Pearlstein writes: "Beginning with a Cindy Sherman-esque scene of a battered woman, the suggested narrative quickly implodes to expose a series of psychological states being 'acted out.' The mood moves through aggression to desire to frustration to a catharsis, which creates a structural shift. The ...

Here Pearlstein uses objects as symbols to delineate relationships between such diverse concerns as ethnicity, mythology, fear, and sexuality.

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.

Role-playing and political performance were integral to Ant Farm's art-making strategies. In 1976 the group travelled to Australia as ironic "artists-in-residence," counter-cultural ambassadors. "Off-Air" Australia is a fragmented document of that trip, culled almost entirely from off-air foo ...

The first in a series of videos investigating the use of digital effects on appropriated imagery, "Painting" Sites compiles pictures arbitrarily yielded by an Internet search for the word "Painting," and peppers the resulting series of images with digital graffiti, courtesy of editing software. When Price began the piece, in 2000, automated image-search tools did not yet exist online; instead, the artist used text-based searches, taking arbitrary screenshots of each and every page that was returned and then cropping out all but the image, an approach that occasionally yielded visual hallmarks like improperly loaded data or the appearance of the cursor.

Writes Pearlstein: "This piece, made as a continuous loop, literally traces the process of a stream of consciousness, such that the process itself becomes the subject. It delineates the way in which one thought leads to the next by associations made through language, sound, image, and action. Going ...

"That's It, Forget It," Miller's first collaboration with young people, celebrates pop culture, fashion, and music video, L.A. style. Miller follows six West Hollywood teenage girls as they shop, dress up, dance, flirt and drive down Melrose Avenue — all to an audio track of disco music ...

In this provocative essay on racism, crime, the law and the media, Andrews constructs a layered pastiche to investigate these issues within cultural and personal contexts. He explores how the fictions of the media reinforce and perpetuate racial mythologies.

Nam June Paik's first single-channel videotape since 1989 is a heartfelt tribute to his long-time collaborator Charlotte Moorman. This portrait traces Moorman's career as an avant-garde performer, from her classical training to her notorious arrest as the ...

Posited as "A tape to Wage War Against War... the War which men wage against women, children, and themselves," (are we and/or do we) LIKE MEN confronts male self-identification, violence and gender conditioning. Focusing on a series of interviews with men, Marton based this work on his experi ...

Precisely edited to the start-stop rhythm of a martial beat, Absolutions glories in organized disjunction, juxtaposing images of the artist collapsing to the ground with bursts of wildly scrambled electronic distortion. Produced while Rist was working at a professional video facility, the piece reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the defects and imperfections of the video machine and medium, which carries echoes of psychological and personal mistakes.

Produced in Yugoslavia, Die gluckliche Begegnung, which translates as "The Happy Encounter," is an enigmatic inquiry into the means by which an individual can know and understand the self through history and the past. Odenbach orchestrates a series of lyrical images, from farmers hoeing the e ...

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.

Writes Michael Snow: "The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes 'messages' between the two hemispheres. *Corpus Callosum, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of, de-picts, creates, examines, presents, consists of, and is, 'betweens.' Between beginning and ending, between 'natural' and 'artificial,' between fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002. It's a tragi-comedy of the cinematic variables..."

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."

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.

An exploration in mood and tone, 1 is a montage of image, music, and language. Against a split-screen study of New York beat cops, Silver presents a sentence, drawn out in single words over the course of the piece. Through subtle word repetition, she alters what would appear to be a unified sentence; this, in addition to the doubled image, calls the work's title into question.

In two channels seen simultaneously on one screen, Hackenberg moves hypnotically as Chinese music suggests the idea of a different place.

The final installment in Cokes' Pop Manifesto series, 1! takes a stroll through the artist's music collection, presenting the titles of 100 recent albums released over a five year period. This annotated discography is paired with excerpts from an essay by critic Christoph Cox discussing rock music's forms and ideological premises, all laid over an appropriated vintage documentary explaining how to project a film.

1/1 is a new direction for Seoungho Cho. This playful study, shot largely in degraded black and white, knowingly recalls the early performative experiments of 1970's video practitioners. In part an exercise in gesture and noise, the piece is also a reflexive anecdote on the nature of video itself.

Writes Kelley: "Bob and Sheree are old friends of mine. Bob Flanagan is a respected Los Angeles writer and Sheree Rose is a photographer who was known primarily as a documenter of the L.A. poetry scene. In recent years their work has come more and more to reflect their sadomasochistic sexual relatio ...

In this dizzying portrayal of futile searches through cluttered handbags and standing files, Baldino continues her provocation of the principles of narrative structure, letting us spy on the anonymous victims of failing manmade systems and the detritus of modern life.

19 Universes/my brother is the latest in a series of videos in which Baldino explores advanced scientific concepts, including nanotechnology and quantum particles. The screen is divided into nineteen shifting strips of video, each portraying Baldino's brother, a musician, as he plays rock and roll guitar; the soundtrack is layered correspondingly. The result is a disorienting composite portrait that explores the phenomenon of parallel universes.

In Romania the fighting was not yet over when Hámos, a Hungarian filmmaker living in Berlin, left for Hungary in December 1989, for the first time since he had left his country of birth without permission ten years earlier. He wanted to make a film about censorship at Hungarian Television — ab ...

21 Films, which actually contains 25 titles, is a compilation of 16mm and 8mm shorts assembled by the artist. In these works, Sherman combines the hallmarks of his "Spectacle" performances—metaphoric juxtapositions and visual puns—with a fluency in film grammar. Through exquisite storyboarding and montage, Sherman transforms the mundane into the magical, blithely manipulating colossal forms (landscapes, bridges, chili parlors, skyscrapers, rollercoasters, escalators, and airplanes) like weightless props.

This tape is Jud Yalkut's video realization of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's concert performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player. In this extraordinary performance, which is manipulated and synthesized by Yalkut, Paik and Moorman play Cage's score on a collection of "instruments" that include a pistol, a dish of mushrooms, balloons, a practice aerial bomb, and a telephone call to President Nixon.

Focusing on the discourse surrounding the music industry, Cokes continues his investigation of pop culture, setting black words on a white screen against the music of his band SWIPE. The resulting quasi-music video addresses the music of each decade since the 1960s with slogans and barbed statements.

Davidovich recorded this video with artist Stuart Sherman at Ronald Feldman's 3 Mercer Street Gallery in SoHo. As the camera moves in a continuous, 360-degree take, Sherman performs a series of actions that are never completely captured by the perpetually revolving camera.

This is the first in Cokes' non-consecutively produced series of "promotional tapes" for his conceptual band SWIPE. 3#, subtitled Manifesto A Track #1, introduces Cokes' concern with the ideological apparatus that undergirds the music industry. The video takes up a song by Seth Price, which is itself the systematic recreation of an early electronic pop song by Kraftwerk.

Inverting the form, style and time frame of commercial television advertising, Logue has produced a unique series of dynamic video portraits of avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and performers. In 30 Second Spots: New York, which Logue terms "commercials for artists," each of the succin ...

30 Second Spots: Paris focuses on prominent artists, writers, philosophers and musicians working in Paris. Using elegant special effects, close-ups, and a highly condensed time frame, Logue captures her subjects in moments of intimacy and contemplation. Pierre Boulez ponders the rhythms of St ...

San Francisco artists Starr Sutherland, Diamanda Galas and Don Buchla are among the subjects featured in 30 Second Spots: San Francisco. Logue tailors the style and content of each succinct "spot" to complement the idiosyncratic nature of the artist's work: Sutherland delivers a terse aphoris ...

In 37 Stories About Leaving Home, a group of Japanese women living in the Tokyo area recount personal stories of their own experiences of leaving home. In these stories one can begin to see, from very personal and individual perspectives, the societal changes that have occurred over the last ...

A collaboration between Arcangel and Milwaukee artist Frankie Martin, this work revisits the "rave" dance party phenomenon of the early to mid-1990s. In an act of simulation at once hilarious and incisive, Arcangel and Martin stage what appears to be an amateur, made-for-public-access-television promotional video in which two awkward young men dance before a swiftly changing, video-keyed background composed of the sort of black and white, "infinite-fill" patterns used in digital painting programs of the 1980s.

Founded and directed by Charlotte Moorman, the Avant Garde Festivals began in 1963 and featured experimental music, art, and performances in diverse sites around New York. Yalkut's rare historical documents record the 4th and 7th events. Held in Central Park in 1966, the 4th Festival included Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Christo, Shigeko Kubota, and Joseph Beuys, among others. The 7th Festival was held in 1969 on two islands in the East River. Yalkut documents performances on Wards Island, beneath one of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes.

5 Composers: 5 Countries portrays five contemporary composers from around the world. Logue visits Michael Nyman in London, Carlos Santos in Spain, Alvin Curran in Rome, Michael Levinas in Paris, and Tod Machover in Boston, documenting the fabric of their creative lives. Concentrating on their ...

In 5 dim/MIND, Feingold constructs a complex and dynamic language system by linking a series of images and sounds collected from television, film and original footage into what he terms "a new text of signifying chains" — associative progressions that mimic unconscious thought processes ...

Silver premiered 5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown in the Shorts Program of the 2010 Berlinale International Film Festival. A longtime resident of New York's Chinatown neighborhood, she writes, "You live somewhere, walk down the same street fifty, a hundred, ten thousand times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE, the district's shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops."

While artist-in-residence in the north tower of the World Trade Center, Lucas was given a tour of the center's sub-basement. 5 Minute Break is the eerie artifact of that tour. An animated woman roams the WTC sub-basement like a benign Lara Croft, negotiating an underground maze of empty stairwells, faded graffiti, hulking machinery, and discarded trash. Lucas' vision of a haunted netherworld of dead-ends and detritus beneath the trade center captures a lost realm.

The fifth and final installment in Cokes' series of "promotional videotapes," 5% (subtitled Manifesto E) shares its predecessors' format: a strict graphic presentation of on-screen text, coupled with a pop soundtrack. As with the other installments, this work is concerned with delineating the status of pop music as a cultural form located within structures of production, capital, and society.

In 67/97, Cho employs the technology of scanning to meditate upon the process of information gathering and the construction of meaning. The result is a lyrical and witty investigation of data systems, surveillance and information overload.

The second in Cokes' series of pop "manifestos," 6^ employs two simultaneous strategies to examine questions of originality and authenticity. While layers of densely theoretical text float across a blue ground, the soundtrack, a song by the band Appendix, features a singer addressing similar questions, albiet in the more familiar context of "rock lyrics."

In Sept visions fugitives, produced in China, Cahen creates impressionistic transformations of landscape and people. Cahen writes: "The looking and listening audiences are confronted — in addition to the pure impressions — with basic questions about work (the child using a traditi ...

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

The 7th Annual Avant Garde Festival, organized by Charlotte Moorman, was presented in 1969 on two islands, Wards and Mill Rock, in New York's East River. Here Yalkut's rare documentation records performances on Wards Island, beneath one of Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic domes.

9/11 is a first-hand, often harrowing document of the events of September 11th and their immediate aftermath. As the tragic events unfold, Oursler records from his apartment, just blocks from the former World Trade Center, and on the ground in Lower Manhattan. In this highly personal and unmediated document, the artist also captures the responses of New Yorkers and tourists at the site in the days that follow.

9/23/69 is a newly restored treasure. This early masterwork of electronic experimentation was created by Paik while he was Artist-in-Residence at WGBH in Boston. The title refers to the day it was made — September 23, 1969. Paik creates a stu ...

Nine young men from a juvenile court high school in Southern California, whose lives have been filled with drugs and violence, worked with Miller to produce this piece, which addresses their backgrounds, their present lives and future hopes. The opening and closing sequences are music-filled collage ...

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended video series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their exper ...