In a powerful collusion of traditional and pop cultural mythologies, Labat confronts his Cuban heritage and identity, and critiques the representation of this culture by the mass media. Donning theatrical face-paint and a wig, Labat transforms himself into an icon of Babalu, the Afro-Cuban folk god. ...

This piece documents one of Smith's earliest performances of his "Baby Ikki" character, in which he performs in public as an oversized infant in diaper, hat and sunglasses. Baby Ikki was conceived as a mute, ambiguous character fixed neither by age nor gender — an archetype with an unclear ...

In June 2008, Michael Smith staged a birthday party for his legendary character Baby Ikki at EAI. Baby Ikki's Birthday Party documents this performance, following the diaper-clad baby as he interacts with party guests and an ebullient clown named Curly. During the party, cake was served, games were played, a piñata was broken, guests sang "Happy Birthday," and gifts were opened. There was even a puppy.

Background Story continues Lucas' ongoing examination of the isolating and disorienting effects of electronic media on contemporary life. Using Amazon's Mechanical Turks program, which connects employers with an anonymous labor pool to complete jobs referred to as "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks), Lucas and her collaborator/employee create a self-reflexive rewrite of the creation story, using text and fair use background images.

In an ironic intersection of two systems — arcane theoretical discourse and popular music — Baldessari sings a tract by Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt. Introducing this performance by noting that "these sentences have been hidden too long in exhibition catalogues," Baldessari sings Lewitt' ...

Baldino expands her continued fascination with scientific phenomena — in this case, the movement of neutrinos. She traveled to Switzerland to visit CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, where she recreated the high-speed journey of the neutrinos. In a digitally accelerated road trip through the Alps and into Italy, Baldino traces her own artistic process.

With a striking economy of means, Ramos enacts a close-up performance action: he blows up a balloon with his nostril until it bursts in his face. He then repeats this action with his other nostril. Alternating nostrils, he continues to blow up the balloon until it bursts. With each iteration his exhaustion visibly increases; he gasps for breath, almost to the point of passing out.

Intertwining fiction and documentary, Ballplayer is a candid story of a man's life and a subtle examination of male culture. Partially adapted from a Garrison Keillor short story, How Are the Legs, Sam?, the narrative begins with the pained recollections of a man (Richard Marcus) jilte ...

Writes Pearlstein: "In this piece, language and image function as a visual onomatopoeia. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Evolution functions as a metaphor and structural principle throughout: the evolution of a thought, a word, a form, the species and so on. This gets played out through vi ...

This tape negotiates the personal and cultural dynamics of being hapa, or Amerasian. Coming from a "mixed blood" background, Fulbeck weaves together personal narrative and media imagery to examine cultural icons, practices and assimilations from both the Chinese and American sides. Telling au ...

Selected Works I exemplifies Buckner's use of image-processing techniques to create dynamic visual expressions that manifest heightened states of consciousness and transform the electronic into the organic. In Hearts, vibrant heart-like forms pulsate with intense color and rhythm over ...

Selected Works II continues Buckner's explorations of image-processing techniques to portray the intangible levels of mental and spiritual energy. In The Golden Pictures, she animates everyday objects to startling effect, as they become fantastic visualizations of the energies of "inan ...

Shot in rural Nova Scotia, Barking is infused with a sense of mystery, the anticipation that something is about to happen. Suggesting an off-screen narrative, the scenario carries an unsettling implication of the limit of vision and the power of what is not seen.

This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos' Soap Opera Series,in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap ...

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.

Baldino records French artist Ivan Polliart as he watches the last part of Battleship Potemkin with his young son, Witold. Father and son sit on a couch together; the television is off camera. The viewer hears the soundtrack (in French) to Battleship Potemkin as Ivan reads the subtitles and explains the film to Witold.

Writes Kuchar: "Large and lumpy things chomp on chunks of matter made animate by techno-bipeds of the biosphere."

Elliot Caplan's 35-mm film adaptation of Beach Birds, a dance work originally choreographed for the stage, begins with Merce Cunningham outlining his approach to dance for the camera, and thus his vision for how movement behaves and how we see it. He explains that the piece is choreography ...

Continuing his investigation into the intersection of culture and technology in the context of the hand-made, here Arcangel explores the "mash-up," in which music fans digitally merge two songs to create unexpected hybrids. Arcangel's experiment pushes this practice into the realm of absurdity, pairing wildly different tracks — live footage of the Beach Boys and a contemporary music video by the rappers Geto Boys — based on the similarity of their bands' names.

"The soundtrack begins with the artist stating the conditions: 'An artist may construct a work and/or a work may be fabricated and/or a work need not be built. I elected five possibilities for videotape.' One sees the artist come over the horizon at a rocky beach and throw a piece of wood. The five ...

In Because We Must, Atlas continued his collaboration with British choreographer Michael Clark, the enfant terrible of the dance world in the 1980s. Based on an original stage production at Sadlers' Wells Theatre in London, this is an ironic, irreverent work that is as entertaining as ...

Transforming individual lives into fictive texts, Geller illuminates the complexity of human nature in this layered, nonlinear narrative. Paralleling human and animal behavior, he intercuts three stories, building a seamless narrative from their visual and aural relationships. A horse racing corresp ...

Before, During, After is a collection of collaborative works that reference the devastating events of September 11th in New York. Levinas in Yorkville overlays images of Yorkville in upper Manhattan with text and music. In The Ambiguous Coil Gorewitz responds to the tragic events and their effects on New York. He writes: "After the panic, a tentative response."

Writes Kelley: "BEHOLDEN TO VICTORY is an edited video version of the full-length super-8 film Hail the Fallen. It is a 'war movie' genre picture. This film is normally presented in an active way — the act of screening the film is theatricalized by requiring the audience to wear ...

Composed entirely of film scraps salvaged from a closed Beirut cinema, this 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."

In this densely textured work, Torres constructs a multilayered metaphor that transcends culture, time and place. Ruins of the abandoned Spanish town of Belchite and archival footage of the Spanish Civil War are juxtaposed with the ruined buildings and icons of the contemporary urban battleground of ...

Belladonna is a brutal testimony of violence and the family. A series of actors, presented as "talking heads," recite chilling lines that accelerate into a horrifying litany, a twisted family romance of child abuse and male violence. At the tape's end, these statements are revealed to be cull ...

Horror and humor merge in Condit's incredulous, wide-eyed narration of a bizarre and lurid tale, which unfolds as a subterranean nightmare of male/female relationships. Condit's account of her discovery that her boyfriend had killed his former girlfriend and hidden the mummified body in their bedroo ...

Lampert writes, "Chelsea thieves market, Sunday morning. Overloaded front table, sunglasses, cell phones, Viagra (sold by the pill, $10), assorted hot goods. Inaccessible back table, more of same, two 35mm film cans marked BENETTON. 'Excuse me, what's in those cans?' 'Twenty dollars.' 'Is the ...

Berlin 1990 travels the streets and the political landscape of the recently re-unified Berlin. In the tumultuous atmosphere of 1990, we watch Berliners walk through check points manned by soldiers, past street vendors selling sausages and "actual" pieces of the Berlin Wall, and watch as they ...

Writes Kobland, "It's a letter to Berlin; a graveyard meditation (with The Wall as its marker). I spent eight months in Berlin (West) as a DAAD fellow; a true guest worker, in 1986-87. I wanted to respond in some way to this strange place. I wanted to describe the landscape of Cold War Berlin, which ...

From 1995 to 1997, Bernadette Corporation constituted itself as an underground fashion label based in New York, complete with a head designer and four well-received runway shows. Drawing on the vernacular of local subcultures, from recent immigrant communities to the downtown fashion scene itself, the label's collections can be seen as a self-consciously critical examination of social codes and their expression through industrial nexuses of power and money. The shows documented here send up the spectacular nature of the fashion industry, incorporating such trappings as bear-costumed mascots, troupes of high-school dancers, and jets of fire.

Chat écoutant la musique (Cat Listening to Music)

This first tape in the Bestiaire trilogy provides Marker's beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, with his "most widely acclaimed" screen role. As Marker recalls, "He was fond of Ravel (any cat is) but he had a special crush on Mo ...

Writes Ahwesh: "Working through my archive of accumulated video footage, I pretended it was found footage from anonymous sources. What began as a tribute to Bruce Conner of the period of Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, with their deliberate pace and bittersweet memory of home, ended as a dedication to my father as I wound my way through miscellany with distance and another aim."

Muntadas states: "Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics, like other economic, political and social systems in our society. Between the Frames is a series of eight chapters about people and institutions located between the artist and the audience."

Between the Lines examines the "invisible mechanisms" that control and contextualize media information. Analyzing a news report to demonstrate how facts are mediated by television's limits, Muntadas focuses on the role and responsibility of the reporter — the person between the facts an ...

Big Market is an evocative travel journal and a formalist study, as Jonas transforms time and space in a document of Budapest's marketplace. A multilayered portrait of place is conveyed through images of the market's produce displays, transaction rituals, faces and gestures, as well as the ci ...

In this narrative performance for video, Burden tells the story of his relationship with a truck named "Big Job." To relate his autobiographical monologue, he sits deadpan before the camera with moving images of the truck behind him. Writes Burden, "During a six-month period, while the artist wrestl ...

Bilder der Berührungen features a full-length experimental film, Syntagma, within a digital sound-and-image-scape that includes film and video sequences, photographs, quotations and poems, drawn from Export's extensive body of work.

Callas writes: "This videotape is an electronic rendering of a form of proto-televisual iconomania: the creation of haphazardly sourced private pictoral scrap books or 'bilderbucher.'" Continuing in his frenetic appropriation and re-casting of historical icons and symbols, Callas references Hans Chr ...

Award-winning choreographer/dancer Bill T. Jones' "new wave" choreography of the 1980s often featured video, text, and autobiographical references, with costumes and sets by noted downtown artists. This 1982 program features four powerful performances by Jones at The Kitchen. This document, which includes artist Keith Haring creating his iconic drawings as part of the performance, represents a snapshot of the early 1980s dance scene in New York.

In this rare and intimate portrait of Bill Viola, shot in Rio de Janeiro as he was installing his exhibition at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, the artist speaks of his work, life and family. Excerpts from Viola's tape The Passing and the installations Tiny Deaths, Heaven and Earth, a ...

This illuminating documentary is a comprehensive view of the life and work of Woody and Steina Vasulka, pioneers of electronic art. From the late 1960s in New York, where they founded The Kitchen, to their present home in New Mexico, the Vasulkas trace their involvement with video and their relation ...

In this evocative formalist exercise, Lucier explores light in relation to the material properties of video. Aiming a laser directly at the camera's eye, she burned the vidicon tube. Changing the focal length of the lens and moving the laser, she records the optical effect of the camera's light perception and absorption. The resulting configurations, set to Alvin Lucier's electronic score Bird and Person Dyning, become an abstract calligraphy of light. Lucier's technology-based, visual records of refraction and reticulation refer to the Impressionists' empirical observations of changes in light over a measured period of time.

This compilation of thirteen early black and white performance tapes from the 1970s reveals the nascent development of the themes, the raw physicality, and the performance personae that mark McCarthy's well-known later works. In several pieces, McCarthy uses his own body as a tool to examine the pro ...

In this film, Nauman applies black makeup to his testicles. The action was recorded with an industrial high-speed camera capable of shooting between one thousand and four thousand frames per second.

Writes Harris: "Black Body is an attempt to come to terms with the contradictions inherent in the experience of blackness and maleness in this country. Drawing on representations of the body in makonde carvings of Tanzania, East Africa, Black Body explores the body's physical a ...

In Black Celebration, Cokes merges newsreel footage of riots in urban black neighborhoods in the 1960s with popular music and text commentary to create an incisive counter-reading. Writes Cokes: "This videotape involves the riots that took place in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California ...

Writes Kelley: "BLIND COUNTRY is a collaboration between myself and filmmaker Ericka Beckman. It was inspired by the H.G. Wells short story The Country of the Blind, which was a favorite of mine as an adolescent. I was both fascinated and repulsed by this tale of a man having to give u ...

Writes Norman Yonemoto, "In the novella Blinky The Friendly Hen (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute ...

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.

This legendary film features artist Jack Smith in what Jacobs calls "a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950's, 40's, 30s disgust. " Jacobs did little of the shooting himself, instead drawing on two unfinished films shot by Bob Fleischner. With its dissociative editing strategies, wild costumes, and scraps of music and voiceover, this baroque portrait deserves Jonas Mekas' recommendation as "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema."

Seoungho Cho transforms a sublime natural landscape into a stunning abstraction through precise electronic manipulation. Writes Cho: "Blue Desert is one in a series of ongoing visual struggles with Death Valley, a specific desert landscape which I have worked with since 1992. It is also not the last piece, as I have every intention to continue producing works about Death Valley. Death Valley has been quite simply my favorite place on the earth since my first visit in 1992."

The story of the Argentine tango star Carlos Gardel is retold in a (computer graphic) theater in which his 1935 movie is projected. If the tango is "a sad thought one can dance," then we are offered the spectacle of romance as compensation. The battle of the Marne and the cooling towers of an atomic ...

Produced as a music video for New Order's song Blue Monday, this witty and dynamic piece fuses Breer's vivid animation and Wegman's humorous tableaux with his dog Fay Ray.

With Blue Moon Over, Weiner extends his text-based works into a digital realm, positing aphorisms and epigrammatic phrases that investigate language, acquisition and desire. Employing a visual system that suggests flowcharts, horizon lines and diagrams, Blue Moon Over is structured as a series of seamlessly animated sequences of drawings and text fragments. Through subtle manipulations, Weiner engages in linguistic tricks and metamorphoses that visually manifest his conceptual inquiries.

In this conceptual performance, Davidovich "paints" on an electronic canvas in the three primary colors of the color wheel, by covering a TV screen with adhesive tape: first blue, then red, then yellow.

Rist's body is the canvas in this surreal montage. Unflinching displays of the artist's own menstrual blood are juxtaposed with images of gemstones, while swooping, close-up shots of Rist's arms and legs are followed by archival footage of lunar fly-bys, suggesting the ease with which visual culture has abstracted the female body into a beautiful but alien natural phenomenon.

In Bob and Jill (Pt. 2), the relation between fact and fiction in the personal and popular narratives of everyday life is rendered in an assemblage of soap opera conventions, performance and documentary. Opening with on-screen text that relates "The Story So Far" ("Jill crashed the Volvo...") ...

WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.

Ken Jacobs describes Bob Fleischner Dying: "Bob allows his sick and fading image to be caught in stereo photography. A man of mystery, so banal in some ways, so unexpectedly 'on' when the situation demanded. The cameraman for Blonde Cobra and much beloved by the next generation of NY film-makers."

This is a newly restored version of a visceral "movement-event" from 1967, in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, creating a physicalized corporal collage.

Produced at Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy, these works are seminal performance-based exercises. Body Music I is "a study in the vocal-physical responses of a species caught in an enclosed square room." In Body Music II Palestine creates a frenetic visual translation of physical movement and energy.

In a series of witty, minimalist exercises that are introduced by inter-titles (Touching, Boxing, Feeling, Hearing, Tasting, and Walking), VALIE EXPORT explores the relationship between word and action.

Body/Voice is an early performance based work recorded in 1985, and compiled and edited by the artist in 1996.

Booty Melt, a mash-up of re-edited YouTube clips and original flash animation, explores the conflation of cartoon violence and real or implied violence in the pop vernacular. Ciocci finds hybrid monsters of caricature/reality in hip-hop fashion and emulative teen culture (viral videos of teens dancing and lip-syncing to hip-hop). Just as errant Looney Tunes become sinister symbols in the everyday, YouTube flattens identity, and, as Ciocci explains, "makes cartoons out of everybody."

Born to be Sold is Paper Tiger Television and Rosler's acerbic and witty interpretation of the notorious "Baby M" case, in which a natural — "surrogate" — mother and father of a baby fought each other for custody of the child. Rosler assumes the various roles of the participants i ...

Borrowed Time, which Gorewitz refers to as "a video dirge for my father," combines highly personal subject matter (including a helicopter ride over an active volcano) and the artist's own music, all synthesized through wildly vivid and frenetic electronic image manipulation.

In this vivid transposition of contemporary music for television, Cahen "responds" to the complex musical transitions of Répons, a work by French composer Pierre Boulez. Performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain and conducted by Boulez, the intricate Répons was designed for an ensemb ...

In this film, Nauman bounces his testicles with one hand. Shot in extreme close-up, the work is one of Nauman's "Slo-Mo" films which are shot with an industrial high speed camera.

For this videotape, Nauman turned the camera sideways and positioned it so that his head is cropped from the frame and his body is presented from neck to ankles. As he stands in the corner, his back to the wall, he appears to be lying down; falling backwards into the corner and then pushing himself ...

Nauman, his head cropped from the frame, is shown bouncing in the corner of his studio. Here, however, the images were recorded with a fixed camera that was inverted rather than turned on its side.

In this film Nauman bounces two balls in the center of a square marked by tape on the studio floor. He throws them as hard as he can, trying to maintain a specific pattern, but the balls ricochet out of control as his moves become correspondingly jumpy and unpredictable. The film was shot with a sta ...

This interpretation of Bow Falls is a collaboration in accord with the Earthscore Notational System. This notation assumes that there are patterns in waterflow that can be communicated electronically. Paul Ryan uses handheld camerawork, slow motion, reverse motion and negative color fields to compos ...

Beauty, laughter, exuberance and shyness are revealed through simple gestures and glances. To look at a surprised or bemused expression on a face and to record that expression through the camera entails a certain amount of staring. To record=to stare. In the poetic sense, this stare permits the r ...

An homage to Op-Art, Brain Operations was inspired by an optical illusion produced by checkered tiles on the artist's bathroom floor. "When editing 16mm film, I had reached for a strand and closed my hand on nothing," Jacobs explains. "I had visually coupled similar-appearing frames, popping them forward in space. It was a life-changing moment...I'm staring down and the tiles come up almost to my nose." In this work, he opts for squares and diamonds—"tilted squares"—which produce the same chimera of depth, at the convergence of sightlines.

Super-8 camera held out before him as shield and surrogate, Acconci pushes through a landscape of dense reeds and overgrowth. Break-Through records this search for a pause or clearing in what, for the viewer, amounts to an abstracted and scarcely differentiated visual field.

The screen is empty: the artist stands off-screen — he breathes in and out, his stomach moving into and out of the frame.

Breath Text is a powerfully simple performance in which VALIE EXPORT creates tension by breathing compulsively.

Bridge Visitor's subject matter relates to what is known as a "legend-trip" in folkloric studies. In this case the legend-trip refers to the ritualized journeys taken by teenagers to "spooky" locales in search of darker knowledge. The tape plays with various adolescent infatuations with Sat ...

"In this video the artist states that it is a public freehold work which demonstrates what could be art within his responsibility. Like Beached it was also shot in a marshy area near the sea and in sequences that are separated by dissolves. One sees five different actions that are related to ...

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City landmark, the Brooklyn Bridge. Emphasizing its strength and beauty, Jonas locates the bridge as an iconic site in this meditative, cryptic study of identi ...

The scene is Brussels, a summer afternoon, and the city seems suspended, silent, waiting. A young girl reads a letter from a friend who is away from the city on vacation. André then opens the narrative — fiction? document? — into a journal of the city in summer, which she presents as an ...

This meditative video is a philosophical investigation, a travelogue of sorts, and, ultimately, a probing essay-film. Kobland pairs lingering shots of urban scenes, industrial installations, deserts, and other evocative landscapes with fragmentary ruminations from filmmakers such as Fassbinder, Bergman and Tarkovsky. Floating over images virtually evacuated of human form or movement, these questions and digressions call up a beautiful and melancholy world.

The golden, barren landscape of Death Valley, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the luminous and mysterious texture of Buoy. Cho reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, once the floor of a vast sea and now traversed by tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho's camera, vertical "strata" pattern the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho's composition.

Writes Gorewitz: "Bush Blinks is based on internet pictures that collected on my computer while I was in Israel during the spring mixed with a few digital stills I shot there. At first I was playing with the 'blink' filter in the editing software, making it look as through Bush and other worl ...

The exuberant irreverence and wit of Butterfly characterizes Paik's stream-of-consciousness visual and conceptual techniques. In a vibrant image/music collage, he ironically juxtaposes high-cultural artifacts (the aria from Madame Butterfly), contemporary avant-garde icons (Laurie Ande ...

In this visually minimalist work, Cho pursues an associative connection between a Buddhist drumming ritual and the pulsing drum solo in Iron Butterfly's famous psychedelic rock song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." In Cho's unexpected intermixing of the mesmerizing Buddhist ritual drumming and Iron Butterfly's iconic hard rock classic, he frames the drummer so that his movements resemble those of a butterfly beating its wings in air.

Button Happening is Nam June Paik's earliest extant videotape, and possibly his first tape ever. Recorded in 1965 on the day he acquired his first Sony Portapak camera, this previously unknown work has recently been rediscovered and restored. Recorded on computer tape, this technically fragil ...

This ambitious live satellite link-up of Japan, Korea and the United States features interviews with Keith Haring and architect Arata Isozaki, and performances and works by Philip Glass and the Kodo Drummers, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Lou Reed ...