EAI continues our 45th anniversary "Edited at EAI" series with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, will be screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices continue to resonate and find relevance today.

Organized in conjunction with EAI's 45th anniversary, the "Edited at EAI" series highlights a historically significant but less well-known area of EAI's programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists, one of the first such creative workspaces for video in the United States. 

The urgency of the AIDS crisis and issues around the politics of identity and representation were catalysts for a new wave of activist movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive video equipment, artists and activists (in an echo of the late 60s and 70s) again took up video as a political tool, turning to editing facilities like EAI to produce works that challenged the images and narratives of mainstream media with empowered self-representations. In The Feeling of Power (1990), artist, EAI editor, and DIVA TV member Robert Beck documents a 1989 ACT UP protest at Trump Tower and offers a self-reflexive manifesto of this new video activism. Target City Hall (1989), the first tape produced by DIVA TV, documents a massive ACT UP demonstration at New York City Hall and offers a look at the diverse groups of activists within the larger ACT UP movement, including CHER (Commie Homos Engaged in Revolution) and LAPIT (Lesbian Activists Producing Innovative Television). In I Object (1990), House of Color (Robert Garcia, Wellington Love, Idris Mignott, Jeff Nunokawa, Pamela Sneed, Jocelyn Taylor, Julie Tolentino), an ACT UP affinity group made up of queer people of color, forcefully challenge the representation and exclusion of people of color in the media. Tom Kalin builds on the subversive, advertising-influenced work he made with ACT UP affinity group Gran Fury in Nation (1992), which confronts nationalism and the public health crisis of AIDS, and in his later revisiting of the same material, Information Gladly Given... (1995). In No Sell Out (1995) art collective X-PRZ (Doug Anderson, Kenseth Armstead, Tony Cokes, Mark Pierson) critique the commodification of Malcolm X by the media, setting computer-manipulated imagery of Malcolm X against advertising logos, archival footage, and TV imagery.



Program

Robert Beck, The Feeling of Power, 1990, 8:48 min, color, sound

DIVA TV, Target City Hall, 1989, 26:43, color, sound

House of Color, I Object, 1990, 5:25 min, color, sound

Tom Kalin, Information Gladly Given but Safety Requires Unnecessary Conversation, 1995, 1:03 min, color, sound

Tom Kalin, Nation, 1992, 1 min, color, sound

X-PRZ, No Sell Out... or i wnt 2 b th ultimate commodity/ machine (Malcolm X Pt. 2), 1995, 5:37 min, color, sound



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Across five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse alternative histories. More of these artists and works will be featured in subsequent screenings throughout our 45th anniversary year.

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About EAI

Celebrating our 45th anniversary in 2016, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of moving image art. A New York-based international resource for media art and artists, EAI holds a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media artworks, from groundbreaking early video by pioneering figures of the 1960s to new digital projects by today's emerging artists. EAI works closely with artists, museums, schools and other venues worldwide to preserve and provide access to this significant archive. EAI services also include viewing access, educational initiatives, extensive online resources, technical facilities, and public programs such as artists? talks, screenings, and multi-media performances. EAI's Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and features expansive materials on media art's histories and current practices: www.eai.org

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Electronic Arts Intermix
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New York, NY 10011
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info@eai.org

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EAI's Public Programs are supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. EAI also receives program support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.