Adventures of the Avant-Garde

Jaime Davidovich

1981, 10:30 min, color, sound

Davidovich searches in vain for the meaning of "avant garde." The artist travels to Iowa City, where he conducts a series of "man on the street" interviews with artist Michael Smith, painter and critic Walter Robinson, University of Iowa professor of art history W.J. Tomasini, a security guard at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, an art school secretary, and strangers on the street.

ahistory

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

1992, 1 min, color, sound

Europe's enchantment with American consumer culture is depicted, as well-known European architectural landmarks. The Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, and London Bridge are reflected in the glossy surface of a 1960's Cadillac convertible, the ultimate symbol of the "golden age" of American consumerism.

Cable Xcess

Kristin Lucas

1996, 4:48 min, color, sound

Writes Lucas: "Cable Xcess is a public service announcement/infommercial which informs viewers about the consequences of long term exposure to electromagnetic fields. I perform as both spokesperson and case study, transmitting a pirate broadcast through my body (body as satellite), educating...

MTV: Artbreak

Dara Birnbaum 

1987, 30 sec, color, sound

Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television.

Nation

Tom Kalin

1992, 1 min, color, sound

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

No Sell Out... or i wnt 2 b th ultimate commodity/ machine (Malcolm X Pt. 2)

X-PRZ

1995, 5:37 min, color, sound

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 is the serialized signifier that sparks...

Paradigm Shift

Philip Mallory Jones

1992, 1 min, color, sound

This lyrical meditation on the cultures of the African diaspora is a richly visualized collage of sounds and images derived from African cosmology, tracing the long historical struggle to define a trans-cultural African race.

STOP

Robert Buck

1985, 28 min, color, sound

TRANSVOICES: transgressions

Dara Birnbaum

1992, 60 sec, color, sound

Birnbaum swiftly traces the geopolitical history of the U.S and then France, charting their constant reconfigurations across maps rendered malleable through special effects. A densely layered soundtrack guides the viewer through this "anti-terrain," in which boundaries are arbitrary and national identities unstable.