This music video for the band Julie Ruin, fronted by Kathleen Hanna, formerly of Bikini Kill, critiques the cynical music marketeers of corporate America. Criticism particularly targets campaigns aimed at women, which Benning and Hanna refer to here as the "Girls Rule (kind of) Strategy."
Mr. Thomas is in the back garden, performing his new moves in the glorious sunlight, making things happen. Somewhere between ritual, a white suburban war dance and 1970's "keep fit" exercise to lovely music, Mr. Thomas tries to coordinate with the Black Blob, that persistently undermines the nature of his representational space...
And the song goes:
We've only just begun to live
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we're on our way...
Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, "The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship.
An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.
This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.
An alternative earth music video. An epic last stand. A portrait of two utilitarian workers engaging in a collaboration with Karen, manifesting improvisational geographic friendships...
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
Through distorted audio and visual representations of interviews with music journalists, this video critiques the mass media’s treatment of the rap group Public Enemy, and accusations that their lyrics are anti-Semitic. This experimental documentary includes scenes from Public Enemy performances and music videos, as well as archival footage of the Black Power movement and Malcolm X. Know Your Enemy details the war being waged by black artists on the battleground of representation, a struggle against forms of expression which are already co-opted.
Martin Sorrondeguy, former vocalist for Los Crudos, produced this powerful and uplifting documentary about the U.S. Latino punk scene and the DIY movement. The video features live performances by bands, including Huasinpungo, Los Crudos, Subsistencia, Sbitch, and many more.
[This] is my first attempt to construct a video piece using one set of generative intervals for both sound and color. All of the color in the piece is orchestrated in brightness ‘octaves’ corresponding to the registration of the pitches in the soundtrack. Each hue from a circle of twelve corresponds to one of the pitches of a tempered scale. The articulation of the piece consists of a series of loudness and brightness ripples which move across the piece in speed relationships derived from the hue and pitch proportions.
Possibly In Michigan is an operatic fairytale about cannibalism in Middle America. A masked man stalks a woman through a shopping mall and follows her home. In the end, their roles are reversed when the heroine deposits a mysterious Hefty bag at the curb. Like Condit's other video narratives, Possibly In Michigan shows bizarre events disrupting mundane lives. Combining the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, she constructs a world of divided reality.
These five short videos introduce Judy, a paper maché puppet who ruminates on her position in society. Like Judy, of the famous Punch and Judy puppet duo, Benning’s Judy seems to experience the world from the outside, letting things happen to her rather than making things happen around her.
This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 3.
Love Songs #1 is composed of three pieces that pose questions about urban culture, race, and politics. Found footage images are manipulated and juxtaposed with popular music; the effects are unsettling, ironic, and sometimes humorous.
Turn the lights down / Way down low / Turn up the music / Hi as fi can go / All the gang's here / Everyone you know / It's a crazy scene / Hey there, just look over your shoulder / Hoo hoo / Get the picture? / No no no no / Yeah / Walk a tight rope / Your life-sign line / Such a bright hope / Right place, right time / What's your number? / Never you mind / Take a powder / But hang on a minute, what's coming round the corner? Wooooo woo woo / Have you a future? / No no no no / Yeah
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth is a short film that remixes archival material from a prominent mainstream newspaper printed during the New York City Blackout in July 1977. The 1977 New York City Blackout is cited as the official birth of hip-hop, wherein looters took equipment that allowed them to formalize and professionalize hip-hop. Titled after a quote by an astronomer looking back at the Earth during the Apollo space mission, this kaleidoscopic film hints at a cultural moment of rupture and reinvention that transcends resilience.
Commissioned to be a "promo" for a loud punk rock band, Mr. Kuchar feared that the noise the band made would spoil the mood of his visuals, so he used the sound of a lush orchestra to score the picture and the antics.
Film time takes on book time. An homage to a Bette J. Davis’ illustrated text, itself an homage to the small music makers of the insect world.
Camera, edit, sound design: Deborah Stratman
Music: Fontanelle
John Cage’s compositions and performances have had a profound influence on generations of musicians and artists. In this tape, he initiates For the Third Time as author Richard Kostelanetz interviews him. “I’ve left the punctuation out, but I’ve distributed it by chance operations on the page, like an explosion,” Cage says. “You can replace the punctuation where you wish.”
In this diptych, Yi-Ching Chen plays the lowest possible sound on her tuba and Magenheimer's own electronically synthesized voice sings a letter that Ada Byron, the world's first computer programmer, wrote to her mother. In the letter she describes what it felt like to discover the extraordinary power of her own vast intellect.
Text excerpted from a letter Ada Byron wrote to her mother.
This tape exemplifies Snyder’s early experiments with the image processor. Articulated patterns of alternating wavelength and amplitude of both sound and light are arranged to produce abstract compositions. Voltages processed by an Emu sound synthesizer are systematized through characteristic interval structures that affect the image processor’s functions.
This title is also available on Bob Snyder: Sound and Video 1975-1990.
A reflection on the phenomenon of the touring musician.
"I shot this film with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and the 25th Anniversary tour of Dutch band The Ex, when they embarked on a 'convey tour' with about 25 performing comrades. If half the battle is getting there and half the battle is joy, then the other half is madness. I thank all of the musicians who float in and out — of the film, in particular, and my life, in general."
— Jem Cohen
Soundtrack music: Guitargument, an Andy Moor and Mia Clarke improvisation, arranged and edited by Jem Cohen.
An ailing, elderly man listens to a private performance in his room. The singing is a halting mix cross-cultural-Inuktitut and Country & Western. Transgressive and mesmerizing, Karaoke distorts the landscapes of sound and body.
In Inukitut.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 1.
Nebula is a hallucinogenically immersive spectacle: a complex, long-form audio-visual composition, which pays playful homage to science fiction fantasies. Captured for video by means of stop-motion photography, objects made of glass, glitter and tulle, are nestled within a kaleidoscopic flow of computer-generated imagery. Drawing from Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux color organs as well as experimental abstract filmmakers such as Mary Ellen Bute, and James and John Whitney, Nebula also recalls liquid light shows and the marvelous sightings of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello (b.1964) creates sonic installations that function to give a physical form or space to audio. In this interview, Vitiello discusses his beginnings as a film student, and his transition from music to fine art through his investment in storytelling aspects of soundtracks. As a teacher, artist, and long-time curator at Electronic Arts Intermix, Vitiello’s insights and anecdotes offer up sentimental reflection and hard-learned life lessons, as well as perspective on the historic landscape of music and art in the 1980s and 90s. By discussing his partnerships with Tony Oursler, Jem Cohen, and Nam June Paik, Vitello provides entry into the myriad influences and collaborations that have shaped his working process and artistic career.
6^ is part of the Pop Manifestos series, a five video project realized in collaboration with Cokes' former students Seth Price and Damian Kulash, and originally conceived as part of a series for the conceptual band SWIPE.
In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.
