Since comets have been recorded, they've augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th Century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.
pulse pharma phantasm is a frame by frame weaving of nine different pharmaceutical television commercials into a pulsating hallucination of worry and relief.
Most of the moving images produced for science, industry, commerce, and medicine are seen only by specialized audiences, and are then discarded soon after they are made. Rumour Of True Things is constructed entirely from such moving image ephemera, including computer games, weapons testing, production lines, monitoring, and marriage agency tapes. Rumour Of True Things is a remarkable anthropological portrait of a technologically-based society obsessed with imaging itself.
Body Prep helps fortify and support the body during any level of activity—low, medium, or high intensity. It compares various alternatives to weightlifting with natural and artificial light sources. Exercise is explored through the change of seasons.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
In Dry Blood (Sagre Seca), various historical moments of political activism in Mexico are superimposed and corroded on the emulsion of expired film. Footage from the International Women's Day in 2017 is coupled with the recording of a powerful speech about the gruesome aftermath of the 2006 civil unrest in San Salvador Atenco.
This found-footage video looks at the demagogic aspirations of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace, concluding with Donald Trump. American history is filled with such characters. In the past, they have all been defeated by stronger democratic forces that refused to acquiesce to authoritarianism. Today the future of this authoritarian urge as represented by Trump and the MAGA movement is uncertain.
This is the new choreography of devotion, via the vlog of southern nightmares. This is the light that never goes out. This is the line describing your mom.
X-Mission explores the logic of the refugee camp as one of the oldest extra-territorial zones. Taking the Palestinian refugee camp as a case in point, the video engages with the different discourses — legal, symbolic, urban, historical — that give meaning to this exceptional space.
Via Jonathan Pryce in elaborate costuming, Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) unwittingly sounded a clear and full-throated argument for the appropriation of so-called intellectual property, for the video remix/rework/quotation, practices and forms that would become ubiquitous on YouTube and its ilk a few short years later.
Filmed directly from the screen of a smartphone using a language translator app that has been told to translate from French into English, Steve Hates Fish interprets the signage and architecture in a busy London shopping street. In an environment overloaded with information, the signs run riot as the confused and restless software does its best to fulfill its task.
Playing off the notion of “interactivity”, Utopia poses itself as a video game plugged into the social consciousness of contemporary California. The viewer/player seemingly makes choices from the menu offering utopian or dystopian realities; however, the score is always the same: the winner loses, and vice-versa. Features Rachel Rosenthal as the host of a macabre interactive game that pushes the boundaries of performance and interactive media.
Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art is a video catalog of the artist’s exhibition, performance and workshop in Montreal in 2003. Produced in the context of a retrospective exhibition at the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, the video presents a close view of Montano’s signture art/life counseling performance, interviews with participants, and views of the artworks in situ. It also documents Montano’s performance pedagogy during her all-night sleepover workshop which was collaboratively hosted by La Centrale and Rad’a.
You never thought that Franco-American relations could be so fun! A French thriller in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade, getting it on with Roger Corman's from-the-hip philosophy.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been documenting the selling of the American presidency since 1984, and have expanded and updated the series with every election. Political Advertisement 2000 features ads from the 1950s up to the 2000 campaign. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the TV spot, what emerges is the political strategy and manipulative marketing techniques of the American televisual campaign process. Political Advertisement 2000 includes many rare spots, some never before seen.
In The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second US - Mexico War), writer/performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña and filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez combine Chicano wit and political vision to create an ironic, post-millennial and postmodern look at the future of U.S./Mexican relations. Both artist and director generate a complex commentary on history, society, pop culture, the politics of language and the repercussions of ethnic dominance.
In Danza Solar, Super8 archival footage of dancers is superimposed with 16mm views of the sun (suns). The film evokes a communal solar trance, both Andean and Mesoamerican. Part of a collection of works the collective considers "Shamanic Materialism," Danza Solar is a Mesoamerican spell unleashed.
Appropriated network-TV footage of Jimmy Carter’s "I see risk" speech from the 1980 Democratic Convention meets Reagan’s gloomy inaugural ride through D.C.: "If you succumb to a dream world, you’ll wake up to a nightmare."
This title is also available on Presidents and Elections.
Found-footage video about the destruction of the environment by man-made forces.
In a tape that stands out as one of the earliest examples of the use of appropriated television footage, Freed assembles a collage of images representing American media icons, from Mickey Mouse and Richard Nixon, to The Wizard of Oz and the Rolling Stones. Placing cartoon images next to images of the war in Vietnam, Freed creates an appropriately surreal vision of American culture, and begs the question whether an anthropologist of the future would be able to decipher the truth of the age from such a confused mix of representations.
Year of the Spawn is an archival collage inspired by the synonymous song by the “gay church folk” band The Hidden Cameras. Wolf interpreted the song as an anthem for doomed youth. Having recently finished the historical film Teenage, Wolf collected over 100 hours of archival footage, featuring early 20th Century adolescents. Much of these historical newsreels feature bizarre and mysterious outtakes. These forgotten scraps became the fabric for this foreboding and melancholic music film.
Vice President Mike Pence eagerly plays cheerleader in chief for Donald Trump. In accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2016, Pence proclaimed, “I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican — in that order,” suggesting how we might understand his role. This ground-breaking, earth-shaking video begins with a pomp-ridden televised press conference, accompanied by uplifting music. Held early in 2017 at the White House Rose Garden, it showcased the president’s announced withdrawal from the historic Paris Climate Accord.
Baby Bush meets Tubby-land. Completed in August 2001, this project was initially just a simple comic skewering of George W. Bush and his defense policies—but after September 11th, it took on a whole new meaning. State of the Union now has a surreal documentary quality that is genuinely disturbing.
