One of his most personal tapes, Damaged Visions reflects Gorewitz's visit to Eastern Europe in June of 1990. Travelling with multimedia artist Warner Wada, he collected images in Sighet, Romania, where Gorewitz's grandparents lived and his mother was born; Auschwitz concentration camp in Pola ...

In this short piece, the performer and viewer alike are taunted to the breaking point by an elusive purple "spot." The spot, rendered as a cardboard cut-out, eludes the grappling performer as it intones a coy song: "See me, touch me, hear me."

In the third part of the Damnation of Faust trilogy, Birnbaum shifts her focus from the individual to the social being, as she examines the collusion of personal history and collective memory through technology and mediated images.

Evocation is the prologue of the three-part series Damnation of Faust, in which Birnbaum transforms the Faustian myth into a dreamlike introspection on the duality of the internalized self and the external world. A playground scene, shot in the streets of lower Manhattan, is the work's ...

A woman gazing through a window, reflecting on a romantic loss and betrayal, gives voice to Marguerite, the female character from the Faust legend. Will-o'-the-Wisp, the second part of Birnbaum's trilogy, is an eloquent reverie on memory and reality. A woven construct of deception and aban ...

Narrated by Graham, this tape documents the formats and concepts of a series of projects made by the artist for the EA-Generali Foundation in Vienna. Encompassing the artist's performance, video and architectural works, these projects all investigate perceptions of architectural space and time. Grah ...

In Sister's Bay Christmas Morning, Sandin transforms natural landscapes, merging image-processed material with unaltered images of snowfall. In Wandawega Waters, a kinetic ode to nature, Sandin processes images of the surface of a lake until they are transformed into an abstracted stud ...

The dark sensibilities and cultural resonances of Butoh, the radical Japanese dance movement, are explored in this multilayered work. Profoundly rooted in both traditional and contemporary Japanese culture, Butoh arose in a spirit of revolt in the early 1960s. Characterized by frank sexuality and bo ...

For this film, Nauman made a square of masking tape on the studio floor, with each side marked at its halfway point. To the sound of a metronome and beginning at one corner, he methodically moves around the perimeter of the square, sometimes facing into its interior, sometimes out. Each pace is the ...

These three early works trace a trajectory from Reeves' engagement with social and political themes, particularly in relation to the Vietnam War, to the articulation of the spirit in the natural world. In Thousands Watch, Reeves and sound artist Jon L. Hilton construct a tensely accelerating ...

Shot on location at Versailles and in Paris, Dans la vision peripherique du temoin unfolds as a provocative inquiry into the psychological and cultural apparatus of vision — seeing and being seen, voyeurism and narcissism, the gaze and the self. The screen is divided into three vertical ...

This psychologically charged performance focuses on light and darkness, need and rejection, and the relationship of the performer and the audience. In a dark space, the viewer can hear Palestine humming and whispering to himself. Very slowly his eyes and then his face appear, as he addresses the vie ...

Writes Gorewitz, "This is the contemplation of beauty and nature: light crossing darkness, movement over form. The first two segments were recorded in Hiroshima... The fishing segments were recorded in Jamaica off the coast of Cousin's Cove in Hanover Parish. I was reminded, watching the night fishi ...

Kalin's short video works function both as visual poems and as alternative music videos. With astute conjunctions of image, music and text, these works respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s. In Darling Child, Kalin uses spare visuals of an interior space and minimalist music to create an evocative interpretation of a text by Truman Capote.

To the ominous accompaniment of a martial drum roll, vom Bruch constructs a charged visual metaphor of internal and historical conflict and confrontation. Through rapid-fire video switching, vom Bruch merges his own image, staring directly into the camera, with World War II archival footage of the b ...

In this dynamic collage, vom Bruch assembles powerful metaphors for threat and force, using fragmented, repeated images from media advertising and archival documents from World War II. The central image, appropriated from a popular TV commercial, is both riveting and ironic: A Duracell battery snaps ...

In Das Softiband, vom Bruch builds an ironic self-portrait within the framework of the representations of advertising and war. A brief fragment of a German TV commercial for Softi facial tissues, featuring animated clouds and a childlike melody, is repeated again and again to maddening ...

Kelley's carnivalesque opus is a genre-smashing epic in which vampires, dancing Goths, hillbillies, mimes and demons come together in a kind of subversive musical theater/variety revue. This riotous, feature-length theatrical spectacle unfolds as an episodic series that forms a loose, fractured narrative. The video comprises parts 2-32 of Kelley's multi-faceted project Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, in which trauma, abuse and repressed memory are refracted through personal and mass-cultural experience. The source materials are high school yearbook photographs of "extracurricular activities," or what Kelley terms "socially accepted rituals of deviance." Kelley then stages video narratives around these found images. Here these restagings take the form of "folk entertainments" that Kelley memorably subverts.

A running man, exhausted and near collapse, is superimposed over the enormous, disembodied red lips of a woman, who taunts and seduces him: "Come on, you can do it. Go a little further. Keep pushing. You've got to make it." Originally a multi-monitor installation, Deadline uses an economy of ...

This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour "silent opera" of the same title. Wilson tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. The ritualistic action, which moves fro ...

Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, Graham's new video draws on nearly twenty years' worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham's own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

Deep Blue Sky is a witty game of association and juxtaposition. In this silent motion drawing or "structure," Weiner engages in visual and linguistic play. The interaction of Weiner's elliptical text and graphic symbols - which suggest stylized tic-tac-toe boards - allude to the relationships between artist/viewer and language and perception: "That of which there is no trace does not enter into the equation."

Delta. A Piece is the video documentation of a performance at the 1977 exhibition Kunstlerinnen International 1877-1977, in Berlin. EXPORT, wearing face-paint, writes words in chalk on a raked blackboard. She attaches sculptural objects to her body, which seem to hinder her writing. Sh ...

Hámos' fascination with the cultural mythology of the hero culminates in this witty, elaborately crafted drama, which was produced for European television. Hámos intercuts two parallel narratives to tell his story: a cartoonish, campy science fiction adventure, shot on video; and an elegant, cinemat ...

Der Westen Lebt is a highly charged work, a powerful visual metaphor of desire within the symbolism of Western cultural mythology. A man and a woman fighting for a kiss collide on-screen with a repeated film fragment of the thrusting pistons of an oncoming train. The couple's erotic interplay ...

Devour is a dual-channel version of the artist's multi-channel video projection installation of the same name. Schneemann notes that this work brings together "a range of images which contrast evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments... political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous menace."

Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse. The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer referring to an unrealized image component of his composition.

Diamond: The 8 Lights is the videotape version of Oursler's multi-channel installation Spheres d'influence, produced for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The city of Paris is the site of a twisted journey into psychological realms and the vagaries of contemporary life. Interlockin ...

Based on the personal experiences of individuals from Hong Kong, the former British colony that "reunified" with China in 1997, Diasporama is an experimental documentary that addresses issues of the diasporic condition. In a series of intimate interviews that explore the relationship of the p ...

In this startlingly original and highly charged work, Odenbach locates the construction of self and identity in the realm of vision, creating an enigmatic memory theater of popular and historical representation. The Romantic opera of Schubert's Erl King alternates with Burundi funeral songs a ...

Die Einen den Anderen is an elusive observation of self and the other. Odenbach constructs a dialogue of associative metaphors for dualities and confrontations between cultures, identities and individuals. Emblems of German art and culture, theatrical re-enactments, autobiographical reference ...

Henning Lohner's portrait of John Cage pays homage to the spirit of the artist in both approach and content. "With this film we wish to honor the creative credo of composer John Cage, to whom the film is dedicated," states Lohner. "We try to pay attention to 'forgotten' landscapes: places we easily ...

This close-up document captures the eclecticsm and offbeat vibrancy of the New York performance art and music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Difficult Music includes short comedic pieces by Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward and Michael Smith, among others.

Standing alone among beach dunes, Acconci begins to kick at the sand below him. Over the course of the film's ten minutes, this repeated action displaces sand at a steady rate: as the artist sinks lower into the hole he creates, the mound of sand before him grows in correspondence.

Using Bell Lab's pioneering research facilities, Paik creates a starkly minimal experiment in digital imaging, in which numbers and shifting dots appear on a black ground.

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.

These short, poignant works contemplate the life cycle with both faith and despair. Referring to the Biblical passage that enjoins against the making of graven images, A Small Jubilee, which was created following Gorewitz's grandmother's death, merges the personal and the social. Religious sy ...

Documenting life in the Soviet Union before the era of Gorbachev and glasnost, Devyatkin goes beyond conventional Western reporting on Russian culture. Suggestopedia: A Science of Learning is a rare view of the Soviet educational system, in which Devyatkin's camera unobstrusively follows a te ...

Here Jacobs reproduces a sequence of 1906 film shots depicting a journey by train, optically reprinting the footage with different formal manipulations. Dramatically altered through repetition, mirroring, inversion, and directional reversal, the film continually challenges the viewer's perceptual understanding and sense of depth.

Writes Gorewitz: "The Rabbi in Berlin (How My Father Helped Destroy Modern Art) is an experimental, fictional narrative told by a dead person about his father and daughter after the Third Exile from Israel, performed by Willoughby Sharp and Debora Prado in Berlin.

"Lights Pop in Dark Places meanders between political protests and scenes of everyday life in NYC, San Francisco, and other places while pondering the contradictions of contemporary politics."

In Dissonant Landscapes, Gorewitz's social, political, and personal introspections are articulated with an expressive use of image processing and original music. Created in response to the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1984, Blue Swee is a protest against government policy at home and ab ...

Disturbances extends Jonas' investigation of mirrored surfaces and spaces, as she explores reflections of movement and images in water. The tape begins with Jonas, like Narcissus, leaning over a reflecting pool. Throughout this lyrical exercise, the viewer sees only reflected images and inver ...

Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner employs minimalist props and scenarios to stage an oblique drama. The performers enact a series of choreographed exercises; their physical interactions with one another, and with the distinctively colored and shaped objects in the space, evolve in shifting relationships that become a kind of language. A multi-layered soundtrack suggests linguistic, rhetorical and philosophical puzzles. This performance translates themes and strategies seen in Weiner's conceptual artworks into the realm of theater.

Documenta, held every five years in Kassel,Germany, is one of the largest and most important contemporary art surveys. In 1977, Documenta 6 featured the first live international satellite telecast by artists. Performances by Nam June Paik, German conceptual artist < ...

Chris Burden's provocative, often shocking conceptual performance pieces of the early 1970s retain their raw and confrontational force in these dramatic visual records, shot on Super-8, 16mm film, and half-inch video. Guided by the artist's candid, explanatory comments on both the works and the docu ...

Accompanied by Wegman's inimitable deadpan narration, Dog Baseball is a humorous, affectionate homage to two of America's most cherished passions: dogs and baseball. Wegman puts a new spin on the old game as he plays opposite a canine team, with the dogs' owners in attendance to cheer their t ...

In an inquiry into the relation between the corporation, the state and the family, Domination and the Everyday presents a fractured barrage of simultaneous sound tracks, film stills and a crawling text. Questioning the privatized existence of a woman and child, and the role of media informati ...

Writes Alice Weiner: "Done To consists of simple camera frames which are silent and/or unconnected to a complex soundtrack running parellel to the images. There are brief instances where image and sound meet; however, the majority of the images are overtaken by at times symphonic, at times cacophonous soundtracks which displace the normal filmic viewing experience. The standard film format for going from frame to frame — and then and then and then — is what the film is concerned with..."

Linking the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Double Entendre is a record of a live satellite performance piece. Davis explores the inherent dichotomy of the electronic linkage, pairing the dualities of male/female, left/right and French/Engl ...

Inspired by the science fiction story Universe by Robert Heinlein, Double Lunar Dogs is an Orwellian vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a drifting spaceship whose timeless travellers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. To recapture memory and create a continuum between ...

In this early conceptual experiment by General Idea, the artists manipulate reflecting surfaces to generate optical "feedback." Two mirrors are positioned to face one another over the edge of a lake. The mirrors are gradually tilted as the camera zooms in and out, revealing fragments of faces and rippling water. The multiplication of reflections produces a kaleidoscopic, disorienting effect.

The interactive laserdisc DOUBLE YOU (and X,Y,Z.) is a sophisticated and innovative venture into communications technology. The disc's inherent structure mirrors the work's subject matter — the acquisition of language. Participants can select from an extensive subject index containing f ...

The primary subject of this complex, multi-leveled work is the acquisition of language, while its underlying structure is derived from physics. Through analogy and metaphor, d'Agostino parallels the successive stages of learning language — cries at birth, first words and sentences, songs &mdas ...

In her premiere video project, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle joins with Gregory Shephard to create a voyeuristic tour de force. Armed with camcorders, Calle and her collaborator/partner Shephard head West in his Cadillac convertible to produce and document a real-life narrative of their jour ...

Performance artists Smith and Skinner use heavily coded comedic costumes and performance, including extensive play with puppets, to articulate the simultaneous banality and ironic reflexivity of "popular comedy." Straight faced 'adult' situations and inter-relations become genuinely hilarious. This ...

As deconstructions of the television viewing experience, Davis' early works exemplify the formal investigations pursued by the first generation of video artists. This anthology comprises Davis' pioneering work, which subverts assumptions of how time and space operate within the television frame. Bre ...

In the first episode of the misadventures of his alter-ego "Mike," Smith introduces his deadpan anti-hero in a day-in-the-life story that is saturated with references to the junk-television culture of the '50s, '60s and '70s. A puzzled innocent who throws a party to which no one comes, Mike ambles t ...

Almy's concern with technology as a communicative tool continues in Drake's Equation, which refers to a scientific formula used to measure the possibility of other life in the universe. Each element of the equation "measures a stage in the evolution of the stars, the planets, life intelli ...

Drawn Conclusions is a "digital drawing lesson" in which Sonia Sheridan and VanDerBeek experiment with the John Dunn graphic program. Using images of their own hands as a point of departure, they transform them into a humorous collage of cartoon-like figures.

A document of the artist's three-channel audio/video installation of the same title, Dreamkeeper is the second part of Jones' ongoing transcultural dialogue, a commentary on the emerging global African diaspora culture. Here he uses a drum to signify the link among diaspora peoples, stating, ...

Writes Torres: "Employing the Indianapolis 500 as a paradigmatic metaphor, Dromos Indiana examines the relationship between speed — the essence of technology — and political, economic and military power." Dromos Indiana was commissioned by the Harron Gallery at the Indianap ...

In Dubs, Emshwiller introduces computerized video editing (CMX) as a strategy for structuring a "word/image dance," a concrete poem that metaphorically describes male/female relationships through the interconnection of words and images in time and space. In what he terms a "conceptual work, a ...

Newly re-mastered through EAI's Videotape Preservation Program, this tape is a classic early video performance. In this seminal exploration of the phenomenology of video as a mirror and as "reality," Jonas, face-to-face with her own recorded image, performs a duet with herself.

With his 8mm camera, a secret film diary was shot between 1936 and 1966 by Jeno, who might have been the best cameraman of our age, had he not worked in 1945 as the senior clerk of General Mortgage Credit Bank. His wife is not as keen on film shooting as on their dog: they love it like a child. The ...

Writes Antek Walczak: "The opening credits announce a set of false pretenses: a video to mark the centennial of fashion images (1898-1998), sponsored by luxury conglomerate LVMH, and produced by the renowned French film producer Anatole Dauman. What ensues is a delirious collection of sketches, scen ...