In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each ges ...

Using the "blink" as a visual metaphor for the often fragmented, non-sequential and interrupted nature of memory, Cho constructs a phantasmagoric travelogue. Writes Cho, "I tried to make a visual poem about traveling which contained contrary elements: manipulation and spontaneity, brightness and dar ...

One of the major works in video, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like envisions an epic quest for transcendence and self-knowledge. Viola describes this work as a "personal investigation of the inner states and connections to animal consciousness we all carry within." The title is taken from th ...

In I hung back, held fire, danced and lied Kalin confronts loss, intimacy and estrangement. This visually arresting piece is constructed of Super-8 fragments that document familiar and foreign spaces, lovers and strangers. Rapidly intercut with these images are brief glimpses of names of indi ...

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.

Writes Zando: "This tape is about seduction. The audience is seduced by the female narrator, while at the same time repelled by the seductress' desperate need for love and approval. The title is ironic — although the narrator 'likes girls for friends better than boys,' the attraction is masoch ...

Donegan writes, "The piece is a short lament and meditation on housework, heartbreak and posing...keeping up appearances and appearing to keep up...I thought about Douglas Sirk and decorating."

I Want Some Insecticide is a keyed-up vision of science fiction run amok, a chilling and dystopian view of a technological and militaristic future. Bizarre insect-like puppets, constructed from coffee cans, plastic cones and other throw-aways, dance in bold chroma-key over black-and-white arc ...

Loss, displacement, time and memory permeate this haunting nonlinear narrative, which unfolds like a dream in the process of telling itself. Jonas is seen watching video images — shot in a New York studio and in rural Nova Scotia — that metaphorically relate to the dreams, reveries and m ...

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. Inspired by ...

Here Rist takes up the concept of the "cover" version, in which one performer does a version of another's song, and gives it her own twist. Starting with music from Chris Isaak's hit single Wicked Game, she adds her own sung and screamed versions of the lyrics, accompanied by manipulated, diaristic video images. The result is an art-world "cover" of a popular artifact, with a woman's voice reinterpreting the male original, and a vivid illustration of the consumer's claim to own and interpret media images.

Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the title (a line adapted from The Beatles' song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Through obsessive mimesis and manipulation, Rist renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll.

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."

Straightforward and wry, Ice documents the consequences of time and gravity on a bold, simple action. A man rests his hand on a vial of upright toothpicks. As he suspends his hand over a table, the toothpicks drop one by one onto the glass surface below. Recording this performance in real tim ...

The crack of a whip repeats insistently throughout this provocative work, which posits male body-building as a charged metaphor for authoritarian structures. With this undercurrent of discipline and punishment, Odenbach conflates the construction of the physical body with the psychological, pain wit ...

"Cinque Terre is the designation for a string of towns dotting the northern Mediterranean coast of Italy. ...Kobland was invited to spend a few weeks there in November 2004, and Ideas of Order in Cinque Terre is the result of his brief love affair with the landscape of the place. Concentrating on line, geometry, and tones of sound and color, Kobland has crafted a powerful, abstract homage to a little piece of paradise." — Tribeca Film Festival, 2006.

Identical Time is an exploration of isolation within an urban environment. With skilled visual manipulations, Cho transforms images of a graffiti-marred subway window and the reflection of a subway car as it traverses a station into moments of sheer enigmatic beauty. This image mantra is furt ...

In a collusion of text and image, Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and other broadcast reports to analyze their deceptive syntax and capture the confusion inserted intentionally into the news script. The artist questions the fallibility of electronic transmission by emphasizing the dis ...

Writes Callas, "This work deals with stereotypes of `Australian' identity, and at the same time examines Australian attitudes towards the media." In this witty and irreverent display of vivid, proliferating visuals, Callas transposes cartoon-like signs and icons from their original context to convey ...

A compilation of Schneemann's anti-Vietnam War group performances, this work merges film projection, sound and slide systems, light beams, audience and performer action in a sensory collage linking the exposed Illinois landscape to the devastation in Vietnam. Writes Schneemann: "I think of this work ...

The spontaneity of improvisational jazz is captured in this series of video music performances created on the Beck Direct Synthesizer. Featuring "live" improvisations with musician Warner Jepson, Beck's "jazz video" evokes musical forms and their visual abstractions.

Illuminatin' Sweeney features interviews with the artist, as well as excerpts from his early image-processing experiments. Sweeney's credo — "to make tapes as satisfying to me as listening to music" — is explored in short pieces that use the Moog Vidium process, which improvises a ...

Working with an all-Native American crew, Hopi artist Victor Masayesva Jr. visited tribal communities in Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, Washington and the Amazon to produce a 16mm film. This is a re-edited version of that project. Masayesva writes, "Coming from a village which became em ...

Driven by an ironic anxiety ridden soundtrack, Hodel sits before a buffet of designer footwear. She dresses her arms and legs in various combinations, representing herself as a creature of obsession and fetish.

In Immemory, his first CD-ROM project, French filmmaker Chris Marker charts a haunting journey through memory, cinema, photography, war and literature. Marker traces an itinerary or map of an imaginary country, with detours to Hitchcock and Proust, to arrive at a self-portrait.

Writes Kuchar, "Yellowstone National Park is the destination on this tape, but side trips are taken to hot spots in Idaho, including a museum to potatoes and solidified lava tunnels near the world's first nuclear reactor. Gargantuan mammals graze in this scenic excursion into ecological excrement."

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."

Silver writes: "in complete world is both a rigorous and unique reworking of the vox pop tradition - the entire documentary is made up of a weaving of street interviews done throughout NYC. Mixing political questions ('Are we responsible for the government we get?') with more broadly existential ones ('Do you feel you have control over your life?'), the video centers on the tension between individual and collective responsibility."

The Vasulkas employ imaging tools to transform physical space and alter perception. In Search of the Castle is a journey of personal, perceptual and technical transformations. Driving from a city through Southwestern landscapes, taping through Steina's mirrored globe, the Vasulkas develop the ...

Merging fiction and non-fiction, In Shadow City considers relations between humans and animals. This episodic narrative examines how animal metaphors for human behavior have entered the common idiom, the use and abuse of animals for human benefit, and the narrowly proscribed role that nature ...

Collaborating with choreographer Elizabeth Streb, Lucier constructs a suite of dances in which the human figure is abstracted and isolated within a natural landscape. Structured in three segments, the work suggests the evolution of a mythical being moving from a black void to a natural landscape, an ...

Part of Gillette's series for Classical Video — tapes designed to act as non-literal, visual interpretations of classical music — In the Creeks is a lush, contemplative study of the natural microcosm of a creek in summer, transformed into an almost abstract, formalist micro ...

In the Land of the Elevator Girls uses the elevator as a metaphorical vehicle to reveal an outsider's gaze into contemporary Japanese culture. The continual opening and closing of elevator doors serves as a succinct formal device, as the viewer is offered brief glimpses of a series of landsca ...

This tape documents an installation, which included color photographs and texts. The work was first displayed as an ensemble in 1990, but with photographs extending as far back as the early 1980's, and, in subsequent versions, up to 1998. Here Rosler explores the system of air travel and its associa ...

In the Planet of the Eye is the second part of Myers' installation series of the same title. Structured on ritualized, universal gestures and signs, this work resonates with suggestions of mythic symbols and archetypes. Woven in a rapidly paced collage and set to a rhythmic soundtrack, the im ...

Originally part of a two-channel installation, this work presents a series of elusive narrative moments — culled from snippets of ordinary life and oddly extraordinary objects — that gain their meaning on the periphery of perception. Writes Baldino: "According to William James, the 'pres ...

In Transit is an observed portrait of the spaces—often considered non-places—of air travel. Lord moves from San Francisco to Shanghai, Beijing to London, and Frankfurt to Mexico City, though these geographic leaps are barely perceptible in the airport interiors or the travelers' behavior. The viewer is ultimately left with an image of air travel that is equal parts science fiction and the sublime.

Inspired by Maurice Blanchot's novel Thomas the Obscure and the experience of observing his child acquiring speech, Hill extends the dialogue between semantics and consciousness in this heuristic tour de force. Depicting the synesthesia of reading and the dreamwork of the text, Hill grounds the viewer in the activity of becoming the text through a succession of evocative scenarios and revelatory motifs.

India Time — the first in the Distance of the Outsider series — is a direct observation of everyday life in India, recorded during the artist's extended travels. Challenging the conventional ethnographic documentation of a non-Western culture by a Western observer, Feingold ...

A dense montage of graphics, charts, and animations, Industrial Synth takes up the tradition of the experimental essay film and flattens it into an oblique composition that reflects on the technological and consumerist dimensions of Modernity. Negating cinematic elements of narrative, performance, and conventional signification, Price's video nonetheless conveys a sense of the pathos of a contemporary digital society, which, despite its promise of the new, relentlessly circles around issues of obsolescence and death.

Infinity Doors draws on the determined staying power and unremitting stimulation of prize-oriented game show culture. Utilizing clips from The Price is Right, Murata edits a kinetic series of prize unveils. Unrelenting audience applause and an excessively animated announcer make the clip at once comical and peculiar. The superfluity of reward and overload of visual cues become absurd in their excess and begin to smother the very excitement they are meant to induce.

Infinite Escher integrates 3-D computer animation with High Definition video to tell the story of a boy who moves between reality and a fantasy world, where computer graphic replicas of the works of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher come to life.

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.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, the Ant Farm collective pioneered the idea of inflatable structures as alternative architecture. Inflatables Illustrated offers a visual primer on how Ant Farm prepared and constructed their utopian, experimental inflatable-plastic architecture. This tape is a corollary to Ant Farm's seminal 1969 publication The Inflatocookbook, a do-it-yourself guide to inflatable architecture. Promoting interactivity, ephemerality and access through collective practice, the book and the video can be seen as early examples of what is now termed "open source."

Information is an exercise in technological reflexivity, an early investigation of the material presence of the electronic medium. From a technical mistake, in which a videotape recorder tried to record itself, Viola constructed a study of electronic anarchy — a disintegrating and self- ...

The second part of The Thinking Eye series, Information Withheld is a complex investigation of signs and symbols in Western culture. Applying linguistic, semiotic and iconographic analysis as systems of interpretation, Downey decodes signs from everyday traffic signals to Michelangelo' ...

Inherent in the Rhumb Line is a silent motion drawing. "With the advent of the rhumb line — a line of constant bearing or loxodrome — a cognitive pattern developed in the Western world that allowed the possibility to conceive pillage on voyages of discovery. Inherent in the Rhumb Line is an imperative for use — regardless of consequence — a flattened convolution that marries landscape with loot and preordination."

With Insectiside, Arcangel brings his strategically amateur aesthetic, which celebrates the excesses of the accidental and contingent, to a new level, re-presenting a home video that he made as a teenager in 1992. The video, which features the artist and his sister parodically yet lovingly performing as a heavy metal band, takes on new meaning beside Arcangel's recent work with music videos and the codes of pop culture.

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

This document of two early installations presents text and imagery from each work. In Barricade to Blue, Myers creates a metaphorical landscape with television monitors, flooding two congruent spaces with blue light. Depicting a transition from mundane reality to a mystical plane, she uses th ...

Inspired by ancient mythology and magic, Myers' installation series In the Planet of the Eye portrays cyclical and regenerative states. The Forms That Begin at the Outer Rim is a spare, evocative installation, in which primal forms related to the four alchemical elements are translated ...

Adams' strategy of simultaneously constructing and deconstructing a narrative text finds its most accomplished expression in Intellectual Properties. Shot on 16mm film in Boston and Newcastle, England, this six-part fiction is an ironic, stylized discourse on representation, reproduction, pro ...

Produced during Arcangel's residency at Liverpool's FACT Center, this carefully ramshackle production appears as if it might have emerged from a public access TV studio some time in the late 1980s. Bracketed by stroboscopic dance segments, the heart of the work is a seemingly casual conversation about pop music between the artist and a local teenager, in which audio and video tracks are slightly out of sync, and digital compression lends the image a softened quality that is somehow both anachronistic and of-the-moment.

In this haunting performance, Wilke conflates the private and the public as autobiographical theater. The audience "eavesdrops" on a series of phone messages intended for Wilke, recorded from her answering machine. This voice-over litany of messages becomes an intimate if one-sided narrative of Wilk ...

In a vast underground cave, Schneemann and seven nude women perform the ritualized actions of Interior Scroll — reading the text as each woman slowly extracts a scroll from her vagina. The scroll embodies the primacy of an extended visual line shaped as both concept and action. The extr ...

Writes Pearlstein: "A white cat, the Playboy party jokes girl, an artist/florist, and the Energizer bunny are among the disparate characters who inhabit Interiors, a loop of six scenes based on a series of drawings. Like animated pictures, each depicts an interior landscape which transforms t ...

In Internal Tantrum, Palestine sits before the camera with a severe expression of concentration, his body tense and his fists tightly wound. He begins to slowly chant and sway, evoking a powerful sense of grief and pain. He writes that the tape provides "a reading, like on the Richter Scale, ...

Divided into ten abstracted "stories," this study of sound and image juxtaposition employs rapid cutting as its primary visual strategy. Although such strategies have become standard conventions of music videos and television advertising, the artists broke new ground at the time with fast edits, dis ...

Interviewed in New York City on Earth Day in May 1970, social theorist Buckminster Fuller expounds on subjects including energy use, ecological systems, the history of technological achievements and the importance of a global vision.

This rare interview with Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, took place a few months before his death in 1978. Maciunas discusses his "Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and other Four Dimensional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial, and Tactile Art Forms," tracing influences ranging from John Cage and Marcel Duchamp to vaudeville and Spike Jones.

Reversing television's conventional "talking heads" format, Blumberg, in his trademark conversational style, questions professional interviewers about the art of interviewing. Part "New Journalism," part video verité, this work presents TV's Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters, Pulitzer Prize winner an ...

Brazilian artist Eder Santos's first feature length work, shot in Spain, employs a rich and varied score by Stephen Vitiello to mobilize the mystic journey of an image prophet who can project his vision into the world. This prophet finds himself in a landscape where images — regardless of thei ...

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 ...

In a sly twist on the methodology of the 18th-century "philosophes" who classified the laws and history of the world in massive encyclopedias, Baldessari devises and then subverts his own system for cataloguing the world. In a matter-of-fact tone, he states that he is going to present a precise, ...

Invisible Citizens is a moving and disturbing examination of the history of Japanese immigrants (the Nisei) in the United States, focusing on the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In this collective portrait, which includes combat veterans of the Japanese 442nd division of ...

Involuntary Reception is a multilayered piece that explores the alienation and exile of the self in a media-saturated world. Lucas performs as a young woman with an enormous electro-magnetic pulse field. Her Web project of the same name, which incorporates streaming video, performance and text, can be seen at www.eai.org/involuntary.

In EAI's premiere Artist Web Project, Kristin Lucas performs as a young woman with an enormous electro-magnetic pulse field (EPF). The video element of Involuntary Reception may be viewed in its entirety using Real Player.

Iris is a meditation on the death of a family member. Here Cho deploys the camera as metaphor, likening the opening of the camera's iris and its saturation with light to a form of video tears. The resulting piece depicts a stark, white landscape of mourning. The soundtrack uses soft, whisperi ...

In this highly reflexive work, three characters and their doubles confront the transparency of mental and physical "fictions" and "realities" during the making of a film. As Feingold writes, "the story appears to be missing, but, circling around it, the characters move through layers of speech and i ...

Irving Bridge, uses visual and aural synthesis in an evocative rendering of the natural landscape.

Loosely structured as a letter home, a "writer" explicates the longings, nostalgia and regrets that exile, even voluntary exile, produces. B. Ruby Rich, writing in The Village Voice, states, "A subtle answer to travelogue mentalities... turns the tables on the tourists in their native land an ...

These two works, both produced on the island of St. Pierre, a French territory off the coast of Newfoundland, confront confinement, isolation and powerlessness. In Island Song, Palestine straps a video camera to a motorcycle and then drives around the island as though searching for an escape. ...

A lurid collage of images and text appropriated from the British mass media — TV news, tabloid headlines, advertising graphics — is accompanied by a narrator's wryly delivered anecdote on the "non-event of the year." Boy George, Royal Couples, political scandals and Halley's Comet vie fo ...

It Starts at Home is a song-and-dance performance sitcom in which our hapless hero Mike encounters his fifteen minutes of fame. When Mike's ordinary domestic activities are inadvertently cablecast to the televisions of a receptive viewing public, a fast-talking entrepreneur promises him cable ...

Based on his own video documentation, Atlas constructs a delirious montage of New York club performances from the past several years. Impersonators of pop-culture figures, including Martha Graham, Kurt Cobain giving a "final performance," and Sid Vicious lip-syncing to Nancy Sinatra, are emceed by t ...

In It's Cool, I'm Good, a bandaged and injured protagonist (Kahn), seduces, entertains, harasses and charms a slew of nurses who have agreed to hold the camera. The "patient" is at once selfless and narcissistic, verbose and elusive, vulnerable and manipulative. With a 22-track surround sou ...

Celebrating the Hopi Tricentennial, Itam Hakim, Hopiit is a poetic visualization of Hopi philosophy and prophesy. The myths, religion, legends and history of the Hopi people, articulated through the ancient oral tradition, are translated by Masayesva to video. Speaking in the Hopi language, R ...