73 Suspect Words

Peggy Ahwesh 

2000, 4 min, b&w, sound

73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.

Ad Vice

Tony Cokes

1999, 6:36 min, color, sound

Ad Vice inhabits the realm of the music-video, only to use that form's language against itself in a subtle critique of the interactions of desire and commerce in a capitalist culture.

Analogue Assemblage

Nam June Paik

2000, 2:08 min, color, sound

Drawing from Paik's earliest experiments with video synthesizers, Analogue Assemblage employs current technology to create a multilayered montage that references both the old and the new. An eerie electronic score from 1969 floats over ghostly processed images; the result is a paean to the way the future was.

Involuntary Reception

Kristin Lucas

2000, 16:45 min, color, sound

Involuntary Reception is a multilayered piece that explores the alienation and exile of the self in a media-saturated world. Lucas performs as a young woman with an enormous electro-magnetic pulse field. Her Web project of the same name, which incorporates streaming video, performance and text, can be seen at www.eai.org/involuntary.

Organic Honey's Vertical Roll

Joan Jonas

1973-99, 15 min, b&w, sound

This documentation of a 1972 performance, in which Jonas performs as "Organic Honey," includes many of her signature devices: mirrors, masks, and the use of video for spatial, temporal, and psychological layering. In this prescient work, Jonas relates the theatrical space of her live performance...

Pinchneck

Bruce Nauman

1968, 2 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on video

In several of his films Nauman manipulates his flesh (see Pulling Mouth and Thighing). Here he pinches his neck as well as his cheeks and mouth. Related are a series of contemporaneous infrared photos by Jack Fulton for which Nauman posed, pulling his lips and cheeks into odd distortions.

TV Bed, The Everson Museum of Art

1972, 1:10 min, b&w, sound

Whoa Whoa Studio (for Courbet)

Cheryl Donegan

2000, 3:21 min, color, sound

Whoa Whoa Studio refracts Donegan's earlier performance work through the lens of a studio art practice. The artist subverts the tradition of studio painting by using a computer to make simple line drawings; the computer is then transformed into a canvas through the act of directly marking the monitor.