Trecartin crafts a fantastical narrative about a girl whose obsessive personal utopia is disrupted. Trecartin's collaborator, Lizzie Fitch, plays a girl obsessed. Everything in her hyperactive, sped-up world revolves around Valentine's Day: red, white, and pink love-themed decorations cover every surface; heart shapes abound; Valentine's Day treats are everywhere. Her private festivities suddenly go awry as a hoard of Christmas-themed intruders appear; gagged and bound, "Valentines Day Girl" is forced to watch while her captors stage a frenzied Christmas intervention.

First composed and performed in 1965, Variations V is a true testament to 1960's experiments with "intermedia"—a coexistence and cutting across of artistic genres that profoundly informed Cunningham's choreographic practice. Video is materially integrated into the performance, with pr ...

In 1977 the Vasulkas were commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create six programs for broadcast on WNED in Buffalo, New York. The result, Vasulka Video, is innovative and informative television. The Vasulkas introduce and contextualize their work and processing techniques, providing invaluable insights into their groundbreaking experiments with electronic image and sound manipulation.

In this tour-de-force of stylized deconstruction, the Yonemotos rewrite a traditional narrative of desire: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie me ...

While visiting Berlin, Baldino turned on her hotel room's television to find Venice Beach, California. She recorded the television image — a long, steady shot of the beach, surf, and bathers. Later, in California, she played back the unexplained and anonymous footage directly in front of the s ...

Vernacular Live from Electronic America is driven by the idea that new media interface culture inspires new means of information exchange. A standalone application and a multi-media performance instrument, Vernacular furthers Coleman and Goldkrand's investigation towards the practice of "cultural alchemy."

Vertical Roll is a seminal work. In a startling collusion of form and content, Jonas constructs a theater of female identity by deconstructing representations of the female body and the technology of video. Using an interrupted electronic signal — or "vertical roll" — as a dynamic ...

Video 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook, a highly original, visually dramatic and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated "episodes" produced for television. Unfolding as a series of thirty-second vignettes, this enigmatic essay in style is characterized by a deadpan t ...

Writes Kuchar: "In two parts, with a total length of 60 minutes, this diary chronicles the final visits I had with Curt McDowell, who was bed-ridden at the time with AIDS. The tape records the whole season inside and out and the food that went in and the feelings that went out...."

In this work, Bell-Smith combines three found elements: an industrial video designed to fix stuck pixels in computer monitors, an animation of a sunset and a New Age soundtrack. In doing so Bell-Smith interrogates the purported transcendence of psychedelia and New Age techno-hippie-dom, while bringing into play the history of brainwashing videos and seizure-inducing strobe effects.

Rife with feeling and movement, Video Drawings is an expressionistic, animistic work that evokes the human condition. Created and then manipulated in real time with the Fairlight CVI, and scored to haunting Senegalese music (with Peter Gordon on saxophone), Fitzgerald's painterly landscape su ...

Video from Russia: The People Speak documents the 1984-85 Journey for Peace through Russia. Devyatkin shot in six cities, interviewing people on life in Russia and their opinions of America. Produced during a period when relations between the United States and the former Soviet Union were at ...

Kubota narrates this surrealistic video diary of her month-long sojourn with a Navajo family on a reservation in Chinle, Arizona. She talks to the women as they cross the desert in a horse-drawn carriage to fetch water from the nearest well, and captures footage of tribal songs and dances, children's pranks and a local rodeo. Despite the language barrier between the Japanese Kubota and the English-speaking Native Americans, the artist befriends her subjects through sheer force of personality. Kubota relates to her subjects less like a documentary observer and more like a distant relative, with humor and affection.

Over the past several decades, Shigeko Kubota has produced a significant body of video installation work. Kubota's sculptural installations include works that recast the iconography and theories of Marcel Duchamp, and those that focus on landscape and nature. In each work, her signature electronic i ...

In this dynamic collision of media images and images of the media, Muntadas fuses films, video and television in a hall of mirrors that reflects and critiques contemporary culture.

Writes Yau Ching: "Because I have always been on the move, departing a city and waking up in another country, I find myself writing letters all the time — to people I miss, people I met on the road, people I look forward to meeting... When I grew tired of words (which happened very often), I ...

Logue merges image with spoken and written text in Video Portraits: French Writers, utilizing elegant video techniques to illustrate the words of such prominent authors and theorists as Jacques Derrida, Andre Du Bouchet, and Florence Delay. Whether filling the screen with Derrida's handwritte ...

"A subject being recorded cannot hide behind his smile for long; thoughts and feelings begin to be exposed without verbal expression. The viewer is confronted with this contemplation and silence and witnesses a psychological expression made visual." So writes Logue about this compilation of early vi ...

Video Skulptur is the most complete documentation of the world's largest historical video art installation exhibition. Forty-three video installations were featured in the 1989 exhibition at the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany.

This restored collection of rare early collaborative works by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut is historically significant as well as remarkably prescient. Recorded between 1965 and 1971, these "video-films" reveal insights into the evolution of Paik's work i ...

In 1972, WGBH commissioned eight visual artists to create video works using the repertoire of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Jackie Cassan, Russell Connor, Douglas Davis, Constantine Manos, James Seawright, Nam June Paik, Stan VanDerBeek and Tsai Wen Ying created experiments with video sculpture, dance, theater and electronic manipulation. Featuring the music of Haydn, Ravel, Schoenberg, Bach, Wagner and Beethoven, Video Variations explores the concept of "music video" ten years before MTV.

Writes Kuchar: "I had some super 8mm footage of a place I went to for someone's movie shoot and I never made anything out of it. It was just sitting around the house so I decided to play around with it using my consumer model video effects equipment."

The artistic refinement and technical evolution of Beck's synthesizer is evident in these later three works. Video Weavings is a multicolored mosaic in motion, "woven" on the Video Weaver. In the video dance composition Anima, Beck merges the abstract electronic imagery of his synthesi ...

This restored collection of rare early collaborative works by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut is historically significant as well as remarkably prescient. Recorded between 1967 and 1972, these playful and improvisational "video-films" reveal insights into the evolution of Paik's work in video, performance and installation.

Video: The New Wave is a seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synth ...

Videograms is an ongoing series of text/image constructs or syntaxes using the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a device that enables Hill to sculpt electronic forms on the screen. Each "videogram" relates literally or conceptually to Hill's accompanying spoken text, which is visually translated int ...

In this meditation on speech and language, Cha juxtaposes English and French words to form new relationships and meanings.

Viet Flakes was composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images, compiled over five years, from foreign magazines and newspapers. Schneemann uses the 8mm camera to "travel" within the photographs, producing a volatile animation. Broken rhythms and visual fractures are heighte ...

Alpert and Tsuno made headlines with a 1977 journalistic coup when they became the first American television crew allowed back into Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal, and were given unprecedented access to the ruined countryside and its people. The resulting "up-close" study of Vietnam's grim postwa ...

Vintage is a meditative and reflexive look at black families through the eyes of black lesbian and gay siblings. In contrast to traditional documentaries, Vintage places the camera in the hands of family members to construct a collective autobiographical presentation of family. Interwe ...

Violin Film #1 (Playing the Violin as Fast as I Can), is one of several 1967-68 films featuring Nauman's violin-playing, in which the production of sound is subjected to procedural strategies that problematize its status as music and performance. In what could be considered a further displac ...

Steina terms this procedural work "a demo tape on how to play video on the violin." Her background as a violinist and her evolution from musician to visual artist is referenced through an analogy of video camera to musical instrument. Steina is first seen in footage from the early 1970s, playing the ...

In an earlier film, Playing A Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (Violin #1), Nauman played a single note on the violin as he walked around his studio. In this video work, he remains in a stationary position while he plays four strings together. (These have been tuned to the n ...

Writes Gorewitz: "Meditation During Wartime was created during a time I was 'teaching' meditation while the war between Israel and Hezbollah raged.

"Psalm 121 was created specifically for iPod and includes images shot on the lower East Side, Ellis Island, and Jerusalem. The ...

Stan VanDerBeek was a visionary of expanded cinema. This special video edition includes a collection of VanDerBeek's seminal film works, from his early surrealist collage animation to his utopian experiments in expanded cinema. Also included is rare footage of the filmmaker at work and talking about his art.

This recently restored performance tape was recorded in Naples, Italy, in 1973. Crouched in a corner, hemmed in by the video camera and a closed-circuit monitor showing him the scene as it is recorded, Acconci attempts to "disappear." He tries to erase his image in the eyes of those watching, alternating between urgent appeals to imagined viewers and pleas to his own image in the monitor.

Visions of Warhol presents scenes from the life of Andy Warhol, as seen by three pioneer avant-garde filmmakers and close friends of the artist. In this extraordinary compilation, Jonas Mekas creates an intimate chronicle of Warhol's life and social milieu over three decades; Willard Maas documents Warhol's seminal exhibition of silver balloons at Castelli Gallery; and Marie Menken records the artist in the process of creating some of his most famous works.

In this work, EXPORT communicates with her fingers. Sign language, as an elision of word and gesture, is investigated. The artist writes: "The body as carrier of information, in order to convey both spiritual and physical contents, is the reflected image of the internal/psychological and of the external/institutional reality."

Vital Signals is a survey of the vibrant, interdisciplinary video art scene in Japan in the 1960s and '70s. Produced by EAI, the DVD anthology features sixteen works by fifteen Japanese artists, among them key figures such as Takahiko Iimura, Mako Idemitsu and Toshio Matsumoto. The DVD is accompanied by a 100-page, bilingual (English and Japanese) illustrated catalogue publication. Essays by Barbara London, Glenn Phillips, and Hirofumi Sakamoto draw out the unique art historical and cultural contexts of early Japanese video art, and its relation to film and other visual art forms. The Vital Signals DVD is organized in three parts: The Language of Technology, Open Television, and Body Acts. In technical experiments, activist statements, and conceptual performances, Japanese artists of the 1960s and '70s transformed the intangible—time, gesture, the electronic signal—into rich art-making material. The Vital Signals DVD anthology and catalogue publication illuminate this fertile period of creative engagement in Japan.

This chilling tape, "operatically" conceived — but neither a musical nor a documentary — probes the objectification of women and others in a technological/bureaucratic society. At its core is a long, continuous shot that reveals the part-by-part measurement and evaluation of a woman by a ...

This boxed set features five of Acconci's seminal audio works from the 1960s and '70s. These early conceptual audio works, on five CDs, were restored by EAI. This set includes Running Tape, The American Gift, Under-History Lessons, Ten Packed Minutes, and The Gangster Sister from Chicago Visits New York (A Family Piece).

Sound, as visually manifested through electronic imaging, becomes a spatial component in this exquisitely rendered confluence of landscape, music and digital manipulation. Singer/composer Joan La Barbara performs a series of voice chants and intonations, creating energized patterns on a grid of hori ...

Based on the thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, this narrative reverie is a televisual retelling of a medieval myth about a young woman (played by Tilda Swinton) whose dreams foretell the future. Shot in the dramatic natural landscapes of Iceland and in New York, this performance-based work ...

Romantic German landscapes, totemic objects, archival film footage of industry and labor, the carousel scene from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train — these mythic representations and icons from Western, non-Western and media cultures are juxtaposed and conjoined in Vorurteile. Ode ...

The Antarctic is the subject of this visually powerful journey into the unfamiliar.

A drive along the electronic superhighway! Using state-of-the-art computer graphics systems, d'Agostino creates a virtual environment that joins together simulations of Philadelphia, the Rockies, Kuwait City and Hiroshima. From inside a computer generated car, these four geographically remote enviro ...

In this informational documentary, produced as part of the Video Tape Review series of New York public television station WNET/Thirteen, interviews with Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno are interspersed with excerpts from their extensive body of work.

A documentary about TVTV shot by one of its own members, this first segment of WNET/Thirteen's VTR series was produced while the collective was in Washington working on Gerald Ford's America. Videotaped by Andy Mann, VTR:TVTV includes equipment demonstrations by Alan Rucker, Megan Will ...

A performance in which Schneemann personifies an irrepressible vulva, who engages two animal hand puppets in a clamorous deconstruction of sexual bias in French semiotics, Marxism, patriarchal religions and physical taboos.

In Vusac — NY, Paik continues his postmodern project of recontextualizing footage from his earlier tapes, updating and transforming familiar images. This collaborative pastiche merges Paul Garrin's reprocessing of the 1975 Suite 212 with Bet ...