Description

EAI presented a seasonally themed free screening of macabre media digging through the tropes of horror cinema. Although narrative, genre, and lurid popular entertainment may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for artists' media, the grotesque—and specifically its situation within the televisual dimension—has crept into approaches as varied as the diary video, direct-camera performance, film/video hybrid, and datamosh.

By dissecting and reanimating the themes and situations of horror film and television, artists such as Peggy Ahwesh, Michael Smith, Cynthia Maughan, Cecilia Condit, Tony Oursler, and George Kuchar offer a subversive post-mortem on the syntax and politics of the genre while offering a glimpse of the unknown, mysterious, and shocking that lurk at the video signal's outer limits.