Events
Events
Past Events
Alexander Galloway x Whit Pow: Error, Noise, & Randomness
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal St #3W
Manhattan, NY
10013
October 19, 2024
3-5pm
Artist-scholars Alexander Galloway and Whit Pow of NYU's Media, Culture, and Communication Department present an artist talk and screening. Drawing from video works in EAI's catalogue, Galloway and Pow will draw on the topics of error, noise, and randomness in the history of media art.
For those who cannot attend in person, this event will be cstrange@eai.org. We can accommodate requests for ASL interpretation up to two weeks prior to October 17. This event will have HEPA filters on-site, provided by Artists in Resistance NYC. Accommodations are supported by NYU Center for Disability Studies.
The New Television: Video After Television: Book Launch
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal St #3W
Manhattan, NY
10013
October 18th, 2024, 7:00pm
EAI is thrilled to celebrate the release of our forthcoming publication, The New Television: Video After Television. Advance copies of the book will be sold for 20% off at this event!
Published with no place press, our new publication pairs a facsimilie edition of the publication The New Television, a compendium of papers presented at the convening Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television held at MoMA in 1974, with newly commissioned papers by over a dozen authors, roundtables moderated by Ina Blom and Michelle Kuo, and previously unpublished archival materials from the original conference. The publication illuminates institutional histories of video art, considers global televisual contexts and alternative critical approaches, and examines contemporary video art and its continued relevance from new perspectives.
Remarks by the book's editors.
Drinks provided by Grimm Artisanal Ales and Hugo's Cocktails!
If you have any accessibility needs or questions about our access plans for this event, please contact cstrange@eai.org. We can accommodate requests for ASL interpretation up to two weeks prior to October 17. This event will have HEPA filters on-site, provided by Artists in Resistance NYC. Accommodations are supported by NYU Center for Disability Studies.
Open Circuits Revisited: Susan Murray and Fred Turner in Conversation
The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU
(non-NYU attendees must RSVP or email cstrange@eai.org by 10/16 for venue access).
16-20 Cooper Square New York, NY 10003
October 17th, 2024, 7:00pm
Susan Murray (NYU) and Fred Turner (Stanford) will be introduced by Rebecca Cleman (EAI) and Marita Sturken (NYU) as they present on television utopias of the 1970s and their continued relevance to our current political, cultural, and technological landscape.
Susan Murray: TV Utopias and Media Ecologies
The state of network television and cable regulation at the start of the 1970s is essential context for our understanding of what was at stake at the 1974 Open Circuits conference. In particular, broadcast television’s failure to live up to its public interest mandate and the sudden availability of public access cable channels and affordable portable video cameras intersected with new theories of the media and a push for participatory democracy in media. In this talk, I will connect the 1974 conference, some of the writing in The New Television anthology, and our contemporary situation back to this history and its industrial, artistic, and theoretical framing.
Fred Turner: New Television, New Democracy
In 1974, one world was fading away and another was being born. For years the dream that cybernetic feedback systems and electronic media would birth global peace had fueled the work of artists like Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik. But now the Bronx was burning and the Vietnam War was lost. This talk will argue that even as cybernetic utopianism faded, it gave rise to a new, pluralist vision of video art and American democracy, a vision centered on questions of difference, identity and the power of seeing and being seen.
If you have any accessibility needs or questions about our access plans for this event, please contact cstrange@eai.org. We can accommodate requests for ASL interpretation up to two weeks prior to October 17. This event will have HEPA filters on-site, provided by Artists in Resistance NYC. Accommodations are supported by NYU Center for Disability Studies.
Richard Serra: A Film and Video Exhibition
Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York
Wednesday, August 21, to Saturday, September 14, 2024
Dia and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) present a survey exhibition of Richard Serra’s films and videos. Between 1968 and 1979, the late artist realized a body of 17 moving-image works, a selection of which will be on view in Dia Chelsea’s talk space from August 21 through September 14, 2024. In conjunction with the presentation, Chrissie Iles will present on Serra's films and videos on Saturday, September 14, 2024, following an introduction by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Dia’s curator and co–department head.
All of Serra’s films and videos are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and distributed by EAI. Text courtesy of Dia.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her curated exhibitions include surveys of Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, and Sharon Hayes’s work, as well as four major thematic exhibitions of moving-image art, including Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 (2001) and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 (2016). She has co-curated the 2004, 2006, and 2024 Whitney Biennials. Iles builds the Whitney’s permanent collection of time-based media and has authored numerous exhibition publications. She lives in New York.
The Movement Program
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
June 25th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
EAI is pleased to present an evening highlighting the use of choreographic strategies in video art. While choreography as a method of sequencing movement for storytelling or affect is typically invoked in relation to dance, the application here broadens to consider a wide range of video art strategies, including the site gag, televisual editing techniques, and the associative organization of text and image. The program includes works by Burt Barr, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Alex Hubbard, Cynthia Maughan, Alix Pearlstein, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Stuart Sherman—a vibrant group of artists whose practices encompass dance, performance, sculpture, and digital animation.
Using their video cameras and editing techniques, the artists in this screening determine the structure of their work according to the recording apparatus itself, complicating the conventions of straightforward performance documentation. Viewed together, the works in this program represent the choreography of movement, character, and the framed scene as facilitated by video and digital technology, compiling the gestures of everyday life into a catalogue of kinetic experimentation.
Maughan’s Calcium Pills (1978) is a direct performance for the artist’s U-Matic camera whose framing reflects her dual role as camera operator and subject. In Barr’s The Elevator (1985), the fictive musings of two women, choreographers Trisha Brown and Wendy Perron, are moulded into a fragmented narrative through the repetitive use of a snap zoom timed with the open and close of elevator doors. Sherman’s Video Walk (1987) animates a pair of sneakers appearing to walk across shifting landscapes on a CRT screen to make a visual pun of the transportive qualities of broadcast television, while Pearlstein’s Pet, Fluffy, Cheezy, Bunny… (1993) strings together a dreamlike selection of public domain images, videos, and sound to reflect the artist’s associative thought patterns. Dodge and Kahn’s Whacker (2005) uses cleverly-timed cuts to comedically portray the durational feat of a woman mowing a tall hill of dead grass in a sundress and high heels, and in Cinepolis (2007), Hubbard composes a dynamic scene as he eviscerates five Mylar balloons atop a projector screen-turned-canvas—reminiscent of Modernist experiments in kinetic sculpture making use of household and found objects. A rich digital animation created in collaboration with the artist’s mother, Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire 3: The Immaculate Conception of Doubting Thomas (2012) concludes the program with an explicit depiction of dance in which the use of on-screen text and computer-generated performers and environment expand the “subject” of choreography beyond the biological human body.
This event is programmed by Charlotte Strange, EAI's Public Engagement and Development Associate, as a part of an invitation to EAI staff to organize public screenings drawn from the collection. An open Q&A will follow the screening.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
If you are feeling sick or experiencing symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.
EAI x International Objects: An Evening with Jake Brush
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
Friday, May 24, 2024
7:00 pm ET
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix and International Objects are pleased to present an evening with Jake Brush, whose dynamic practice stretches popular culture tropes to their most absurd. Brush has chosen videos from the EAI collection by Alex Bag, Michael Bell-Smith, and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch to screen alongside his work.
A former student of Bell-Smith, Brush sutures together the dizzying syntax of reality television, internet slang, drag sensibilities, and hometown lore to poke fun (and horror) at the dopamine-crazed tendencies of contemporary culture. In Petpourri (2023), Brush performs as a “genetic clone” of Marc Morrone, host of the titular Long Island public access show in which the local pet store owner advised live callers on animal rearing, simultaneously attempting to keep the peace between an assortment of domesticated animals. Laundry Detergent (Cheers!) (2023) stages a Real Housewives-esque interaction between three nouveau riche laundry detergent heiresses, each sporting a haphazardly pinned blonde wig and makeup smeared across their drooping synthetic skin. The video encompasses core facets of American reality TV: Egregious wealth, familial trauma and alcoholism, tactical self-mythologizing, bitter interpersonal conflict, and fleeting moments of human connection. Like much of Brush’s other work, both pieces draw from the artist’s childhood on Long Island, re-staging contemporary tragedies and family gossip in a setting where curious engagement precedes moral judgement.
There will be a Q&A with Bell-Smith and Brush following the program.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
Atlas Variations: The Moving Image Works of Charles Atlas at Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave,
New York, NY 10003
May 8th-June 27th, 2024
Buy tickets on Anthology's website.
Anthology Film Archives and EAI are thrilled to co-present a major survey of the moving-image work of Charles Atlas, an indelible figure in EAI’s collection. An exceptionally prolific, protean, and inventive artist, Atlas has collaborated for over fifty years with an extraordinary array of choreographers, dancers, musicians, actors, and performance artists, and has himself occupied a crucial role at the intersection of the worlds of art, film, video, performance, dance, and installation. Atlas has worked as a chronicler, collaborator, and creator within the nightlife and performance scenes of New York since the 1970s, documenting historic venues such as The Pyramid Club, and prominent figures including DANCENOISE, Happy Phace, and Lady Miss Kier. A foundational innovator of the video-dance genre, the artist's work is animated by inventive pastiches of narrative and fictional modes playfully merged with performance documentary. Typified by a provocative, postmodern performance sensibility and an ironic urban insouciance, Atlas' works transform performances into vivid time capsules of contemporary culture.
Complementing a partial retrospective of Atlas’ collaborations with Merce Cunningham held at Anthology in 2019, the 10-program series will highlight Atlas’ other collaborations and solo work, paring some of his best-known videos, such as The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002), Hail the New Puritan (1985-86), and Superhoney (1994), with more rarely-screened pieces, including the “Martha” Tapes (1997-99), early films Mayonnaise #1 (1973), and Nevada (1974), his ad campaign for Calvin Klein (2015), and his stereoscopic film Tesseract 3D (2017). Atlas will appear in-person for the program.
The Last Time I Saw Ron: A Tribute to Ron Vawter
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
April 16th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix is pleased to present an evening honoring the legacy of Ron Vawter, a leading presence in downtown theater, film, and video from the mid-1970s until his premature death from AIDS-related causes in 1994. Although devoted to theater, Vawter made work with many of the leading film- and video-makers of the 1980s and 90s throughout his career. Held on the 30th anniversary of his passing, the program will highlight Vawter’s collaborations with artists in video, featuring works by Joan Jonas, Ken Kobland, Leslie Thornton, and The Wooster Group. A discussion with Ken Kobland and Leslie Thornton will follow the program.
Born to a Green Beret father and WAVE mother in the years following World War II, Vawter was given a “gift” of enlistment papers for his 17th birthday. Incredibly, Vawter’s induction into the Green Beret Special Forces would steer him toward avant-garde performance. While stationed as a recruiting officer at Centre Street in New York City, Vawter became involved with Richard Schechner’s downtown theater troupe The Performance Group, from which The Wooster Group emerged in 1975. A founding member of The Wooster Group, Vawter, together with director Elizabeth LeCompte, and performers Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, and Kate Valk, would participate in some of the most indelible pieces in the legendary experimental theater group’s repertoire. Vawter also performed in stagings by Richard Foreman, Mabou Mines, and Jeff Weiss.
Although devoted to theater, Vawter collaborated with many of the leading film and video-makers of the 1980s and ‘90s, including Shu Lea Cheang, Lizzie Borden, and Jonathan Demme. Together, the works in this program convey Vawter’s distinctive and multifaceted career towards the end of his life, a pivotal moment of experimentation in video and performance, non-commercial art making, and AIDS activism—all strands of Vawter’s prodigious legacy. Famously photogenic, Vawter’s iconic visage and versatile charm shine across a range of roles: from a flamboyant hermit in Ken Kobland and The Wooster Group’s Flaubert Dreams of Travel But The Illness of His Mother Prevents It (1986), to a dream interpreter in Joan Jonas’ Volcano Saga (1989), to oppositional cultural figures Roy Cohn and Jack Smith, captured backstage in Ken Kobland’s End Credits (1994) for Jill Godmilow’s film version of Vawter’s legendary dual performance. Thornton’s The Last Time I Saw Ron (1994) creates a moving elegy to the artist’s memory, employing footage taken of Vawter shortly before his death.
This screening accompanies a weekend tribute to Vawter at Anthology Film Archives from April 19-21, featuring the stage and screen versions of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, and Free Fall (1994), a documentary portrait of Vawter shot during one of his performances of this work. From April 19-26, Le Cinéma Club will stream Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Made in Hollywood (1989), in which Vawter stars opposite Patricia Arquette. An online, closed-captioned version of EAI's program will be accessible for a limited time in May.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
Messages From the Avant-Garde: EAI x Collaborative Cataloging Japan
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
April 4th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
EAI and Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ) are thrilled to present a selection of video and film highlighting the exchange of avant-garde experimentation in New York and Japan during the 1960s and 70s. The screening is organized in anticipation of the forthcoming exhibition Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s, on view at Philadelphia Art Alliance of the University of the Arts June 14-August 9. The program will be introduced by Ann Adachi-Tasch, Executive Director of Collaborative Cataloging Japan. RSVP here.
Jud Yalkut’s moving image account of the 4th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, held in Central Park in 1966, accompanies works by Japanese artists Masanori Ōe and Akiko Iimura, underscoring shared engagement with intermedia innovation, psychedelia, and ongoing political upheaval occurring simultaneously in the United States and Japan. Both Yalkut’s film-video and Ōe’s Head Game (1967) use their own experimental practices to document countercultural events in Central Park, framing the realignment of humanity’s relationship with nature and the senses as fundamental to forming a new, harmonious social order. In Yalkut’s piece, shot on film and edited on video, artists and their families take over the park with performance and installation, and in Head Game, participants stage “The Great Be-In” in protest of the Vietnam war. Engagement with then-burgeoning media technology, generating vivid new sounds and images, serves a double purpose in resisting war, social conformism, governmental authoritarianism, and the top-down media practices in mainstream journalism reifying these realities.
Akiko Imura, an active participant in the New York underground scene, and the partner of Takahiko Iimura, also layers experimental imagery over a natural setting in Mon Petit Album (1974), folding sprawling, overlapped film footage of a pastoral scene under an original soundtrack by Jacques Bekaert combining flute and violin phrasings atop subtly processed sounds. Iimura herself drifts in and out of the frame, making direct eye contact with the camera while embedded in the landscape—a powerful act asserting autonomy over her own image as a woman. Iimura, Ōe, and Yalkut’s technological, visual, and aural experimentation opens sideways realities at once distinctly subjective and grounded in the universe outside the image.
Through engagement with their respective avant-garde scenes in Japan and New York, Iimura, Ōe, and Yalkut share many points of contact—artists like Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, and Alvin and Mary Lucier, and collectives like USCO (Us Company or the Company of Us), Newsreel, and Third World Studios. These artists, their peers, and the interplay between their aesthetic and political inquiries paint a picture of an international avant-garde far more vast than Western art history’s commentary on the U.S. and Europe, with invaluable exchange between New York and Japan.
Collaborative Cataloging Japan is an international non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of Japanese experimental moving image produced from the 1950s through 1980s, including fine art on film and video, documentations of performance, independently produced documentaries, experimental animation and experimental television. The mission of CCJ is to preserve, document and disseminate these works, and enable their appreciation by a wider audience.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.
Making Your Life a Little Easier: Recent Works in Distribution
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
February 29th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present a selection of works recently added to our distribution catalogue. The evening takes its title from one of Cory Arcangel’s Runners series videos: a screen recording of a live bot performance on Walmart’s Instagram feed, in which the bot systematically “likes” every post, undermining the genuineness of Walmart’s slogan, and the supposed engagement with its customers. Videos in this screening share an emphasis on human care, curiosity, and idiosyncrasy as artists utilize evolving tools and platforms to witness the multidirectional links between technology, labor, and interpersonal relationships.
In this array of short videos, artists contend with the larger topics of AI, “essential” work, labor economies, and the false naturalization of technological progress. Two videos from Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy’s @ Work series (2022), now installed as a mural at the Electrical Industry Training Center in Long Island City, will bookend the evening. Following an expanded definition of “essential worker,” Beloff and Muzzy conducted interviews throughout New York City reflecting on cultural economies of labor and the diverse, often overlooked, skillsets involved in her interviewee’s vocations. Sondra Perry’s phantom. menace. (2023) uses AI DALL-E animation software to play out a speculative interaction based on a version of Perry’s Newark studio, formerly a barbershop. Kit Fitzgerald’s Romance (1986) comprises vibrant, computer-generated video paintings live-edited and set to original music by Peter Gordon. Cory Arcangel’s Transitions (2007), A Couple Thousand Short Films about Glenn Gould (2007), and Making Your Life a Little Easier (2020) make use of popular digital-age forms such as the stock video transition, social media feed, and self-directed YouTube performances to contextualize the relationships between these tools, their users and audiences, and technological development at large. Finally, Kristin Lucas’ Inforeceptor (1994), shot on Hi-8 and Super-8, provides a playful yet ominous anticipation of the then-cresting World Wide Web.
Following the program, there will be an informal chat with artists Kit Fitzgerald, Zoe Beloff, and Michael Britto. An online, closed-captioned version of this program will be accessible for a limited time in March.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.
Image: Sondra Perry, phantom. menace. (2023). A warped, AI-generated closeup of two Black men shaking hands, shrouded in green light against an abstract blue background.
Kristin Lucas: Primordial Soup of the Day
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
December 14, 2023
7:30 pm ET
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is thrilled to present a special evening with Kristin Lucas, an artist whose wide-ranging experiments with video, computer-generated imagery, technology history, and interactivity utilize playful, open-ended inquiry to examine the impacts of technological progress on Earth’s life forms and ecologies.
Springing from Lucas’ decades-long engagement with networked technology, the evening will begin with a screening of Inforeceptor (1994)—a lighthearted yet ominous anticipation of the cresting World Wide Web shot on Hi-8 and Super-8, recently restored by the artist. A live performance will follow the screening, integrating display equipment from different eras to echo the evolution of life on our planet. Lucas will transform EAI’s office with video and augmented reality evoking the underwater home of a distant ancestor, a fish called the alligator gar, often referred to as a “living fossil” due to its morphological resemblance to ancestors dating back 100 million years. Alongside a live biodata soundtrack generated from the electrical signals of nearby plants, Lucas will narrate her research into the evolution of humans from fish, and her ongoing project of underwater breathing.
Lucas explores connectivity as an interpersonal process and a condition of the digital age that is as technological, electrical, and cybernetic as it is familial, ancestral, and ecological. She writes: “Amidst the challenges of global warming, glacial melting, and the climate trends signaling the sixth mass extinction, I have embarked on a quest to reconnect with family and train for breathing underwater. Through the wonders of genomic mapping and internet research, I came to a surprising revelation: my distant cousin, a resilient lizard-like tetrapod who survived the previous extinction event, resides in Texas! Inspired by investigative TV series, I have slithered into the primordial soup, journeying sideways through the depths of time, literature, science writing, freshwater pools, and text messaging with family.”
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Kristin Lucas is a multidisciplinary artist working in video, installation, live, networked, and hybrid media art forms. In works that gain their currency within the context of public and private systems, Lucas responds to the uncanny overlaps of virtual and lived realities, and to the fast-changing mediascape that reconfigures perception and identity. Lucas has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Engadget, and Hyperallergic. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Artists Space, FACT Liverpool, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Harvestworks, Haus der Kunst, HeK Basel, ICA Philadelphia, Nam June Paik Art Center, Pioneer Works, OK Center for Contemporary Art, MoMA, New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and ZKM; and at festivals including BAM Teknopolis, Cinekid, EarthxFilm, Impakt, ISEA, Okeechobee Music & Arts, Print Screen, TIFF, Transmediale, World Wide Video, and WSJ Future of Everything. She earned degrees in art from Cooper Union and Stanford University and is faculty of Studio Art at University of Texas at Austin.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
If you are experiencing symptoms that could be related to COVID-19 or other contagious infections, we ask that you please stay home. These may include: cough, sore throat, headache, chills, fever, or shortness of breath.
Ilana Harris-Babou Artist Talk and Screening
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
Thursday, November 9, 2023
7:00 pm ET
EAI is thrilled to host an evening with Ilana Harris-Babou, whose moving image works accompany a broader multimedia practice including sculpture and installation. Activating playful demeanor as a tool for investigation and critique, Harris-Babou uncovers paradoxes latent in mainstream media: claims to authenticity figured around the fetishization of pre-colonial, non-white culture, the exploitation of gender stereotypes, and the commodification of “wellness.” Rather than attempt to resolve these contradictions, Harris-Babou makes fun with them—and in so doing, exposes imagination and fantasy themselves as powerful media languages.
Harris-Babou’s videos repurpose the genres of home improvement television, self-help vlogs, and youtube-style tutorials. Frequently featuring her mother as a main character, the artist approaches her topics of interest from a personal vantage—for example, addressing reparations for Black Americans from the perspective of home renovation, and the role played by “repair” in commercial American furniture design. The screening will include Cooking with the Erotic (2016), Reparation Hardware (2018), and Decision Fatigue (2020), tracking Harris-Babou's evolving inquiries into the machinations of aspirational culture and the notions of expertise it upholds.
Following the screening, Harris-Babou will be joined in conversation by Wendy Vogel to discuss shared themes in their practices, followed by audience Q&A.
The event celebrates the distribution of Harris-Babou’s work, added to the EAI catalogue this fall. Harris-Babou also has solo shows this month at Storefront for Art and Architecture and Candice Madey.
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
Masks are strongly encouraged. If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.
(Mis)Reading the Image: Selections by Darrin Martin
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
Tuesday, April 18 to Friday, April 28
This online selection of videos by Darrin Martin stems from the artist’s research seeking disability representation in EAI’s collection—both intentional and unintentional. The titles span early conceptual video to contemporary performance, engaging themes of perceptual difference, semiotic play, and embodiment, and present an array of strategies for access. In Shape of a Right Statement, Wu Tsang re-performs text by the late disability rights activist Mel Baggs. Phyllis Baldino’s Absence is Present: MayJuneJuly and Absence is Present: Dead Nature in the Dark overlay handheld footage with a fuzzy, floating orb meant to represent a blindspot experienced by the artist following open heart surgery. Lawrence Andrews’ Birthday and Anal Denial explore the titular prompts through simultaneous on-screen text and spoken monologue. In John Baldessari’s The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson, the artist dissects the semiotics of news media while prompting his interlocutor to verbally describe isolated newspaper clippings. Cecilia Vicuña’s Fire Over Water hauntingly addresses industrial climate disaster through a poetic rendering of the artist’s experience watching Gasland 2. Finally, Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 6 problematizes the incomplete promise of wellness culture to make its subjects feel whole. The videos are closed captioned. Baldessari and Moulton’s works are presented with open captions in a window-boxed format to minimize interference with the image. Baldino’s works are included with and without audio descriptions, which were written by EAI staff in collaboration with the artist. Available through April 28.
Watch here.
Full Disclosure: Selected Video-Performances 1972-75
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
Thursday, April 20 to Monday, April 31st, 2023
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) hosts an online streaming program of a selection of Anthony Ramos’s video-performances circa 1972-1975, a fertile period for the artist then based in Los Angeles. Ramos’s interest in time and duration stems in part from his long friendship with Allan Kaprow, with whom he studied and worked under as a teaching assistant, and who housed him following his imprisonment for conscientious objection. Ramos met Kaprow while a student at the Southern Illinois University and participated in a handful of the artist’s iconic “happenings,” including the ambitious 1967 event Fluids,, which involved the construction of several intricate igloos across Pasadena. He was later part of a coterie of West coast figures inspired by Kaprow to mount their own interventions—Ramos often staged prankish, ephemeral art events with fellow artists Joe Ray and Lowell Darling, who appear in the two plastic bag videos. A key theme for Ramos is tension and discomfort: his fatigue during Balloon Nose Blow-Up (1972), the terror of confinement in Plastic Bag Tie-Up (1972) and Water Plastic Bag (1973), and the gluttony and racial stereotype in Watermelon Heaven (1972). His own body often becomes a vector in the work: his use of body paint in State of the Union (1973), the mannequin appendages and nudity in Identity (1973), and the experiment in race-bending made in conjunction with his then-wife Ann Ramos in the two-channel installation Black and White (1975). Available through April 31.
Watch here.
Part of Nor Was This All By Any Means: A Career-Spanning Series with Anthony Ramos
Nor Was This All By Any Means: A Career-Spanning Series with Anthony Ramos
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), DCTV, the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, and online
264 Canal Street #3W
Thursday, April 20th, 2023 to Friday, April 28th, 2023
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is thrilled to present a series of events spotlighting the extraordinary career of Anthony Ramos, among the earliest artists to use video as a tool for mass media critiques and cultural documentation, and to examine media presentations of “truth.” A significant but underrecognized figure in both East and West coast art scenes—he had been a close student of Allan Kaprow at CalArts and a peer of important video figures such as Nam June Paik and Juan Downey—Ramos produced a varied body of work, ranging from deliberately confrontational direct-camera performance to provocative essayistic compositions using appropriated material as a satirical counterpoint. Common themes for Ramos are incisive critiques of American nationalism, racial media representations, and oppressive power dynamics.
Full Disclosure: Selected Video-Performances 1972-75
Thursday, April 20 to Friday, April 28
Online showcase of early video works
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
Free
About Media (1977) and Decent Men (1977/2013)
Friday, April 21, 7:00 pm
Followed by a Q&A with Ramos and Jake Perlin
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St,
New York, NY 10013
$16 / $8 DCTV members
Tickets here
Nor Was This All by Any Means:
A Career-Spanning Conversation with Anthony Ramos
Saturday, April 22, 2:00 pm (selected works on view), 3:00 pm (conversation)
with Ramos and Catherine Quan Damman
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
Free
RSVP here
Mao Meets Muddy (1989)
Tuesday, April 25, 6:30 pm
with Ramos and Bentley Brown
Co-hosted by The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture
The Feldstein Immersion Room, Bobst Library at NYU
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
Free with RSVP (non-NYU must email ss162@nyu.edu)
In 1967, Ramos served an eighteen-month prison sentence for his refusal to register for the Vietnam War draft, an act of conscientious objection with far-reaching resonance throughout the art that followed. On the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s 1977 declaration of amnesty for so-called “draft dodgers,” Ramos produced two major works drawing from his personal experience and the glib disconnect of political showboating. About Media (1977) documents, and deconstructs, Ramos's aired television interview by New York news reporter Gabe Pressman, revealing the construction of mainstream media's slick, obscuring veneer. Decent Men (1977/2013) is built around Ramos's powerful recounting of his prison stay, intercut with vintage cartoons that feature grotesque racial stereotypes alluding to America's long history of racial disenfranchisement through aggressive carceral strategies. Ramos began the work in 1977, but left it unfinished for nearly four decades, until he returned to EAI to finish the work in 2013.
Upon his release from prison, Ramos was invited by Kaprow to join CalArts’s inaugural class, where he produced a series of indelible performance tapes, including collaborations with Joe Ray and Lowell Darling. In one tape, Plastic Bag Tie-Up (1972), Ramos and Darling sealed themselves, blindfolded and bound, in clear body-sized bags; the video’s excruciating duration records their struggle to escape. One of the most unique aspects of Ramos’s career is its global scope, capturing significant instances of political struggle and social change across the world. He has traveled widely in Europe, Africa, China and the Middle East, and helped direct the video programming at the American Center in Paris, where he oversaw the television cabling of ten blocks of the city for the first time. He videotaped the end of Portugal's colonial rule of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, and Tehran during the 1980 hostage crisis. He completed a number of experimental travelogs, including Nor Was This All By Any Means (1978), a densely-layered collage shot in Gorée, Cape Verde, and Tanzania, and Mao Meets Muddy (1989), documenting his travels to Beijing with painter Frederick Brown in 1988, just before Tiananmen Square.
In the late 1980s, Ramos turned to painting as his primary medium, and has since produced a staggering output of vibrantly colored compositions, drawing from techniques of dot-painting and patterning, often produced on canvases constructed by the artist himself. Most recently, in the aftermath of the high-profile killings of Black citizens by law enforcement, among them George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Ramos’s paintings have once-again taken up his unabashed portrayal of America’s insidious racism. Ramos considers his contemporary work to be a two-dimensional extension of his videos’ cultural and political concerns.
Mao Meets Muddy
The Feldstein Immersion Room, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
Tuesday, April 25, 6:30 pm
Free with RSVP. (Non-NYU must email ss162@nyu.edu)
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture co-present this screening of Anthony Ramos’s Mao Meets Muddy (1989), considered by the artist to be his final video before shifting his emphasis to painting. In this rarely-screened video, Ramos captures a trip to Beijing made with his close friend and collaborator, painter Frederick J. Brown, who was mounting a retrospective of his work at the National Museum of China in 1988—considered to be the first solo exhibition of a Western artist in China post-Cultural Revolution. Throughout the footage, Ramos reflects on Sino-American relations, and documents cultural collisions including his and Brown’s interactions with local children and a Chinese man breakdancing in front of Brown’s portrait of Bessie Smith. Any air of jubilant possibility is undercut by the video’s setting of Tiananmen Square; in a postlude, Ramos videotapes himself tuning into the media coverage of the 1989 massacre the following year.
Ramos will be joined by artist and curator Bentley Brown, son of Frederick J. Brown, for a discussion on this video and Ramos and Frederick Brown’s long-standing collaboration. Ramos began documenting the painter’s process in the mid-’70s with Portrait of an Artist (1975), showing Brown in his 120 Wooster Street studio loft set to music by Anthony Braxton. Ramos was a part of a revolving cast of artists, poets, and musicians involved in Brown’s space, which regularly hosted gatherings and performances. Ramos continued to tape the painter’s practice even after his official retirement as a “video artist,” capturing the loft’s final performance in 1991 by Felipe Luciano, and Brown’s post-New York studio in Arizona.
Part of Nor Was This All By Any Means: A Career-Spanning Series with Anthony Ramos
Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, doctoral candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and adjunct professor of Art History at Fordham University. Based in the Bronx, NY and Phoenix, AZ, Brown's research at the Institute of Fine Arts explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. In his artistic practice, inspired by African American cultural production, abstract and figurative expressionist approaches to the artistic process and the desert landscape of his native Phoenix, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage and film to to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.
Nor Was This All by Any Means: A Career-Spanning Conversation with Anthony Ramos
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
Saturday, April 22, 2:00 pm (selected works on view), 3:00 pm (conversation)
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to host a career-spanning conversation between Ramos and scholar Catherine Quan Damman, touching upon Ramos’s varied activities as an artist. Ramos is counted among the earliest artists to use video as a tool for mass media critiques and cultural documentation, and to examine media presentations of “truth.” A significant but underrecognized figure in both East and West coast art scenes—he had been a close student of Allan Kaprow at CalArts and a friend and peer of important video figures such as Nam June Paik and Juan Downey—Ramos produced a varied body of work, ranging from deliberately confrontational direct-camera performance to provocative essayistic compositions using appropriated material as a satirical counterpoint. Selected video-performances will be on display from 2:00 to 3:00 pm, followed by a screening of Ramos’s Nor Was This All By Any Means, a densely-layered work exploring personal and cultural heritage, capturing disparate landscapes from Harlem to Goree Island, Cape Verde and Tanzania.
Part of Nor Was This All By Any Means: A Career-Spanning Series with Anthony Ramos
Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she teaches and advises graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. She is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, with the support of a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship, and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications.
Nor Was This All by Any Means: A Career-Spanning Conversation with Anthony Ramos
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
Saturday, April 22, 2:00 pm (selected works on view), 3:00 pm (conversation)
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to host a career-spanning conversation between Ramos and scholar Catherine Quan Damman, touching upon Ramos’s varied activities as an artist. Ramos is counted among the earliest artists to use video as a tool for mass media critiques and cultural documentation, and to examine media presentations of “truth.” A significant but underrecognized figure in both East and West coast art scenes—he had been a close student of Allan Kaprow at CalArts and a friend and peer of important video figures such as Nam June Paik and Juan Downey—Ramos produced a varied body of work, ranging from deliberately confrontational direct-camera performance to provocative essayistic compositions using appropriated material as a satirical counterpoint. Selected video-performances will be on display from 2:00 to 3:00 pm, followed by a screening of Ramos’s Nor Was This All By Any Means, a densely-layered work exploring personal and cultural heritage, capturing disparate landscapes from Harlem to Goree Island, Cape Verde and Tanzania.
Part of Nor Was This All By Any Means: A Career-Spanning Series with Anthony Ramos
Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she teaches and advises graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. She is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, with the support of a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship, and is a frequent contributor to Artforum and other publications.
About Media (1977) and Decent Men (1977/2013)
DCTV
87 Lafayette St,
New York, NY 10013
Friday, April 21, 7:00 pm
Tickets available here. $16 / $8 DCTV members
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and DCTV co-present a special evening with Anthony Ramos, a significant but under recognized figure in video art history, who has produced a varied body of work ranging from confrontational direct-camera performance to provocative essayistic compositions using appropriated material as a satirical counterpoint. In these two interrelated videos, Ramos stages powerful mass media critiques to examine media representations of “truth.”
In 1967, Ramos served an eighteen-month prison sentence for his refusal to register for the Vietnam War draft, an act of conscientious objection with far-reaching resonance throughout the art that followed. On the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s 1977 declaration of amnesty for so-called “draft dodgers,” Ramos produced two major works drawing from his personal experience and the glib disconnect of political showboating. About Media (1977) documents, and deconstructs, Ramos's aired television interview by New York news reporter Gabe Pressman, revealing the construction of mainstream media's slick, obscuring veneer. Decent Men (1977/2013) is built around Ramos's powerful recounting of his prison stay, intercut with vintage cartoons that feature grotesque racial stereotypes alluding to America's long history of racial disenfranchisement through aggressive carceral strategies. Ramos began the work in 1977, but left it unfinished for nearly four decades, until he returned to EAI to finish his edit in 2013.
Part of Nor Was This All By Any Means: A Career-Spanning Series with Anthony Ramos
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions. In September 2022, DCTV opened a documentary cinema where filmmakers and film lovers can come together in appreciation of nonfiction film. Housed in DCTV's beloved landmarked building in Chinatown, New York City, Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film will feature first run, curated, repertory, masterclasses, family programs and more.
Jake Perlin is a film programmer, distributor (Film Desk) and book publisher (Film Desk Books). He is the Creative Director of Cinema Conservancy, a New York based non-profit which supports production and preservation, and serves as Archivist and Curator for the St. Clair Bourne/Bourne Family collection.
Jean Dupuy and DeeDee Halleck's Self Portrait
Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway #2
New York, NY 10012
Friday, April 7th to Sunday, April 9th, 2023
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and the Emily Harvey Foundation are pleased to present a weekend-long engagement celebrating the life and work of Jean Dupuy (1925-2021), a trailblazing figure in art and technology and a fundamental node connecting the fields of conceptual, performance, and video art in 1970s downtown New York.
Friday, April 7th
7 pm
Screening of DeeDee Halleck and Jean Dupuy's Self Portait, followed by conversation with Halleck, Barbara Moore, and Carlota Schoolman
RSVP here.
Saturday, April 8th to Sunday, April 9th
1 pm to 6 pm
Selected works by Dupuy on view
On the evening of Friday, April 7th, DeeDee Halleck will present a recent transfer of her and Dupuy’s Self Portrait (1974), which captures the duo making art and cooking tarts at his loft and studio at 405 East 13th Street. Following the screening, Halleck, Barbara Moore, and Carlota Schoolman will reflect on the artist’s activities and impact. On Saturday and Sunday, April 8 to 9 from 1 pm to 6 pm, a selection of Dupuy’s drawings, collages, and sculptural interventions either featured in the film or made around the same time as Self Portrait will be on display.
Originally trained as a painter in Paris, Dupuy disavowed his earliest medium by throwing his artworks into the Seine, and soon immersed himself in the city’s growing performance and sound poetry scenes, eventually relocating to New York in 1967. Within a year, the artist generated significant attention for his sculpture Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust), a glass box outfitted with a stethoscope that vibrated a cloud of red particles to the rhythm of a viewer’s heartbeat. The piece won a competition held by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) directed by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, and was soon featured in the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age organized by Pontus Hultén at the Museum of Modern Art. Dupuy joined the Sonnabend Gallery, with whom he exhibited widely until his departure from the gallery in 1973.
From 1973 to 1979, Dupuy was a prolific organizer of group shows and collective happenings, engaging many of the key performers, musicians, and conceptual artists of the era with events organized at his loft, the Whitney Museum, the Kitchen and the Judson Church. Among these are the storied Soup and Tart (1974), a multimedia dinner party pairing home-cooked soup, bread, apple tarts and wine with two-minute performances by Yvonne Rainer, Charles Atlas, Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joan Jonas, Hannah Wilke, and many others; his video performances Chant A Capella (1977, with Davidson Gigliotti) and Artists Propaganda (1978, with Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn); and hosting a wedding and Fluxus cabaret celebrating the marriage of George Maciunas and Billie Hutching (1978). From 1976 to 1979, Dupuy presented many performance concerts at his Grommet Studio, ran in one of Maciunas’s artist co-ops in the loft that is now known as the Emily Harvey Foundation.
In the early ‘80s, Dupuy relocated to Pierrefeu, a commune in southeastern France. He again shifted his focus to anagram and wordplay-based art, publishing over twenty books on the subject and exhibiting across Europe and the United States until his death in April 2021.
DeeDee Halleck is a media activist, founder of Paper Tiger Television and co-founder of the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. She founded the television version of Democracy Now!, the first truly alternative daily newscast. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego. Her first film, Children Make Movies (1961), was about a film-making project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. Her documentary, Mural on Our Street was nominated for an Academy Award in 1965. She founded film workshops at Otisville School for Boys in 1968, a NY State Division for Youth Facility. She has served as a trustee of the American Film Institute, Women Make Movies and the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation. Her book, Hand Held Visions is published by Fordham University Press. She co-edited Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (M.E. Sharpe) and has written essays for a number of collections of independent media. Halleck has collaborated with many artists: she was cinematographer and editor for Richard Serra’s Railroad Turnbridge, edited Nancy Holt’s Pine Barrens and Sun Tunnels, and was a principal member of Shirley Clarke’s Tee Pee Video Space Troupe for two years. She has worked with others including Joan Jonas, Jean Dupuy, David Tudor, Liza Béar, David Behrman, Roberta Neiman, the Videofreex, Mary Frank, Reverend Billy, Morag Benepe, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and more.
Barbara Moore is an independent scholar of late 20th-century avant-garde art such as artists’ books and performance. She was the first editor at Dick Higgins’s legendary Something Else Press, became a rare book dealer specializing in printed manifestations of alternative mediums, and has written and lectured extensively on these subjects. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ’80s she simultaneously worked alongside photographer Peter Moore (1932-1993), in creating an archive containing several hundred thousand of his images plus related documents chronicling the development of what came to be known as Performance Art, including Fluxus, Happenings, Judson Dance Theater, multimedia, and intermedia. She is currently writing a memoir and visual history of performance in the 1960s and ‘70s as experienced in the Moores’ joint discovery of these seminal events.
Carlota Schoolman became interested in producing video made by artists in 1970. She began inviting artists to make videotapes and created Fifi Corday Productions to produce their work and screen it on the newly established public-access cable stations in NYC. She also worked with Experiments in Art and Technology, organizing their public-access cable broadcast of artist video and films. After producing and exhibiting work by Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Richard Landry, Richard Serra and many others, she joined the staff of The Kitchen. As Video Curator and TV Producer (1974-86), she produced exhibitions, screenings and performances. Works for television included Revolve by Nancy Holt (1977), broadcast on WNET Channel 13; Perfect Lives, an opera for television by Robert Ashley (1983), premiered on Great Britain’s Channel Four; and Two Moon July (1986) by Tom Bowes, broadcast on WNET Channel 13. Along with Mary Griffin she founded Providence Productions International, commissioning, producing and presenting exhibitions and several operas with musicians and artists including Griffin, Leroy Jenkins, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Joe Hannan and others. In 2009, Schoolman had a traumatic brain injury which resulted in aphasia, a communication disorder. After 6 years of speech therapy with the International Aphasia Movement (IAM) she became the President of that organization. IAM offers free speech and language therapy in small group settings to anyone with aphasia, both on Zoom and in-person. For more information, e-mail carlota@iamaphasia.org or visit https://iamaphasia.org.
Maintaining Clarity: Recent Works in Distribution (Online)
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
March 15th to March 30th, 2023
From March 15th through March 30th, explore Maintaining Clarity, an online version of an event showcasing recent works in distribution held at EAI on February 28th, featuring six titles and a conversation between Cecelia Condit, LoVid, Shelly Silver, and C. Spencer Yeh.
Watch here.
In this collection of short works, which takes its name from Ulysses Jenkins's Sobriety, artists contend with technology’s travails and possibilities, exploring how digital devices interact with the corporeal world. Cecelia Condit’s AI and I considers the artist’s relationship to Amazon’s Alexa. Jayson Musson’s Blockedt! pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app, co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. Shelly Silver’s Score for Joanna Kotze, described by the artist as a “dance film that primarily leaves us in the dark,” flickers through photographs of flowers, buildings, and debris, and C. Spencer Yeh’s Three Waves collages close-up video and recordings from the artist’s mouth. LoVid’s Three Moons compiles footage of weeds, wild flora, and friends in and around Long Island taken with a custom-built temporospatial camera, and Wu Tsang’s iPhone-shot Girl Talk captures poet and scholar Fred Moten letting loose to Josiah Wise’s cover of the eponymous 1965 jazz standard.
(Mis)Reading the Image: Selections by Darrin Martin
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
March 30th, 2023
7:00 pm ET
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Image: Still from Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 6, 2006. An incomplete jigsaw puzzle is presented on a green table marbled with black veins. A hand pressing pieces in place is pictured coming in from the side. Enough of the puzzle is complete to reveal a waterfall descending from a cliff that ends in a rainbow and mist into the forest below.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present a screening and discussion lead by artist and educator Darrin Martin, whose video, performance, and print-based installations have considered the synesthetic qualities of perception, and notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies, and audio descriptions.
Beginning in 2010, Martin started to explore EAI’s collection with two goals in mind: to search for disability representation, and in pursuit of experimental video work that considers disability access at its inception—even if it might not have been the impetus for its making. As an extension of this project, Martin has assembled a program of works by six artists whose practices span from early conceptual video to contemporary performance, each uniquely engaging the themes of perceptual difference, semiotic play, and embodiment. This event will feature open captioning and live ASL interpretation. A free, closed-captioned online streaming version of this event will be available in mid-April.
Martin writes: “The works in (Mis)Reading the Image are never what they appear to be at face value and/or have found new perspectives within and against each other in time. Their relationship to language, text, and image is built upon shifts in context whether through the performative work of Wu Tsang embodying the words of a late autism rights activist Mel Baggs, an attempt to audio describe images removed from newspaper clippings in John Baldessari’s The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson, or in the stuttering poetic plea of Cecilia Vicuña’s emotional summary of a film that rings the alarm over specific man-made environmental catastrophes. Woven throughout the program are selections from Phyllis Baldino’s Absence is Present which manifests her experience with a blind spot and two works from Lawrence Andrews’ Selections from the Library, which take the approach of building an image within the viewer using text and sound that resists simple approaches to reification. Finally, Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 6 places the viewer as witness to the trajectory of her alter ego Cynthia’s attempt to find wholeness in a world of image fragmentation and missing pieces.
Darrin Martin creates videos and installations that engage qualities of perception mediated through the lens of both obsolete and new technologies. His latest projects consider ways in which meaning is layered and performative using sonic analogies and audio descriptions. Through collaborations with artist Torsten Zenas Burns, they build speculative fictions around re-imagined educational practices and dystopian cosplay paradigms. Martin is a Professor in the Art and Art History Department at University California, Davis.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
Maintaining Clarity: Recent Works in Distribution
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
February 28th, 2023
7:00 pm ET
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present an eclectic selection of videos ranging from frenetic experiments to raw cell phone footage, musical numbers to satirical riffs on sleek consumer electronics, culled from works recently added to our distribution catalogue. The evening takes its title from Ulysses Jenkins’s Sobriety (2022), a new video and song by his conceptual art band Othervisions about keeping one’s head above water amid tumult.
In this collection of short works, artists contend with technology’s travails and possibilities, exploring how digital devices interact with the corporeal world. Cecelia Condit’s AI and I considers the artist’s relationship to Amazon’s Alexa. Jayson Musson’s Blockedt! pitches a functionless “anti-social social networking” app, co-developed with Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. Shelly Silver’s Score for Joanna Kotze, described by the artist as a “dance film that primarily leaves us in the dark,” flickers through photographs of flowers, buildings, and debris, and C. Spencer Yeh’s Three Waves collages close-up video and recordings from the artist’s mouth. LoVid’s Three Moons compiles footage of weeds, wild flora, and friends in and around Long Island taken with a custom-built temporospatial camera, and Wu Tsang’s iPhone-shot Girl Talk captures poet and scholar Fred Moten letting loose to Josiah Wise’s cover of the eponymous 1965 jazz standard.
Following the program, there will be an informal chat with Cecelia Condit, LoVid, Shelly Silver, and C. Spencer Yeh. An online, closed-captioned version of this program will be accessible for a limited time in March.
Please note that works in this program contain flashing lights and intense visual patterns.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
Frank Heath: Three Works
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
eai.org
December 19th, 2022 to January 4th, 2023
On December 6th, 2022, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented an evening with Frank Heath, whose videos works explore the inner workings of underground infrastructures, communication networks, and other complex systems. This online, closed-captioned version of the event spotlights three works by Heath that examine topics including public payphones, supply-chain logistics, nuclear waste repositories, and home safety. It also features the post-screening conversation moderated by EAI's Tyler Maxin. This program will run from December 15th, 2022 to January 4th, 2023.
Works included:
Frank Heath, The Hollow Coin, 2016
Frank Heath, Last Will and Testament, 2021
Frank Heath, Protect Your Home (Interpret It Well), 2022, featuring music by Ches Smith
