Temple Time

Ryan Trecartin

2016, 54:32 min, color, sound, HD video

Tender Fictions

Barbara Hammer

1995, 60:27 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video

Hammer’s 1996 documentary Tender Fictions is the second in a trilogy of autobiographical films that includes the iconic Nitrate Kisses and History Lessons. The film was chosen for the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, for which Lisanne Skyler wrote, “[Barbara Hammer’s] struggle becomes symbolic of all those who have rejected the ideals by which they were raised...a moving and provocative look at the role of community in an artist’s life and the role of the artist in her community."

Tension Tape

LoVid

2015, 2:52 min, color, sound, HD video

A thread illuminated with neon video static pushes its way through a white sleeve, linking one arm to another. Commenting on the linkages between technology and the body—literally sewing the two together—Tension Tape can also be seen as making a reference to theories of time and reality, "string theory," and the question of temporal continuity, with the string embodying the chronological sequencing and causal relationship between events and the complicating gaps in its continuum.

Test Patterns

Lynn Hershman Leeson

1979, 10:25 min, color, sound

Test patterns refers to a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active—most recognizable as bright strips of color shown on the TV screen when an image is not playing. In this video, what Hershman Leeson refers to as a “factional docudrama,” a “test pattern...

Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses

Mike Kelley 

1999, 51:18 min, color, silent

Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses documents Kelley's installation of the same name, in which visitors were invited to enter a caged area and interact with sculptural objects and "parental surrogate objects." Kelley creates a theatrical...

Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses and A Dance Incorporating Movements Derived from Experiments by Harry F. Harlow and Choreographed in the Manner of Martha Graham

Mike Kelley

1999, 59:54 min, color, silent

Test Room... is a choreographic work that merges movements related to Martha Graham's mythological dance pieces, gestures derived from monkey behavior observed in Harry Harlow's 1960's experiments, and "cathartic" violent behavior evoking the films of psychologist Albert Bandura's studies of the...

Test Tube

General Idea

1979, 28:15 min, color, sound

Produced by De Appel, Amsterdam, while General Idea was in residence there, Test Tube was conceived as a program for television. Presented under the brand "The Color Bar Lounge," the program is a hybrid of popular television formats, including talk show, soap opera, news magazine, and infomercial.

The Adventures of a Nurse (Parts I and II)

Eleanor Antin 

1976, 65 min, color, sound

Part I: The artist, in the role of a nurse, fantasizes on romantic themes, using a set of foot-high, hand-painted paper dolls as actors. A fantasy within a fantasy. The "Nurse Eleanor" paper doll performs as a surrogate self for Nurse Eleanor Antin and is the much put-upon but brave heroine of a...

The Amarillo News Tapes

Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter.

1980, 27:44 min, color, sound

With the intention of "dissecting" television news, Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter travelled to Amarillo, Texas to serve as artists-in-residence at station KVII-TV. Collaborating with local newsmen, they combined documentary, sociology and parody in this analysis of news gathering,...

The B.C. Corporate Story

Bernadette Corporation 

1996, 7 min, color, sound

This video examines the sorts of propaganda that a corporation might distribute internally to communicate an over-arching mandate or vision to its workers in order to boost morale. Bernadette Corporation slyly turns the notion inside out, yielding a document that at once subverts and expresses the form.