Various - U.S. Express - Early 21st Century Video Art (2005)
Thursday, April 17, 2008
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1. Sign Movie
Karolina Sobecka 1:10 2001
Sobecka's videos are lyrical metaphors, rich enough to hold many interpretations. To us
they are about seeking connection with the physical world through our senses: sight,
touch, movement. Sobecka transforms her camcorder footage with staccato editing,
pixilated video animation, and other computer techniques. In this 21st century road movie,
a black and white traveler speeds through a lush color California landscape in the blink of
an eye, looking for signs.
Karolina Sobecka was born in Warsaw, Poland and is a graduate of the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Her works have been screened at the Women in the Director's Chair
2000 Tour and 19th Annual International Film and Video Festival; Dialogues @ Matthew
Gallery (Edinburgh, 1999); Animac International Festival in Lleida, Spain; Cinanima Film
Festival in Portugal and many others.
2. Welcome to My Home Page
Paper Rad 3:00 2003
High spirited, frenetic music drives an over the top, eyeball-saturating excerpt from
PjVidz#1: Color Vision. Paper Rad, creator of this digital divertissement, is an artist
collective that synthesizes popular imagery from TV, video games, and advertising,
reprogramming the references with an exuberant, imaginative aesthetic. Members
Benjamin Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci have performed and exhibited at Foxy
Productions, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the NY
Underground Film Festival; the Big Orbit Sound Lab, Buffalo, NY; Space 1026, Philadelphia,
PA and others.
3. Modern Daydream: Islands in the Sky
Mitchell Rose 4:32 2001
Out in the desolate countryside, dancers atop cherry-pickers weave fifty feet in the air,
reaching for the clouds and for each other in extraordinary gestures of yearning that are
amplified by the giant machines and sweeping camera movements. This strong and
beautiful dance video was directed by Mitchell Rose, a choreographer, performance artist,
and now mediamaker, based on the West Coast. He’s made seventeen short films that
have garnered many festival awards and been screened in theatres, television, museums,airlines, the Internet, even on the CBS JumboVision in Times Square.
4. Imprint
Karolina Sobecka 0:48 2003
The artist considers this video to be about human touch but we think it's about reach. Her
editing style collapses time, and merges multiple efforts to connect with the world into one
universal gesture.
5. Docking at X
Anita Thacher 7:06 2001
The artist dreams a silent journey along the coast, through fields and trees and fog.
Mysterious images obscure the view at times; an “X’ appears and disappears; a trapeze
artist swings gracefully through the air and slides down a rope, perhaps to return to her
dreamer’s bed. Docking at X while always in motion means being where you are. Anita
Thacher is a New York-based artist known for her indoor and outdoor multimedia
installations, films, videos, and photographs. Her works have been seen at the New York
Film Festival, Whitney Museum (NY), Berlin and Melbourne Film Festivals, Jeu de Paume,
Belgium Cultural Center and many others.
6. Current
Brian Doyle 6:00 2001
In New York City’s Financial Center, a blizzard of paper and tickertape swirls wildly in the
turbulent air that blows through the narrow streets; satellite dishes sprout from every
building. Paper shows the wind; the electromagnetic currents are invisible. Glimpses of
the World Trade Center twin towers are eerie but merely a background to a serendipitous
free-form paper dance. Brian Doyle is a Brooklyn, NY installation, video and photo artist
who has had many screenings including Lighthouse Museum (Glasgow, UK), Rotterdam
Film Festival, L’Alternativa (Barcelona), Instituto Brasileiro de Audiovisual, Pierogi 2000,
Slamdance 2003, Arte’s Mic Mac 8 and the New York and the Chicago Underground Film
Festivals.
7. One Mile Path
Karolina Sobecka 2:08 2003
In this third video by Sobecka, a barefoot woman walks across many landscapes, taking
careful deliberate steps, as if walking for the first time. Then she lifts her gaze toward the
skies, connecting multiple images of heaven and earth.
8. Weekend in Moscow (unofficial art)
Skip Blumberg 3:00 1990/2002
This short excerpt is the antic opening of a 35-minute non-fiction video about American art
aficionados touring Moscow during the last days of the Soviet Union. The humorous, ironic
first-person travel diary focuses on visits to the studios of an underground community of
talented, courageous and often wacky “unofficial,” conceptual artists. Skip Blumberg produces cultural documentaries and performance videos that have been seen on TV
networks, in festivals and art galleries around the world.
9. There There Square (condensed)
Jacqueline Goss 5:40 2002
Where is there? In this silent video (condensed from the full 14-minute video), Goss
eloquently uses terse text and fluid visual coverage of the U.S. map to present fascinating
facts and personal ruminations. She tells us that when the explorers arrived on our
shores, natives drew maps with circles that filled the square paper. Today the national
map is an indelible image for its citizens, yet they still draw highly idiosyncratic versions of
it. Jacqueline Goss’s videotapes and multimedia projects have been screened
internationally including the New York Video Festival, Rotterdam International Film
Festival, the Hong Kong Film Archive and Flaherty Film Seminar. She teaches in the Film
and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College, Annandale, NY.
10. Language Lessons
Pamela Z, Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse 9:00 2002
Z, Finley and Muse have woven an intricate pattern of narrative fragments about dreamers,
outsiders, and believers. Otherworldly images of ordinary objects - immigration forms,
butterflies just out of reach, toy airplanes and watery baptisms - obliquely illustrate their
words. Viewers must discover the connections and untangle meanings for themselves.
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist and has toured
extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan with her audio works included in
exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (NY) and the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum
(Cologne). Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse have worked collaboratively on numerous
experimental documentaries and multi-channel video installations since 1988.
11. One Mile Per Minute
Bobby Abate 10:00 2002
Bobby Abate takes us on a sentimental drive through a fictional post-9/11 America where
nothing has changed; it’s a landscape of media, products, logos, and tract homes. Abate’s
work deals with ritual, commercialism, self-reflexivity and contradiction and appeared in
the 2000 New York Film Festival plus many more off-beat venues. His trilogy of Internet
video shorts, Real Videos, was named one of the top avant-garde works of 2001 in the
Village Voice.
12. The Light
Brian Doyle 10:18 2003
This video, by the maker of Current, is an exquisitely photographed, crisply edited,
amazingly detailed study of artificial lights. The fluctuations between darkness and
brightness enhance our awareness of the light emanating from a video screen. At first
there is incidental coverage, then extensive coverage of the World Trade Center memorial
twin towers of light.
13. Cookie Girl in the Hot Zone
Skip Blumberg 4:30 2001
Two days after the World Trade Center twin towers collapsed 12-year-old Jemma Brown,
who lives just a few blocks from the site, baked and served cookies to rescue workers at
the end of their shifts, walking away from the clean-up of the still burning rubble. “Thanks
to all who helped in the recovery efforts.”
14. Robots/Cyborgs/Immortality
(from Act 3 Dolly of the 64-minute video opera Three Tales)
Beryl Korot (video) & Steve Reich (music) 11:35 2002
In this segment the robot Kismet and creator Cynthia Breazeal are featured in a tour-de-
force blending of audio/video fragments of ideas about artificial intelligence. The opera
stars engineers, scientists and philosophers (Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle, Marvin Minsky,
Bill Joy, Henri Atlan, Rodney Brooks, Richard Dawkins, Ruth Deech, and Adin Steinsaltz). It
includes a luscious, rousing Steve Reich score and Korot’s expert intricately woven multi-
screen, multi-media, digital visualizations.
Beryl Korot is a seminal video artist, co-founder and co-editor of Radical Software, the
journal for the 1970's video movement. Her multi channel video installations have been
exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including the Whitney Museum (NY),
the Reina Sofia and the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle. Three Tales, her second video opera in
collaboration with composer Steve Reich, was performed with live musicians and singers
in Paris, London, Berlin, Torino, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Lisbon, Vienna, Hong Kong,
Perth, New York, Chicago and Charleston, SC in 2002-2003.
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at 5:08 PM