer.

Infinity Kisses - The Movie completes Schneemann's exploration of human and feline sensual communication. It incorporates extracts of the original 124 self-shot 35mm color slide photo sequence, Infinity Kisses, in which the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat was recorded over an eight-year period. Infinity Kisses - The Movie recomposes these images into a video, in which each dissolving frame is split between its full image and a hugely enlarged detail.

"Souvenir of Lebanon follows a long video pan through destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese villages. In 1982-83, Israeli ceaseless bombardments destroyed bridges, farms, roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, apartments, and historic sites and towns dating back 2000 years. The live color footage was received unexpectedly from an anonymous news photographer. It is intercut with black and white disaster stills I re-shot from daily newspapers, edited in juxtaposition with color slides of bucolic Lebanon given to me on the day the Lebanese tourist bureau in New York city closed."

Schneider writes: "- + 2005 was completed in February 2005. It is a non-narrative information collage of people, places & themes. It includes brief clips of Michael Moore, Yoko Ono, Rome, Atlanta & longer sequences in Venice, NYC, San Francisco, & Berlin. It alludes to art, politics, music & literature. It includes some Berlin nightlife & Venice water."

Schneider writes: "It is a non-narrative information collage of people, places & music. It includes brief clips of Jonas Mekas' Anthology Film Archives 35th Anniversary & sequences in Copenhagen, NYC, Nice. It alludes to art, music. It includes some Berlin nightlife, Fluxus Performance and a look at Andy Warhol's favourite club of the 60's - Max's Kansas City."

Schneider writes: "Started as film in 1968 about the painting of a boutique in Greenwich Village & the scene that evolved around it, it contrasted the news of the Viet Nam war with the 60s fashion scene... I filmed the rock n' roll sequences in 1967-68 with reversal Ektachrome at 1600 ASA & passed them through an analog video echo in 1975. I finally videoed the original site in 2004 & finished editing the work in January 2005..."

This short "orientation video" was created as an introduction to the retrospective exhibition Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators), which opened at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas in 2007 and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2008. Reprising the story of "Mike," Smith's hapless Everyman alter ego, this deadpan compendium of footage from Smith's videos, installations and performances over the years guides the viewer into an insular "Mike space" of equal parts failure and hope.

This narrative video, made at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, stars the hapless "Mike," Smith's eponymous performance persona. Here "Mike's" lonely lifelong project of knowledge acquisition is renewed when, in middle age, he discovers OpenCourseWare, MIT's "free and open educational resource for self-learners around the world." The soundtrack to Smith's dreamlike, deadpan meditation on isolation in the Global Village was composed by Red Krayola co-founder Mayo Thompson.

Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (1970-2005) is a project by Robert Smithson that was realized posthumously. Produced by Minetta Brook in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, Floating Island features a barge landscaped with earth, trees, shrubs and rocks: a "non-site" of Central Park. Towed by a tugboat, this fabricated "island" circled the island of Manhattan for a week in September of 2005. This video documents the evolution and realization of this project.

Michael Snow's film Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of avant-garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In February 2003 Snow made WVLNT, a "re-mix" which created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential porgressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture.

Thornton continues her investigation of the production of meaning through media. Thornton and a companion are seen hiking through a desert, photographing and recording the journey. Shots of desert landscapes are overlaid with the artist's running commentary and text, as she investigates the porous boundaries between the still and the moving image.

Thornton describes Sahara/Mojave as a "little trip to Hollywood via North Africa, circa 1900. I hone an 'aesthetics of uncertainty' to question our understanding of the real." She pairs disparate media sources - a collection of vintage erotic North African postcards and video footage from Universal City, Los Angeles - and a dense audio collage to create an elliptical inquiry into culture, history and representation.

Trecartin describes this work as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles. Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the stylized characters are constantly on the phone or online. Their e-mail exchanges and Internet searches are channeled into bright animations that intersect with "real world" locations; the story moves from person to person like a browser surfing through Web pages.

Trecartin hurtles the viewer into a narrative universe dominated by the fleeting logic of text messaging, MySpace, pop music, and disposable culture. He takes the clichéd gay coming-out story and processes it and reprocesses it until it is almost unrecognizable. Trecartin stars as Skippy, a colorful and troubled teenager with a secret. After a failed suicide attempt, his parents catch him with a boy in his room, he is hit by a car, his friends throw a party, and he rises from the dead in time for fireworks.

Holland Cotter, writing in The New York Times, describes Trecartin's "sensationally anarchic" new video I-Be Area, in which the artist uses what Cotter terms "very basic digital tools to create a highly personal narrative art, almost a kind of folk art." He writes, "Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities."

Around the Park was a public art project commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservency in New York in autumn 2007. The video, which stars Wegman's canine cast enjoying a fall day in the park, was presented on four outdoor monitors near Madison Square Park's food kiosk.

Turning Some Pages was produced in conjunction with the printing of a limited edition journal of the same name by the Howard Smith Paper Group, a British paper merchant. The action of reading a book informs the structure of this digital motion drawing, in which abstract arrangements of graphic shapes and images of dice are interspersed with cryptic aphorisms.

Writes Lawrence Weiner: "SITUATED WITHIN A LANDSCAPE OF HUMAN INTERACTION THOSE ACTIVITIES THAT LEAD TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF STRUCTURES NECESSARY TO DEAL WITH OR CO-EXIST WITH THE FORCES OF NATURE, WATER IN MILK EXISTS ATTEMPTS TO PRESENT VARIOUS CHARACTERS AT A POINT OF DISJUNCTIVE BUT SIMULTANEOUS REALITIES.... THE ACTIVITIES OF THE PLAYERS FIT WITHIN THE GENRE OF ADULT FILMS. IN FACT, THE PLAYERS ARE ADULTS."

Yalkut creates a poetic homage to Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's pioneering 1930 kinetic sculpture Light-Space Modulator, which was reconstructed at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in 1970. Yalkut's silent Light Display: Color combines processed analogue and digital imagery derived from the original 16mm film that he shot at the gallery.