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.
Are gender outlaws considered the new biological terrorists seeking weapons of mass bodily destruction? OPERATION INVERT compares the different regulations mediating botox-related plastic surgery and gender reassignment "sex change." Historical medical assessments of the invert (homosexual and transsexual) "condition" reveal seemingly outdated absurdities about outsider deviance. Nonetheless, current institutional loopholes governing gender re-assignment surgery suggest a fresh resurgence of loony pathology and diagnosis.
In 1972 Eric Siegel, an early pioneer of video art, set out on an extreme adventure driving from Europe six thousand miles overland to India. He was one of the first people to use the revolutionary new technology from Sony Corporation, the Portapak. This was the first small portable video camera/recorder combo that was the predecessor of today’s camcorders. Together with his friend Anthony they documented the trip. This video is the portion of the trip that took them through Afghanistan, one of the most exotic places along the way.
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.
O.U.T. is a work documenting the emergence of computer games which train players to fight in cities among civilians, (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). O.U.T. contains sampled footage and machinima (stories told with video games) from five military simulation games. Following is a documentation of the performance, (Operation Urban Terrain), an urban wireless intervention by Anne-Marie Schleiner and an international cast of game expert and art activist collaborators.
The Battle of Karbala (680) resulted in the death of Hussein, the grandson of prophet Muhammad and all his supporters. This battle is central to Shi'a Muslim belief in which the martyrdom of Hussein is mourned by an annual commemoration, Ashura. Artist Köken Ergun has worked with Istanbul's Shiite minority, documenting their preparations for the Ashura day.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — drones — have become an everyday feature of contemporary military activity, replacing humans in reconnaissance flights, small-scale combat missions and covert operations. The U.S. Army operates some ten thousands UAVs — a six-fold increase during Obama's term — deploying them over locations like Pakistan and Yemen.
I Was There is a trilogy of experimental documentary films that explores the problem of radiation, our society's fading collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unresolved debate between ethics and science. These series concern the immediate effects of weaponized nuclear technology, as invisible poison, on the human body.
The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation Of Parts that this became clear.
“Misfortune makes and breaks you.” I have the misfortune of a history of disruptions, and the fortune of having that history to work with.
Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.
We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.
This surprisingly candid tape between two men looking to avoid the draft and a draft counselor offers unique entry into conversations that often only took place behind closed doors during the Vietnam War. The Videofreex capture the length of a discussion, set in an office room piled high with stacks of records and forms, during which a counselor guides two college-age men through a series of questions that they must manage and address in order to carefully navigate the legal system.
Atomic Ed & the Black Hole tells the story of a scientist-turned-atomic junk collector known as Atomic Ed. More than 30 years ago, Ed quit his job making “better” atomic bombs and he began collecting what he calls “nuclear waste,” non-radioactive high-tech discards from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. As the self-appointed curator of an unofficial museum of the nuclear age called “The Black Hole,” Atomic Ed reveals and preserves a history of government waste that was literally thrown in a trash heap.
Spanish subtitled version available.
An episode from a Lebanese TV series entitled "Image + Sound." Each episode in this groundbreaking series is based on paralleling TV news images alongside staged events. Mourning Images was shot at Studio Bayroumi in the historic district of Saida, Lebanon.
Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a mircrocosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.
"... Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza, a film that captures the impossibly politicized domestic sphere of the Gaza Strip, under the constant hum and buzz of overhead drones."
An episode from a Lebanese TV series entitled "Image + Sound." Each episode in this groundbreaking series is based on paralleling TV news images alongside staged events. This episode was shot in Gouraud St. in Gemayzeh in Beirut.
While out shooting for a different project altogether, I encountered two sleeping men on a Manhattan street. A short time later, I was standing in front of Pennsylvania Train Station with the camera on a tripod, when one of the men suddenly reappeared. He stepped in front of my camera and began to speak, about his path in the U.S. military, from Panama to Afghanistan to Iraq, about his life. I decided to limit the piece to what I shot in that area in those few hours, with one key addition: the text from a classic children's rhyme.
–Jem Cohen
Blending live action staged as if in a dollhouse with rarely seen archival footage from the National Archives, the fantastically true story of how America entered WWI is told. Through vibrant historical characters like labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and German naval officer Franz von Rintelen this loose adaptation of John dos Passos’ 42nd Parallel, explores the timeless issues of radical labor politics and the domestic effects of war.
Anthony Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on his part in the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. Ramos, who had served an 18-month prison sentence for draft evasion, was interviewed by news reporter Gabe Pressman, whose film crew meets Ramos' video crew in a confrontation between technologies and sensibilities. At the time, some broadcast television news crews still used 16mm film, although the expensive transition to ENG (electronic news gathering) systems had begun in 1974.
We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.
Mike Builds a Shelter is a performance comedy with apocalyptic overtones, a narrative extension of Smith's installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar. In this darkly humorous morality play, Smith contrasts Mike's rural adventures in a pastoral landscape with his home fallout shelter. Throughout, the dual narratives are intercut with episodes of Mike's Show on cable, in which Mike's banal domestic activities are eagerly if passively received by living-room TV viewers.
For over 70 years, Colombia has been confronted with internal armed conflict. Over the years, the outlines of the conflict have grown indistinct. A climate of generalized violence has gradually settled over society as a whole.
Violence and barbarity have worked themselves into every aspect of daily life, and fine traces of it mark the streets. Through a multitude of these traces, perhaps the narrative of this hazy war will finally take a firmer shape.
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.
The author assembles a genre picture of the contemporary FRG with shots of scenes where life is rehearsed, ability/durability is tested. Wherever one looks, people appear as actors playing themselves; they take on roles. A play in the theater of life made up of training courses, fitness tests for things and people. Be it in birth preparation classes for expectant parents or in practice runs for sales talks, on the military training ground or during role-plays for educational purposes. Everywhere the incessant effort to be prepared for the emergency of "reality" can be felt.
