Tag Archives: early video art

Un Chien Andalou – THE GAME!!

Slicing Up Eyeballs in a Surrealist Game

The startling 1929 surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou made by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Salvador Dalí is now a deeply unsettling video game. If the infamous eye slicing scene makes you recoil at its memory, wait until a digital moon soundtracked by hideous stretching noises morphs into a gaping oculus, and your only release from its revolting gaze is to slash it down the pupil.

via Hyperallergic

[interesting to think of this project in relation to Perry Bard’s Man with a Movie Camera: A Global Remake.]

Hot Internet TVs on Frozen Winter Days

Hot Internet TVs on Frozen Winter Days
by Alicia Eler on Hyperallergic

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said that television is cool and radio is hot. This isn’t a temperature thing, but rather a classification of media based on the participation it involves from viewers — TV watchers can be more detached, whereas radio listeners are completely engaged. In the installations of artists Nam June Paik and Gretchen Bender, though, TV becomes the central, interactive medium. As the temperatures this week hovered in the negatives, I channeled heat by sipping tea and watching TV as video art from my global perch on the internet.
read more

 

Arte ≠ Vida and media projects with an archival impulse

Doing some research and came across these interesting projects that are using experimental archival approaches.

Arte ≠ Vida: A Chronology of Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000.
A CHRONOLOGY OF ACTIONS BY ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAS, 1960–2000 BY DEBORAH CULLEN | MUSEO DEL BARRIOThis chronology first appeared in the exhibition catalog Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960–2000 (New York: El Museo Del Barrio, 2008). more info

The Knotted LIne
The Knotted Line is an interactive, tactile laboratory for exploring the historical relationship between freedom and confinement in the geographic area of the United States. With miniature paintings of over 50 historical moments from 1495-2025, The Knotted Line asks: how is freedom measured? Just as importantly, The Knotted Line imagines a new world through the work of grassroots movements for self-determination. More information on the project here.

On the Subject of Archives: e-misférica, summer 2012
Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, editors, “The subject of archives has been a topic of conversation, collaboration and co-teaching between the two of us for several decades. Whether we were working on the memory and postmemory of the Holocaust or the Argentinean Dirty War, thinking about literature, photography, or performance, whether we were co-teaching courses on trauma and memory or co-organizing conferences or workshops, the subject of archives supersisted in our minds. Why had the subject of archives taken on such power?” read more from intro.

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980

“Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972-1987” at LACMA review in NYTimes

The exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. Starting this fall in LA…

A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online

A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online is a work-in-progress. This “living archive” will continue to expand, linking the history of media arts to its future.

Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a leading international resource for video and media art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI’s core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. For 39 years, EAI has fostered the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects. more

Link to their online catalogue
Appointments can be made to watch videos in their viewing room free of charge.

This site is one of the best resources for video and media arts.

ETC Video History Project

Fantastic archive
of artist interviews,
bibliographies and
some online texts,
resource links, and
preservation information.

recommended texts:
Video: A Selected Chronology, 1963-1983 in Art Journal: Video – The Reflexive Medium by Barbara London, Curator of Film/Video MOMA, 1985

The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions from Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices , by Marita Sturken, 1996

Dara Birnbaum

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/birnbaum/biography/
New York-based artist Dara Birnbaum, a pioneer of media critique. Since the mid-’70s, Birnbaum has consistently mined the telecommunications industry to make videos that are at once feminist polemic, critical essay, and aesthetic exploration. Her seminal 1978 piece, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, is an example of virtuosic video editing, looping actress Linda Carter’s trademark spin so that she never completes the shift from svelte superhero to ordinary working woman, while simultaneously casting an analytical eye on television’s representation of a “super woman,” red bustier, star-flecked hot pants, knee-high boots and all. view video


Interview in Bomb Magazine
Interview in ArtInfo
Cabinet Magazine: Cable TV’s Failed Utopian Vision: An Interview with Dara Birnbaum, winter 2002/2003