A political composition on natural resistance. These images are an expiring breath in danger of extinction. These images become extinguished, consumed: a drop, a pure intensity which only appears when falling. In the presence of the image these audiovisual crowds become an affected body, assaulted by entropy. A face exhausted and reanimated by the continuous sound trance that traverses the battlefield. Faces for an eye that would not need to see.
Book Report explores themes of sexual assault, the weaponization of language, and the futility of escape. It combines short sequences of Mad Men's Don Draper with relevant facts about the 2016 presidential campaign — including a history of the hashtag #trumpbookreport and notes on a payment to the mysteriously named “Draper Sterling” ad agency. A choral voice-over, drawn from the infamous Access Hollywood transcript, revises the misogynist “locker room talk,” turning it against the original speaker.
Security Anthem’s requisite components came together relatively slowly. I’d known for years that I wanted to make something out of the Oto speakers’ most sinister, suggestive sentences. I’d taught myself to program music on a Game Boy using a cartridge I’d bought from a Swedish programmer, and I composed a sequence of ominous music that seemed well-matched to the speakers. I’d recorded John Ashcroft singing his self-penned song “Let the Eagle Soar” through a media player window, and I knew that it somehow belonged with the speakers and the 8-bit music.
In this video, Glennda Orgasm and social critic Camille Paglia walk the streets of downtown Manhattan and discuss the status of mainstream feminism in the early 1990s. They visit the Stonewall Inn, Washington Square Park, and a gay bookstore, and confront a group of anti-pornography protesters.
An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Camille Paglia. Featuring The Centaurians, Brian Roach, and Rennard Snowden.
What Farocki Taught is literally and stubbornly a remake — that is, a perfect replica in color and in English, of Harun Farocki’s black and white, 1969 German language film, Inextinguishable Fire.
In From Fagtasia to Frisco, Brenda and Glennda report from Fagtasia, an event honoring the Summer Solstice in New York organized by the Radical Faeries. Through interviews with Faeries and footage of their walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, the group proposes to reclaim the city as a safe space for queer people, and discuss reorienting queer consciousness toward spirituality.
On September 21, 2014 Ligorano Reese installed a 3,500 pound ice sculpture of the words The Future at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23 Street in New York during the People's Climate March. This video compresses the 11 hour event into 4 minutes.
“A century's carelessness is now melting away the world's storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It's as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color or eradicating one note from every octave.”
–Bill McKibben, January 2006
In this episode of Glennda and Friends, Glennda Orgasm and Mark Allen drink at Marie's Crisis Café, a piano bar in Manhattan. They interview other bar patrons and discuss topics including politics, Judy Garland, and the idea of mid-life crisis.
An episode of Glennda and Friends, hosted by Glennda Orgasm and Mark Allen.
Made in Germany, October 14th, 2004
While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.
Museum Piece is the second 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.
In Mondo Toronto, Glennda travels to Toronto to visit Liza LaBruce (Bruce LaBruce). Liza gives Glennda a tour of the city's public parks, with specific reference to their role in gay culture. Following this, Glennda attends a party that LaBruce is hosting and interviews partygoers, including Scott Thompson from The Kids in the Hall and Amy Nitrate.
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 Very Very End, Barber points to his medium's plastic possibility by somehow traveling into the future and the past, nodding to Neville Shute's apocalyptic 1957 novel On The Beach, while setting an end-of-days story in a 21st Century holiday resort.
In conversation with curator and educator Mary Jane Jacob, visual artist Ann Hamilton (b. 1956) talks about care, interactivity, and social relations — key concepts that preoccupy her practice — and why she feels compelled to revisit these issues under the Trump administration. Hamilton was trained in textile design and sculpture, and she received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1985.
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.
In this interview, Phyllis Kornfeld, author of Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America, describes her initial interest in working with prisoners in her native Oklahoma City, stemmed from an exploration of outsider artists. Detailing her first visit to a high security prison as a ‘mind blowing and breathtaking’ experience, Kornfeld discusses how she came to her realization that prisons are fertile environments for free form experimentation with the teaching process. She learned that through personalized art education, inmates could teach themselves to make positive contributions to society. - Kyle Riley
In the words of activist Dhoruba Bin Wahad, “Historical and social events are subject to almost instant censorship by those who have better access and control over the medium of communication. It is important that there exist people skilled in the use of the technological instruments of communication who will seek out the real truth behind the headlines and tell it for all to see, know, and hear.”
This tape was shot in August 1972 by the same crew that had convened for pioneer video collective TVTV’s (Top Value Television) project Four More Years. Videotaped at the 1972 Republican Convention, it begins with the cameraman taping from inside the press area, with protestors from the People’s Band outside at the fence. There is footage of girl- and boyscout groups. A group of protestors are shown calling for non-violent blockades of the delegates' entrance. Tear gas is feared, and there are interviews with tear-gassed people and medics.
The Political Advertisement project began in 1984, when New York-based media artists Muntadas and Reese produced their first compilation of American presidential commercials, beginning with Eisenhower in the 1950s. Every four years since — aligned to the national election cycle — they’ve updated the collection to reflect the current moment, presenting the clips in chronological order, with no voice-over editorializing, a tour-de-force of witty and incisive editing.
Another Clapping explores the relationship triangle between a daughter, her mother and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is an experimental documentary based on the mother's violent past with its traumatic political history and an unsuccessful marriage. Through their subsequent experiences as immigrants in Canada and the complex process of remembering and reviewing the past, history comes to signify the characteristic of the individual. The tracing of memory illuminates the difficulties of identifying mother and daughter as different people.
In Biemann’s film, she traces the routes and reasons of women who travel across the globe for work in the sex industry. By using the latest images from NASA satellites, the film investigates the consequences of the U.S. military presence in southeast Asia as well as European migration politics. This essay takes an earthly perspective on cross-border circuits, where women have emerged as key actors and expertly links new geographic technologies to the sexualization and displacement of women on a global scale.
Through a process of degeneration of both sound and image, Just endows the iconic American flag with new context and implication. The image is repeated by generations, using different processes such as digital video, computer printout and photocopying, and then combined with degenerated sound. Single frames of original digital images are exported, and evolve through the repetition of process, before being metamorphosed back to digital image by scanning and rendering.
They say there are only two stories in the world: man goes on a journey, and stranger comes to town.
Six people are interviewed anonymously about their experiences coming into the U.S. Each then designs a video game avatar who tells their story by proxy. Goss focuses on the questions and examinations used to establish identity at the border, and how these processes in turn affect one's own sense of self and view of the world.
Q: What was the Cubists’ greatest contribution to modernity? A: The invention of camouflage. The Art of Protective Coloration asks us to consider the less-than-innocent connections between the making of art and the making of war. Such questions are the first few steps into the deceptively shifting terrain of this videotape, which leaps into a lurid meditation on aggressive male fantasies, linking the domains of art, war, and sex. It looks at binocular voyeurism, the regressive illusion of the perfected body (whether female or male), the phallic gun-toting pin-up, and camouflage.
People enjoy my company connects the privatisation of telecommunications with techno-optimism, euphoria and online communication in the lead-up to the millennium.
The film explores the privatisation of the Irish state-owned telecommunications company Telecom Éireann from the viewpoint of shareholders communicating on early online forums. The event is contextualised within ideologies of technological emancipation in the pre-millennium period.
Blood and Guts in High School features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations* that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker's book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes' interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by U.S. news events from the time period in which the book was written.
