Humor

Visit a ghetto for the gifted in this Christmas tape that features painting, cooking, and a private tour of cubicles dedicated to culture. Revel in the un-whiteness of a Los Angeles holiday and bask in the heat of noshing newlyweds. Happy New Year!

Something primitive projects into the present to upset the lives of a group of people delving into past-life regression techniques. The hairy intrusion is both attractive and repellent as he strips bare a suburban carcass composed of Christian pretensions and pagan proclivities.

As the camera looks out through a barred window and the clock strikes four in a Swiss city, the death of Yasser Arafat provides the starting point for a journey back in time.

Throwing Stones is the third episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

This episode includes: two more adverts, considerations of the future, a multiple projection spectacular in miniature, a riverine jaunt, much fog, and an ending x 2.

This is the fourth and final episode in The Variations cycle.

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

Putting the Balls Away is a reenactment of the historic September 21, 1973, tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, created for broadcast on the 35th anniversary of the original event. The Battle of the Sexes was the most-watched live sporting event at that time, and pitted chauvinist against feminist, when women tennis players demanded equal pay to that of their male counterparts. Both players are performed by Mateik, whose work wages strategic operations to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender. After each game the competitors "switch sides".

Surrounded by the scribblings of the undecipherable, the denizens of the dark and the cheap reach out for light and for the pearls of wisdom that lie enmeshed in a maze of grooved and spray-painted enigmas. A trip through New Age horizons and the madness just around the corner and above our heads. Come with an open mind and sit with a sealed orifice.

A leisurely meditation on East West interactions involving accidental Occidental mishaps and Oriental dental ingenuity. Throw in some parakeets and a squeamish socialite, mix with a dash of depression and then stir thoroughly with a dollop of docudrama. Voila: a gum-flapping snack of lip smacking goo with scented whiffs of wisdom to sniff!

A drama, enacted on the cornfields of Iowa, of a woman haunted by the legacy of her mother and the acts that lead to mom's downfall on the banks of a river. Unable to follow a different path to drier terrain, the heroine over-lubricates both inside and out and gets stuck in the muck.

A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters — each of a different, though often indeterminate, species — who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.

A Day for Cake and Accidents is the third in a series of short collaborative animations.

This sprawling drama about a group of country folk sucked into the fashion world of magazine layouts and romantic intrigue features a cast of glamorously garbed gals and good-natured bumpkins. Produced in collaboration with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the picture delivers high-octane antics fueled by the $800 budget and creative desperation typically inherent in these types of endeavors. The cast is large and labors valiantly with the high speed shooting schedule and color saturated subplots.

A combination birthday/going away party proceeds at its own shallow pace, while revellers reminisce inwardly amid a paralyzing atmosphere of mixed drinks and emotions that choke all but the young at heart and body.

In Joan Does Dynasty — a hilarious classic of feminist media deconstruction — critic Braderman literally projects herself onto the set of the favorite series of one hundred million people in 78 countries. Her do-it-yourself deconstruction of TV’s most successful night-time soap opera is at once a succinct critical analysis of the disturbing cultural assumptions inherent in the narrative, and an unabashed appreciation of the show’s seductive power.

Alone in my room at the El Reno Inn, way out west from Oklahoma City, I face a big picture window that overlooks the refuse of Route 66 to ponder the fate of trailer trash in Twisterville. The skies darken and rumble to the sounds of Mother Nature in heat while Big Brother TV suffers an anxiety attack. Lightning flares up while rain pounds down on the terminal tourists of a raging planet. Only the ice-cold veneer of a sculpted ceramic gives comfort to the terrorized tenant who sweats in sequestered silence while the sky falls down.

A window or two on the outside world is not enough, especially when you have such a lousy view of things as I had in this Oklahoma residential care home. The majesty of the console-model TV gave new dimension to the concept of time and space, and shrank it all down to a 21-inch lump of nature—a 21-incher that didn’t smell and permeate the atmosphere with discomfiture. A meditation on the elsewhere and wanting to be there.

Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.

Rosie Cutler, a middle school lunch lady, and TJ Fortune, a outcast student, have an unusual relationship. Mystically-minded and gender ambiguous, TJ recoils into an abandoned warehouse where he builds a massive sculptural shrine from discarded objects and trash. Through a dream Rosie makes intimate contact with a trans-worldly being who she hopes will bridge the gap between real and imagined to reveal truths about our world.

"Combining the comical with the absurd, I created six funny faces to animate the images of Japanese vowels while differentiating between 'image', 'letter', and 'voice'."

— Takahiko iimura

"iimura deconstructs our coherence as he shifts between the English roman alphabet and Japanese characters, interjects spoken Japanese, and manipulates the computer images of his features.  The images often take on geometrical shapes, others recall the classical images from Japanese woodcuts of Samurai warrior grimace."

— Robert West, Curator, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC

A Fourth of July celebration ignites the Id and unleashes a digital demon hungry for imagery of the young and the restless to appease the contraption it sees through: the cannibal camcorder in a state of carniverous conniptions!

"A major influence for generating ideas for me was not what I could contrive on my desktop, but being open and receptive to “accident”. For instance, one evening in 1972 while typing a syllabus for a class on my old Smith Corona typewriter, I happened to see on the TV a documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. German troops were marching, and I found that I could duplicate the “ta ta tum, ta ta tum, ta ta tum tum tum” of the drumbeat by typing “mar mar march mar mar march.“ Had not the broadcast of this film taken place while I was typing, I would never have thought of this concept.

Shot in Pixelvision, Joe Gibbon's Multiple Barbie features the artist as a smooth-talking psychoanlayst imploring the silent doll to explore her multiple personalities in order to purge their power from her psyche.

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.

Introduces the audience to the rockin' talkin' pony, who provides musical accompaniment for a series of Texas country-dance lessons.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

Most of TVTV’s work takes place in the city, at the center of some pop culture event. “The Good Times Are Killing Me” takes place in the country – Southwest Louisiana, around the towns of Mamou and Eunice, the heart of Cajun country. This is an indigenous culture of food, music, language, and bawdy French-language jokes – something you don’t see much anymore in America. The event is rural Mardi Gras, where beer-drinking, boudin-eating men and boys on horseback capture and behead chickens for a big gumbo and town dance.

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrifice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.