Found Footage

My Only Idol is Reality is a video work created from an excerpt of Season One of MTV’s The Real World. The piece uses repetition as a framework for abstraction —  re-recording the video between

My TV Dictionary: The Drill (1986) translated through digital filtering in 2014.

A self-help speaker encourages self-reflection. Friends in Chicago hang out.

This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.

Vice President Mike Pence eagerly plays cheerleader in chief for Donald Trump. In accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2016, Pence proclaimed, “I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican — in that order,” suggesting how we might understand his role. This ground-breaking, earth-shaking video begins with a pomp-ridden televised press conference, accompanied by uplifting music. Held early in 2017 at the White House Rose Garden, it showcased the president’s announced withdrawal from the historic Paris Climate Accord.

"Shaharazad is trapped at the Baghdad Hilton, so she conjures up an ironic story of the great King Bush's attempt at 'protecting one dictatorship from the attacks of another'"  -  Scott Andrew Hutchins

Baby Bush meets Tubby-land. Completed in August 2001, this project was initially just a simple comic skewering of George W. Bush and his defense policies—but after September 11th, it took on a whole new meaning. State of the Union now has a surreal documentary quality that is genuinely disturbing.

Walt Disney's re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a rapidly transforming New York City. A 'fair use' parody by Bryan Boyce.

"A brilliant video essay."

-- Roger Ebert

A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

— Michael Robinson

"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves."

"This is the first of a set of pieces that involve combining a series of electronic video process recordings, musics, texts and appropriated materials. These multiple elements, simple and tricky grammars, trigger expanding electronic narratives. The trajectories and drags of multiple narratives color the electronics and visa a versa.

Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been documenting the selling of the American presidency since 1984, and have expanded and updated the series with every election. Political Advertisement 2000 features ads from the 1950s up to the 2000 campaign. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the TV spot, what emerges is the political strategy and manipulative marketing techniques of the American televisual campaign process. Political Advertisement 2000 includes many rare spots, some never before seen.

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

Family Court introduces us to the world of good, clean, family fun and leisure. 

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.

In Dry Blood (Sagre Seca), various historical moments of political activism in Mexico are superimposed and corroded on the emulsion of expired film. Footage from the International Women's Day in 2017 is coupled with the recording of a powerful speech about the gruesome aftermath of the 2006 civil unrest in San Salvador Atenco.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

Since his early days in Ant Farm, Lord’s evocation of the automobile has been the car as avatar, as the spirit of America—that consummate combination of superior organized corporate technology and the pioneering triumph of the willful individual driver. Motorist is a 69-minute road picture in which the camera rides shotgun with TV actor Richard Marcus as he plays a drifting driver.

In Animal Charm's masterful example of video montage, a monkey is mesmerized as he watches two dolphins toss a woman from snout to snout. Go cross-eyed with cross-cutting. Sometimes, in order to prevent the insidious absorption of mass media, it is necessary to apply Vaseline to your eyes and ears. Other times, you only need to watch Stuffing — it’s inside of everything.

In this interview, American filmmaker, teacher, and video artist Peggy Ahwesh (b.1954) delves into the key figures and primary texts that have inspired her work in Super-8 and video since the 1970s.  She discusses her early influences as a member of the underground art scenes in Pittsburgh in the late 70s and Soho’s Kitchen in the 80s. Ahwesh’s experimental hand-processing and controversial subject matter can be traced to feminist theory, and her exposure to underground experimental films, including works by Werner Herzog, George Amaro, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and her teacher at Antioch College, Tony Conrad.

"Shaharazad is trapped at the Baghdad Hilton, so she conjures up an ironic story of the great King Bush's attempt at 'protecting one dictatorship from the attacks of another'"  -  Scott Andrew Hutchins

Strained Andromeda Strain is a frame by frame re-edit of Robert Wise's 131-minute sci-fi biological thriller into a 7-minute anxious oscillation.

George Barber doffs his cap to the 20th anniversary of Scratch Video with What’s That Sound?, a mesmerizing montage of questions, answers, and the cries and screams of people caught in a disaster movie. The work uses as its starting point, the film Airport '77 where, improbably, a jumbo jet sinks to the bottom of the sea. What follows is a clever amalgamation of absurd linguistics, cries and shouts, highlighting the artist’s permanent fascination with speech, and human reaction to out-of-the-ordinary situations.

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."

You never thought that Franco-American relations could be so fun! A French thriller in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade, getting it on with Roger Corman's from-the-hip philosophy.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.

Polycephaly in D is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another.

The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2004 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Edited without commentary, the artists show an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Kerry, who are marketed like commercial products. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the campaign TV spot, what becomes apparent is a consistent sameness of political issues amid complex, changing visuals.