Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.
"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."
–– Linda Mary Montano
Created and commissioned for Little Sun, Fast Forward short film series exploring a sustainable world. For this project over 100 interviews were conducted in five destinations throughout Ethiopia; teachers, brokers, farmers, students, engineers, carpenters, soldiers, merchants, taxi drivers, cashiers, security guards, housewives, managers, nurses, designers, cameramen, accountants, pharmacists, architects, mechanics, technicians, retirees, and more.
A documentary about Holt’s public installation work Dark Star Park in Arlington, Virginia, this video is about the process of developing and building the park. It includes commentary from the architects, contractors, foremen, and engineers who worked on the project, as well as with people who frequent the park. Holt transforms a site of urban blight into an aesthetically stimulating spot that addresses environmental issues.
Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.
A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
Developed in collaboration with and performed by DonChristian Jones.
The footage was filmed by Eiko during the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, FL in November 2017. Eiko edited the footage in Japan during her 2020 Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University. After editing, Eiko realized this is the first media work she created without her body.
Directed by Eiko Otake as a part of The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable.
Against images of an inventor-chemist juggling brightly colored molecules, psychedelic arms passing out pesticides, and nightmarish landscapes that include trapped live subjects, Oursler presents Hopewell, Virginia—a turn-of-the-century boomtown gone bust, and host to a Kepone pesticide manufacturing plant since 1966. Although Kepone’s extreme toxicity was well established by 1964, production grew and employees continued to be exposed to the carcinogen—eventually poisoning the surrounding area and the James River for years to come.
Extractions parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected her, she reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.
Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.
When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does. Filmed inside a car, this tape focuses on observation of natural phenomena, presenting the obverse of the, "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. Does observation change the course of events? Can you believe in things you don't see? In this experiment, the camera occupies a privileged position — showing the woman and what she sees, as well as what she cannot see.
Appealing concurrently in this video essay to various meanings of the term “Subatlantic” — a climatic phase beginning 2,500 years ago, as well as the submerged regions of the Atlantic — Biemann immerses her camera deep in oceanic waters to ponder upon the entanglements of geological time with that of human history.
Bee Film is a collaboration between filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane and composer Beth Custer that explores the life of bees in Hilo, Hawaii and their human caretakers who are working to preserve an endangered species.
The artwork was originally presented as a three-channel film installation including a live score by Beth Custer, with the world premiere at Aurora Picture Show, in Houston, Texas in 2015. Bee Film is available for distribution as a three-channel composite.
Originally part of a larger sculptural installation using prospector's tools, this tape reenacts the search for "Olga," a miner's wife who disappeared on her honeymoon in 1936. As Paul and Marlene Kos call out, "Olga... Olga...", the camera scans the Wyoming wilderness, and their search becomes ritualistic, the repetitive calls building in intensity and breaking down into chanted moans.
This observational documentary presents Venice as a city inundated with tourists as well as periodic bouts of high water. The tourists take pictures, and endure the flooded areas of Piazza San Marcos. On the canals, tourists ride in gondolas while workers collect the garbage, and others deliver building materials. In the fog we approach the Rialto Bridge and then move on towards Saluti. Here a ritual procession is in progress, an event held every year since 1643 when the plague ended.
The 1949 Housing Act, often seen as the beginning of urban renewal, reshaped the landscapes of many American cities. One of the nation’s largest urban renewal projects was the Lincoln Square Title I Project in New York City led by the powerful public official Robert Moses, which created Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts along with Fordham University’s Manhattan Campus and middle- to high-income housing. The area selected for the project was a working-class, predominantly Black neighborhood with a large population of Puerto Ricans.
"Interested in the hidden corners of exoticism and a reinterpretation of history as an aesthetic challenge, Colombian resident in France, Laura Huertas Millán (Bogotá, 1983), presents in Aequador—in her own words—'a parallel present modified by virtual reality, an oneiric allegory, an uchronic dystopia.' With foundations on science fiction—uchronia as a source for an alternative history can actually be seen as a subgenre—, Aequador establishes parallelisms—in a complex and deliberately fragmented way—between the (virtual) relics and ruins of an ideal 3-D architecture embed
The foliage and sprouting of urban greenery becomes the subject of this celebration to all things pollinated. The video explores hidden gardens that lie sequestered amid an array of dwellings inhabited by the not so rich and famous. Felines creep amid the blossoms as human entities enrich the soil with their leaking desires.
Eiko edited this video to illuminate, in fast pace, her solo performance project A Body in Places. The red cloth she often uses in her performance is used as a visual link between different places and communities where Eiko performed.
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
Imagining future Deep Time, Post-extinction, using dark humor to speculate on the defiant vitality of matter to evolve life again. Two billion years from now, the oceans are beyond understanding. A soup of plastics, cloth and string, song and dance, collaborate to find new ways of moving in bleak time. The ghost of an oyster holds memories of what happened. It sings to a scrap of waste that fell to the bottom of the sea, trying to form new life, trying to get a face. With help from Stevie Wonder, undersea karaoke may still be possible.
Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.
Part science movie, part storybook, Bug Girl is an ecological fable. A young girl has lost her cat. While searching for it she accidentally swallows a bee--her journey suddenly transforms into a visual tumble through nature, biology, and consciousness.
This title is only available on Soft Science.
"This movie was collected for four years before being sprayed scattershot over 28 minutes of psychic mayhem. The line between living and dead is a frontier crossed and re-crossed here. The living are dead while the dead are animated, breathing, swimming, giving birth. Consumed by the animal life of the city, the artist undertakes a first person journey, producing diary notes from one of the most skilled lens masters of the new generation. The camera is her company in this duet of death, the instrument that permits her to see the impossible, the unbearable, the invisible."
In this 2001 interview, filmmaker Jem Cohen discusses the origins of his film philosophy, and the circuitous route he has taken in his pursuit of an anti-narrative film practice outside the mainstream. Cohen sheds light on the many influences that have impacted his sentiments towards conventional film, and his desire to eschew both classical avant-garde and theatrical filmmaking in favor of a model rooted in the tradition of the 1940s New York School of street photography. Cohen also locates his aesthetic as being impacted by the 1970s hardcore and DIY scenes he was exposed to as a youth in Washington, DC.
The daily life of the Panará village during the peanut harvest, presented by a young teacher, a woman shaman and the village chief.
Direction and photography: Paturi and Komoi Panará
Editing: Leonardo Sette and Vincent Carelli
Production: Video in the Villages
