T.R. Uthco was a San Francisco-based multi-media performance art collective that engaged in satirical critiques of mass media images and cultural myths, using theatricality and spectacle as strategies. Founded in 1970, T.R. Uthco staged irreverent, fabricated events, and produced video documents of its performances. Interweaving reality and illusion, truth and artifice, they parodied pop iconography, political symbolism and cultural mythology.

Bringing complexity and sophistication to her deconstruction and appropriation of popular texts, Rea Tajiri decodes the images and soundtracks of Hollywood cinema and mass media as a strategy of cultural analysis. Fragmenting and rereading the vernacular of pop cultural narratives, she deciphers their embedded meanings to expose how history and memory are rewritten through media representation.

Aldo Tambellini was born in 1930 in Syracuse, New York. He received a BFA in Painting from the University of Syracuse in 1954 and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Notre Dame in 1958. Tambellini was also a fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1976 to 1984. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Whitney Museum. Tambellini’s work has been highlighted in several major retrospective exhibitions including at the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhle, Germany, in 2017; the Tate Modern, London, in 2012; and the Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, in 2009. Tambellini also has an extensive archive of poetry collected alongside other works by the Tate, United Kingdom and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Selected poems, written from 1946 to 2016, were published under the title LISTEN by Grady Miller Books in 2017. Tambellini lived and worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2020.

Janice Tanaka's intricately textured video collages confront the autobiographical and the cultural. Merging social and political observations, philosophical inquiries and personal introspections, Tanaka's works use original footage, appropriated media images, and layered electronic processing. In recent works, she has extended these inquiries to the construction of Asian-American identity.

Refracted through archival material, texts, found footage and dense soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media. Her epic project Peggy and Fred in Hell is an ongoing cycle of interrelated films, videos and installation environments. Exploring the aesthetics of narrative form as well as the politics of the image, Thornton forges a unique and strangely beautiful syntax, one that poses its critique at the same time that it mesmerizes and confounds.

Francesc Torres' works question social orders based on political and economic power relations. Examining the machinery of war and violence within culture and history, he contemplates tensions between the persistence of time and the fragility of memory in politically charged spaces. From architectural ruins to media artifacts, he creates associations and metaphors to suggest larger cultural constructs.

Ryan Trecartin is one of the most innovative young artists working with video today. He was termed "the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s" by The New Yorker. Trecartin's fantastical video narratives seem to be conjured from a fever dream. Collaborating with an ensemble cast of family and friends, Trecartin merges sophisticated digital manipulations with footage from the Internet and pop culture, animations, and wildly stylized sets and performances. Trecartin crafts startling visions that are thoroughly unique.

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker, visual artist, and performer who incorporates strategies of activism, art making, and stage production across a range of multi-disciplinary projects. While Tsang’s work has a rich visual style, her attention to shifting identities, transitional spaces, and communities emphasizes contingent identifiers such as language, voice, and persona, prompting inquiries into how individuals and communities resist ingrained social prejudices. Using the frameworks of popular media forums such as cinema, television, theater and dance clubs, her work considers prescient debates about social gathering as a form of insurgency and the political capacity of contemporary art.

An artist working in print, performance, photography, and film, New York native Tommy Turner is considered a key figure of Downtown No Wave. In the mid-1980s, he directed arresting small gauge films that retain their ability to inspire shock, awe, and revulsion, while conveying a biting sense of humor and incisive social commentary. Turner's concise oeuvre encompasses black magic, domestic dysfunction, addiction, rock ‘n’ roll, demagoguery, murder, and wasted teenhood, often addressed through gleefully graphic, lo-fi special effects that swerve between clinical detachment and sardonic irreverence. (Bio image shows a still from Rat Trap, made in collaboration with Tessa Hughes.)

Adopting the tongue-in-cheek appellation Top Value Television, the influential video collective TVTV defined the radical video documentary movement of the 1970s that is known as "guerrilla television." TVTV subverted conventions of television news and documentary reportage with its alternative journalistic techniques, countercultural principles and pioneering use of portable, low-tech video equipment.