THE GREAT CURDLING is a Folk-Sci-Fi film. It’s a darkly comic musical exploring the feeling that collective reality is at tipping point. A middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed a transformative liquid technology that helps re-structure them from the inside.
Babeldom is a city so massive and growing at such a speed that soon, it is said, light itself will not escape its gravitational pull. How can two lovers communicate, one from inside the city and one outside? This is an elegy to urban life, against the backdrop of a city of the future, a portrait assembled from film shot in modern cities all around the world and collected from the most recent research in science, technology and architecture.
"It’s a complex architectural vision equal parts awesome and terrifying… This is a film – and city – to get lost in."
A short documentary about life in the Everglades National Park with its few male residents. Living in the midst of a national park, they learn to exist with the wild. As a female moving image artist, Dana Levy takes on the role of an anthropologist, observing the men and how they interact with their surroundings. Apart from Levy, the only women that appear in Eden Without Eve are in erotic photographs taken by a resident named Lucky, who believes that women like having themselves put in romantic, exotic, and dangerous settings to be photographed.
When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does. Filmed inside a car, this tape focuses on observation of natural phenomena, presenting the obverse of the, "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. Does observation change the course of events? Can you believe in things you don't see? In this experiment, the camera occupies a privileged position — showing the woman and what she sees, as well as what she cannot see.
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.
A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse is a poetic glimpse into the ways centuries of extraction, racism, pollution, and nature's commodification have altered our relationship to sacred land, water, and resources. A constellation of intersecting histories and source material include testimony from a Water Protector at Standing Rock protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, contaminated water in Flint Michigan, and original footage of Hierve el Agua near Oaxaca, Mexico, a rock formation revered for its healing properties.
Six Indians of different Waimiri and Atroari villages, located in the Amazon, document the day-to-day life of their relatives in the Cacau village. These images transport us to intimate scenes of their lifestyle and their intense relationship with nature.
Directed and photographed by Araduwá Waimiri, Iawusu Waimiri, Kabaha Waimiri, Sanapyty Atroari, Sawá Waimiri, and Wamé Atroari.
Edited by Leonardo Sette.
In Waimiri and Atroari with English subtitles.
Planetary battle over the porous body of the earth. This is the battle of the Earth.
The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.
"Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind."
— Harun Farocki
Scenes from a vacation. Music comes on loud and clear and washes over a series of visual impressions of the land and the sky and the faulty plumbing that submerges porcelain bottoms in a sea of unmentionable froth.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE. Years, decades go by and you continue, unseeing, possibly unseen. A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself "what used to be there?" You are only vaguely aware of the district's shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th Century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops.
A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
This video was originally created to be used as a projection in a performance of Bodies on March 29, 2019. DonChristian Jones and Eiko performed Bodies at the public plaza in front of Columbia University's Lenfest Center for the Arts on 125th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive. The footage was shot at the same location days prior to the performance. Eiko re-edited the piece in May 2020.
Camera and edit by Eiko Otake.
The footage of Eiko's performance was shot by Alexis Moh and Sumie Yonei.
A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.
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.
Developed in collaboration with and performed by DonChristian Jones.
The footage was filmed by Eiko during the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, FL in November 2017. Eiko edited the footage in Japan during her 2020 Virtual Creative Residency hosted by Wesleyan University. After editing, Eiko realized this is the first media work she created without her body.
Directed by Eiko Otake as a part of The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable.
Public Discourse is an in-depth study of illegal installation art. The primary focus is on the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art, all performed illegally. Public Discourse is about passionate artists who want their work to be seen by a wide range of people rather than be confined to the systemic structures of galleries and museums.
This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.
"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."
–– Linda Mary Montano
A documentary about Holt’s public installation work Dark Star Park in Arlington, Virginia, this video is about the process of developing and building the park. It includes commentary from the architects, contractors, foremen, and engineers who worked on the project, as well as with people who frequent the park. Holt transforms a site of urban blight into an aesthetically stimulating spot that addresses environmental issues.
Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.
When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does. Filmed inside a car, this tape focuses on observation of natural phenomena, presenting the obverse of the, "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. Does observation change the course of events? Can you believe in things you don't see? In this experiment, the camera occupies a privileged position — showing the woman and what she sees, as well as what she cannot see.
Appealing concurrently in this video essay to various meanings of the term “Subatlantic” — a climatic phase beginning 2,500 years ago, as well as the submerged regions of the Atlantic — Biemann immerses her camera deep in oceanic waters to ponder upon the entanglements of geological time with that of human history.
Bee Film is a collaboration between filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane and composer Beth Custer that explores the life of bees in Hilo, Hawaii and their human caretakers who are working to preserve an endangered species.
The artwork was originally presented as a three-channel film installation including a live score by Beth Custer, with the world premiere at Aurora Picture Show, in Houston, Texas in 2015. Bee Film is available for distribution as a three-channel composite.
Against images of an inventor-chemist juggling brightly colored molecules, psychedelic arms passing out pesticides, and nightmarish landscapes that include trapped live subjects, Oursler presents Hopewell, Virginia—a turn-of-the-century boomtown gone bust, and host to a Kepone pesticide manufacturing plant since 1966. Although Kepone’s extreme toxicity was well established by 1964, production grew and employees continued to be exposed to the carcinogen—eventually poisoning the surrounding area and the James River for years to come.
Extractions parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected her, she reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.
Originally part of a larger sculptural installation using prospector's tools, this tape reenacts the search for "Olga," a miner's wife who disappeared on her honeymoon in 1936. As Paul and Marlene Kos call out, "Olga... Olga...", the camera scans the Wyoming wilderness, and their search becomes ritualistic, the repetitive calls building in intensity and breaking down into chanted moans.
This observational documentary presents Venice as a city inundated with tourists as well as periodic bouts of high water. The tourists take pictures, and endure the flooded areas of Piazza San Marcos. On the canals, tourists ride in gondolas while workers collect the garbage, and others deliver building materials. In the fog we approach the Rialto Bridge and then move on towards Saluti. Here a ritual procession is in progress, an event held every year since 1643 when the plague ended.
