2 Piano Concerts documents two important performances by Paik, who was originally trained as a musician and composer. In the first concert, which was performed during the 1994 multi-national arts festival SeOUL NyMAX in New York, Paik plays the piano while it is being destroyed by chai ...

Produced for public television station WNET/Thirteen in New York, Nam June Paik: Edited for Television is a provocative portrait of the artist, his work and philosophies. This fascinating document features an interview of Paik by art critic Calvin Tompkins (who wrote a New Yorker profi ...

This tape documents the dress rehearsal and the final ten minutes of Paik's video-opera performance, Coyote 3, at Anthology Film Archives in 1997. The performance was based on Duette, a piece performed with Joseph Beuys in Tokyo in 1984. < ...

Working with a stationary camera, Hoover brings a painterly, minimalist aesthetic to these contemplative explorations of light, shadow, color and scale, which evolve in real time with no editing. She writes, "Essentially I see my work as a trigger that ignites associations in the viewer." The evocat ...

In this collection of works, Hoover subtly orchestrates light and movement in real time to suggest enigmatic sculptural landscapes. At times using her own body as landscape, she creates an evocative tension between abstraction, reality and illusion.

In Landscape, a single illuminated h ...

Baldino takes the theory of "Nano-technology" as her jumping-off point to explore the connections between science, magic and wonder. Nano-Cadabra is composed of forty abstract narratives, each lasting five seconds or less. In these mini-events, an array of ambiguous objects interact, eerily s ...

In this vivid pastiche of images, music and text, Santos addresses technology and image-making in the context of cultural formation. Writes Santos: "Technology is explored in terms of information speed — a feature that makes popular absorption and understanding all the harder. Metaphorically, ...

This highly stylized and deftly edited provocation features a cast of performers, diverse in national origin, who recite a litany of statements meant to challenge viewers' secure notions of national identity. Kalin asserts that bodies are very real battlegrounds, territories that are contested and controlled by the same political forces that

National Arts Emergency chronicles the response of the arts community to the Congressional "attack" on the National Endowment for the Arts' grant-making procedures. Combining lively footage of actions in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, this document represent ...

In Nature Demo, Dodge and Kahn explore the flora and fauna of the Los Angeles River, which flows in a concrete channel through the city. They attempt to build a shelter and scavenge for food, questioning their ability to survive alone in this urban wilderness—though the ruse of their isolation is betrayed by the constant noise of traffic flowing over a nearby freeway.

This work is a poetic, often abstract documentation of the natural environments and animal life that exist in the midst of the New York cityscape. Ryan includes footage shot at nature reserves in Jamaica Bay, Staten Island and the Bronx.

A radio play that aired on WBAI in New York in 1978, Need to Know is a sound structure. With allusions to Sam Cooke and the socio-political upheaval of the era, this multi-voiced "Experimental Theatre of the Air" is alternately playful and, as promised by its title, urgently imperative.

Produced during a year-long residency in New York, Neo Geo is a vivid portrayal of the contemporary American cultural landscape. Constructed as a fragmented and dislocated terrain embedded with emblematic imagery, Callas' dark vision of cultural memory is inscribed with symbols of violence, m ...

Neptune's Choice is Santos' self-described "letter to Amsterdam." With lush images, elliptical text and a haunting sound collage, this poetic work explores the artist's impressions of the cosmopolitan city. Defining Amsterdam through its historical and contemporary relation to water, Santos celebrates the rhythm and routines of the city from the point of view of an outsider. This work was created as an artist-in-residence project of the World Wide Video Festival.

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

A new form of athletically inspired, circus arts-derived dance is the focus of this group of performance tapes. Nine Person Precision Ball Passing is a synchronized dance performance by avant-garde choreographer Charles Moulton. Nine dancers in a grid formation repeatedly pass nine balls to o ...

New Man continues Pearlstein's wry commentary on gender and media. Against an austere white backdrop, five shirtless men defiantly face the camera. The artist writes: "New Man demonstrates the speed, impact and elusiveness of change. As a dummy version of the central character drops in to replace, merge with or inhabit him, he is visibly unchanged, yet able to break from the group of men and move forward."

Early performances by some of the best-known "new music" artists are captured in this document of the first New Music America Festival in Minneapolis in 1980. Selections include David Byrne rehearsing a stirring avant-garde composition for string octet; composer Richard Lerman wiring fifty bicycles ...

A glimpse of Japanese youth on the streets of Tokyo.

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

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

Excerpted from Price's 2001 video-lecture "New York Woman," which explored the ways in which music production techniques change over time, NJS Map uses animated diagrams to lay out the historical development of one period in pop music, the briefly-lived but influential genre often called "New Jack Swing."

Night's High Noon is a powerful visual portrayal of the memories sublimated in the cultural construction of contemporary Australian identity. Each pictorial "scene" is constructed of three layers of iconic images, creating a complex "emblematic landscape" that is at odds with the "information ...

From childhood memories to recurring nightmares, Nine Fish attacks and illuminates the indecision and confusion surrounding euthanasia and care of the elderly in the United States. In this deeply personal video, Fulbeck chronicles his Cantonese grandmother's physical decline and its continuin ...

In Nine Thousand, Hodel is disguised behind a fencing mask. Sitting on a white bed in a white room, she meticulously counts hundred dollar bills. This exercise becomes manic when the performer is compelled to lie on the stacks of money.

Writes Kuchar, "Come join Pepe, the magic puppet, as he transports Blackie, the cat, to a world of magic-marker marvels and Crayola creatures. View Blackie's owner as he wanders around a watery world of aquarium relics and flesh and blood quacking things. A picture for the young at heart."

Writes Tanaka: "Silent, sex-less, obedient houseboys and mystic martial arts masters are the popular images of Asian males propagated in this culture's mass media. Invisibility is the core element reflected in this single-dimensional representation of Asian men. Through the reflections and voices of ...

Rhythmically departed from Murata's usual assertive cadence, No Match employs footage from the 1980's game show, Classic Match. The seamless loop of an unyielding contestant's ineptness solidifies as an almost cruel experiment, as the stretched time limit imprisons him in a fruitless guessing game. As 1000 seconds tick off the clock, our relationship towards the disembodied head of the contender shifts from sympathetic support to uncomfortable pity. One cannot help but wonder if this humiliating effort is really worth the grand prize at stake.

States Tony Cokes: "No Sell Out employs desktop video (Adobe Premiere) to position images of Malcolm X in tension with commercial culture. It is a result of a series of loaded questions we ask ourselves, and now wish to impose on viewers... Mr. X i ...

Nocturne, writes Ahwesh, is "a psychological horror film built on the conflicts of a woman tortured by the ambiguity between reality and illusion, dream and desire."

Kalin's short video works, which use literary quotations as starting points, function both as visual poems and alternative music videos that respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s. In Nomads, a brief text by Jane Bowles is the point of departure for a vivid music video that presents an elliptical view of the realities of contemporary urban life.

In this densely layered work, Ramos explores his cultural and personal heritage through a collage of recorded and appropriated footage. Juxtaposing African and American landscapes, personal and media imagery, he traces a spiritual and physical journey that explores African identity. In a forceful po ...

Pervaded with references to Max Ophuls' classic film Letter From an Unknown Woman, Nostos I uses video to explore obsession, the imaginary and memory, relating the cinematic apparatus and the psychical apparatus. Kuntzel describes this work: "Three people, or rather three silhouettes of rare ...

A magical bone that promises eternal life propels the story of Not a Jealous Bone, a post-Freudian fairy tale in the guise of a musical narrative. An eighty-two-year-old woman in search of her mother and a beautiful young woman struggle over the life-extending magic bone. Condit holds an unfl ...

In NOT TOP GUN, which was produced for Paper Tiger Television, Lord gives a discursive, deconstructive reading of the hit film Top Gun. Examining the film's strategies and subtext, he critiques the militaristic and aggressively masculinized attitude that it embodies. The unpopulated sp ...

Notes from the Underground presents unyielding voyeurism on the London Underground. In Deadman Walking, a middle-aged commuter pulls a variety of bored expressions. As the sequence starts, the train is leaving Temple Station, center for the city's law practices and named for the Or ...

In her new work, Thornton confronts the economic and cultural transformation of contemporary China, evoking the spectacle of capitalism run amok. Creating a layered landscape of alienation and dislocation, Thornton shoots from her window of the Jin Jiang Hotel in Shanghai, the site of Mao's 1972 meeting with Nixon, and revisits her 1983 film Adynata, itself an exploration of Orientalism and the Other.

Now takes on video's claims to immediacy and authenticity, as Benglis juxtaposes live performance with her own prerecorded image. The soundtrack features phrases such as "now!" and "start recording," commands that usually ground us in the present, but here serve to deepen the confusion between live signals and mediation. Repeated takes and acidic color processing heighten this challenge to video's power of "liveness."

Tajiri combines classic cinematic moments with her own text, slyly juxtaposing the power of the viewer's anonymous machinations with the illusions created by the magicians of cinema — both located out of sight, just behind the curtain/screen.

A portrait of threatened spirituality in an age of big guns and fast food, Numbering Numbers packs the torment of temporality into nine minutes. With Steve Reich's minimalist score set against a richly layered video collage, images of both the eternal and the incidental flicker and dim, creat ...

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

Jacobs writes: "The belle of the ball surrounded by suitors. A vigorous 3-D that can be seen without special spectacles and even by the one-eyed."