Part of a cable TV series called Communications Update that aired on public access in New York City from 1979 through 1992, these tapes provide an early example of television made by artists. The series centered on the democraticization of the media. Birth Of An Industry covers a Miami satellite TV convention attended by thousands of backyard satellite TV enthusiaists, inventors, and entrepreneurs.
In The Blood is an experimental documentary about American-Jewish attitudes towards Germans, and the role the Holocaust plays in shaping Jewish identity. This layered collage combines appropriated images, original footage, sampled sounds, and fragments of audio conversations, to examine perceptions and representations of Germany, cultural identity, collective memory, and history.
The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images. The loss of the 'genuine picture' means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry, but rather a new policy on images.
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".
Television Delivers People is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power—the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. While canned Muzak plays, a scrolling text denounces the corporate masquerade of commercial television to reveal the structure of profit that greases the wheels of the media industry. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world.
"Black Holes/Heavenly Bodies-Hell is a high-tech nightmare about a coming-of-age in America in which violence and mediocrity are the potent background noise." – Steve Seid
Re-mastered in 2005, Reel 2 features a series of demonstrations and durational tests: how to protect oneself from germs; how to turn a roll call into a role play; and an excruciating exercise in desire, as Man Ray attempts to get his just rewards. While entertaining, these humorous pieces also parody television culture and work to highlight issues of consumerism.
Contents:
Sanforized, 0:47
Coin Toss, 2:11
Monkey Business, 1:06
Same Shirt, 0:32
In this interview, communications theorist, Gene Youngblood (b. 1942) maps out the various stages of the development of video technology and its philosophical implications for human interaction. The range of topics discussed moves beyond video to offer an extensive and rich survey of American culture from the 1960s to the present moment. In addition to discussing his canonical text, Expanded Cinema, Youngblood shares stories from his early days as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where he gained intimate knowledge of the media’s politics of representation. With the acuity of hindsight, Youngblood discusses important self-discoveries, and his life-changing decision to move from the mainstream media into the world of the underground press.
We have come to this place of meaning together, celebrating our un-remaindered completeness. Yet, in our wake endures a long procession of stowaways: misspoken sounds we unconsciously omit, the limitations of our alphabet, the ignored gaps of an imperfect analog, and most recently, these forgetful bits of the virtual. We celebrate the lineage of our information as we celebrate one another, not realizing that the loudest affirmations might come from these unacknowledged, unavoidable participants. With each generation, they say a little bit more, speaking a little bit louder.
Derived from Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, Lossless #4 is the result of a digital file's debugging routine that reveals vectors describing apparent movement in the frame. Having removed the picture, thereby isolating these vectors, the formal qualities of Gehr's film are detectable. The hypnotic effects of the shifts in the lens’s focal length in the original are now substituted with a purely graphical representation, creating a perverse replacement of the optical effect of the original.
Revolving around a movie mogul’s familial intrigues, Made In Hollywood tells the story of two artists selling out to make movies, and a simple country girl’s angelic rise to fame despite it all. As a copy of a copy, this tape critiques what it mimics, and, by revelling in the glitz and glamour of image-obsessed stars, exploits the love/hate relationship viewers have with their media icons: simultaneously viewing them as perfect models and ridiculous trumped-up figures existing only in the fantasy-land that is Hollywood.
Turn It On, Tune It In, Take It Over! is a portrait of freedom of expression at the dawn of the Electronic Age. The video was distilled from hundreds of hours of footage shot mostly in the early 1970s, using the first portable video format—the 1/2" open-reel, black-and-white, battery-operated, video Portapak. The piece recovers an almost lost and forgotten era of television history, when participation set out to conquer passivity, and when process was more important than product.
A combination of experimental and narrative approaches which explore the commodification of rebellion as it is marketed to youth culture, through the eyes of two drug-dealing, teenage girls from Brooklyn who "accidentally" kill and mutilate their favorite alternative rock star. Their obsession with murders and makeovers and their confusion between fashion and transgression lead these girls into a world where nihilism is bought and sold, and rebellion is impossible.
Timely concerns about the future of video, artists’ complicity in the money making system of the ‘establishment,’ and the effect of the camera’s presence on personal encounters, is discussed and debated in this late night video produced by David Cort, Chuck Kennedy, and Skip Blumberg.
"In the free space of the commodity, I digitally took apart moving image sequences and re-animated them into an encoded montage to create a metaphor of experience where the viewer feels like a fiber optic cable has been hard-wired into their consciousness — a look where the image is simultaneously visible and invisible. My hope was to create a work that re-presented information as a kind of subliminal narrative that critiqued the currently popular technotopian rhetoric."
— Les LeVeque
Billion Dollar Bimbo: A Musical is a story of a young Hollywood actress’s psychological roller coaster ride through loss and redemption. One day on set the actress witnesses her mother collapse in the middle of shooting. Thinking her dead, the woman quickly spins out of control, immediately descending into drug use and promiscuity. The daughter’s depression-induced mania is assuaged when the mother recovers, but only briefly. When the mother quickly dies, the forlorn daughter plummets again into hopelessness and seeks solace in religion.
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.
This video takes its departure from the BBC's coverage of the killing of three IRA volunteers by British Security Forces in Strabane, a small town on the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Interrogating television discourse, the video examines what is referred to as the British “shoot to kill” policy of planned assassination in the North.
In the fall of 1974 Doug Hall and Jody Procter began to develop a presidential archetype, which they called "the Artist-President." Procter wrote the speeches that Hall delivered "presidentially" in performances. Over time, the character became more explicitIy based on JFK, requiring a makeup artist and a speaking style more recognizably Kennedy-esque. On November 22, 1975, members of T. R. Uthco (at the Anthology Film Archives in New York) and Ant Farm (at a church in San Francisco) simultaneously screened media from their reenactment of President Kennedy's assassination.
Scenes from an Endless War is an experimental documentary on militarism, globalization, and the "war against terrorism." Part meditation, part commentary, Scenes employs recontextualized commercial images, rewritten news crawls, and original footage and interviews to question received wisdom and common sense assumptions about current American policies.
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain's Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880's, when the introduction of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into the street. For the first time one could be photographed casually in public without knowledge or consent.
Colonial Transfer vindicates the eidetic chasm that produced the arrival of television in the cinema as well as the absorption, transduction and digital expansion of television and historical film archives, all linked by the negentropic outburst of a source code in trance. This is the state of ever-expanding media landscape in the post-covid quarantine. Our state of space-time.
A rumination via handwritten index cards and an assortment of images recalling histories and ambitions of varied film productions.
The 2016 installment in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2016 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.
