A.L. Steiner’s video More Real Than Reality Itself expands the structures of documentary works while challenging its conventional reliance on linear narratives. This critique takes shape through Steiner’s reconsideration of the history of political activism and its representations — configuring a story that emphasizes the embodied, romantic aspects of activism rather than a singular, dominant history.

An evening-length collaboration work with the celebrated avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. The stage set is by Eiko & Koma and the lighting is by David Ferri.

Commissioned by and premiered at Japan Society, New York, October 18-20, 2007, celebrating Kazuo Ohno's 101th Birthday and the 100th anniversary of Japan Society.

During a video workshop, the Ikpeng community decides to act out the myth of the origin of the tattooing ceremony. The mythical hero, Maragareum, dreams about the collective death of the villagers of his friend’s Eptxum’s village. Arriving in this village, he finds, in fact, that everyone is dead. As night falls, he hides in the hut, and observes and learns the Moyngo ceremony from the spirits of the dead.

Directed and photographed by Karané, Kumaré, and Natuyu Ikpeng; edited by Leonardo Sette.

In Ikpeng with English subtitles.

Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1975; it has subsequently become one of the most influential work in film theory. Using a psychoanalytic methodology to discuss spectatorship, it was groundbreaking in its feminist critique of the sadistic, misogynistic mode of classical Hollywood cinema in which women were objects of fetishistic display for male viewers’ pleasure. She has also written extensively on melodrama, published three books, and co-directed six films, including Riddles of the Sphinx with Peter Wollen (1974).

Part of an ongoing video correspondence with sculptor Robert Morris, Mumble brings together repeated scenes and gestures, featuring Morris and Jim Benglis (the artist's brother), and a narrative of irrelevant, confusing, and often purposefully untrue, statements. Although the viewer is inclined to accept Benglis's narrative as true, such trust is called into question by her statements about actions taking place off-camera — actions that cannot be verified.

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.

This compilation features 11 of Jem Cohen's collaborations with musicians. Made on 16mm, Super 8 and Video, the works include the music of R.E.M., Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Void, Elliot Smith, Jonathan Richman, Miracle Legion and Olivier Messiaen.

Nightswimming

Musica Electronica Viva at Baggie’s is a quintessential Videofreex work in its documentation style and explicit discussion of the Videofreex project. The video is a live recording of an experimental music performance, Musica Electronica Viva, at a recording space and venue in New York City. The video documents the performance in its entirety, examining the experimental instruments filling the performance space and filming the crowd’s interactions with various modules of the work.

In this classic personal elegy, Kubota mourns her father's death and recounts the last days of his life. Reflecting on Kubota's use of the video medium, the television emerges as the link between Kubota and her father, with the melodramatic crooning of Japanese pop singers providing a backdrop for Kubota's real-life tragedy.

This title is also available on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

An unseen narrator weaves a textual “map of moral acupuncture” as two BDSM scenarios unfold between queer sex workers and their partners. Archive, architecture, land, sky, and touch bind the historical to the present. Where/what are the slippages between subversion and re-inscription? Liberation and retention? Real and fantasy? How do BDSM practices thicken historical narratives around bodies, sex, and power?

My mother's life and death were both extraordinarily epic. A painter who art therapized herself out of depression. Her resiliency could have rewarded her with a Badge of Courage; alchemizing trauma into art, activism and humor. Modeling these gifts for me, I look at our lives which could have been charted and copied page for page, letter by letter, and I recognize that I have imitated her style, not missing a beat.

— Linda Montano

Eiko & Koma's second son Shin Otake created this video for the occasion of the 2004 American Dance Festival Scripps Award ceremony. Shin edited and narrated the video to convey Eiko & Koma's history and the concepts behind their works.

Naked is a "living" environmental installation created for and commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where EIko & Koma were "on view" all the hours the museum was open for the month of November 2010. Eiko & Koma performed the total of 144 hours.

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

The second installment of the collaborative project New Report, an ongoing series of performances and videos, Artist Unknown features K8 Hardy (founder of the queer feminist art collective LTTR) and Wynne Greenwood (of Tracy and the Plastics) playing Henry Irigaray and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill, and anchor and roving correspondent for WKRH, a feminist TV news station whose tagline is "pregnant with information." Based on documentation of a live, digital communication in real time between Greenwood at Foxy Production Gallery and Hardy on the street in New York.

The second installment of the collaborative project New Report, an ongoing series of performances and videos, Artist Unknown features K8 Hardy (founder of the queer feminist art collective LTTR) and Wynne Greenwood (of Tracy and the Plastics) playing Henry Irigaray and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill, and anchor and roving correspondent for WKRH, a feminist TV news station whose tagline is "pregnant with information." Based on documentation of a live, digital communication in real time between Greenwood at Foxy Production Gallery and Hardy on the street in New York.

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.

Collaboration with Joseph Scheer (print making artist specializing in moths) and Rebekkah Palov.
Choreography and editing by Eiko Otake, assisted by Rebekkah Palov.
Eiko is deeply grateful to Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University.

From the performance by the same name, by Suzanne Lacy, Stan Hebert, Councilwoman Sheila Jordan, Frank Williams, Officer Terrance West, Mike Shaw, and Annice Jacoby, Oakland, 1995-6. Suzanne Lacy worked alongside youth activists, city council members and the mayor’s office to draft a Youth Policy Initiative that would create a dedicated stream of funding to serve youth needs. In the spring of that year, No Blood/No Foul was a performance on the eve of the Policy’s vote by the Oakland City Council, with Mayor, Council members and a large audience in attendance.

This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and their body memories each willingly carry. In January 2020, New York based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate. The surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko's visit and the pandemic has made Wen's visit to the USA impossible but the collaboration continued.

A trans performers enacts an improvised strip-tease in silence, adhering to directions of positioning and movement. The performance fails to reveal genitals. Perspective oscillates between three stages of distance from the subject; re-focusing and reframing the (lack of) genital revelation. 

A short story about new bodies, the power of denial, and a state of no sunshine. Two infantile bodies float in a cyberspace ball, connected by two subconscious bodies in the background. The attempt at unification and metamorphosis is interrupted by one part as the other is liberated. A glance over the shoulder means destruction.

The sources for the soundtrack are fragments of the childish voices of early Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder songs.

Performed by Bjørn and Roald Melhus.

The earliest of Benglis's videoworks, Noise calls attention to the assemblage element of video by allowing the image to disintegrate into static between edits. Benglis also plays back several generations of image and soundtrack to introduce increasing amounts of distortion. Conversation is reduced to unintelligible noise, resulting in the disassociation of sound and image that to some extent characterizes her later work.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

...were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come A project of The Speculative Archive "Peace. I don't want it. Justice. Why? Victory? Makes me sick! Love? What a pity. Freedom? Ugly! Friendship? My ass!" Rami Farah, a young Syrian performer, uses various modes of address such as a promise, a threat, a curse, a joke, a lament, and a premonition in order to speak to the current state of affairs in Syria and the Middle East.