Film Screenings / Programs / Series
FEEDBACK, PART 2
July 21 – August 2
July 21-August 2, 2023
This past spring, Anthology organized a series that explored the filmic phenomenon of “documentary feedback”: films that have created a kind of non-fiction feedback loop by giving their subjects the opportunity to preview footage and then incorporating their responses into the works’ final form. Now we expand the frame dramatically to illustrate the many other ways that the concept of “feedback” has been manifested within the cinema. The films and videos presented here make use of various techniques – including video feedback, sonic feedback, and mirrors – to create visual or aural feedback loops. Other works engage with the theme in more theoretical, conceptual ways, by confronting performers with their own image, reflecting the audience back to itself, holding up a critical mirror to the normally hegemonic broadcast news media, and so on. One way or another, the artists featured here look beyond simplistic, one-way flows of information or expression. Instead they experiment with circular, reflective, or multi-directional orchestrations of images, sounds, and ideas, while also demonstrating how different technologies give rise to different opportunities for variation, analysis, and philosophical or aesthetic self-awareness.
This series is co-presented by Electronic Arts Intermix (www.eai.org). Special thanks to Rebecca Cleman & Karl McCool (EAI); as well as to Tyler Maxin (Blank Forms), and all the filmmakers.
ONTOLOGIES:
We launch the feedback series with a program featuring three works that – each in their own way – offer a kind of primer on the phenomenon, by breaking feedback down into its most basic conceptual or technical elements.
Charles & Ray Eames AN INTRODUCTION TO FEEDBACK 1960, 10.5 min, 16mm. Music by Elmer Bernstein.
Drawing on analogies between the function of the feedback principle in everyday situations, and the way it works in the modern computer, this film explores the cycle by which performance is measured, evaluated against desired results, and corrected for future performance.
Takahiko Iimura OBSERVER / OBSERVED AND OTHER WORKS OF VIDEO SEMIOLOGY 1998, 22 min, digital
“This video trilogy of CAMERA, MONITOR, FRAME, OBSERVER / OBSERVED, and OBSERVER / OBSERVED / OBSERVER creates a semiology of video as a work on video rather than a written text. Its main purpose is to study the structural relationships between video and language, in this case using the English language.” –Takahiko Iimura
Steina & Woody Vasulka VASULKA VIDEO: STEINA 1978, 29 min, video
In 1977 the Vasulkas were commissioned by public television to create six half-hour programs for broadcast on WNED in Buffalo, New York. In the resulting series, entitled VASULKA VIDEO, the Vasulkas introduce and contextualize their works and discuss their processing techniques, providing invaluable insights into their groundbreaking experiments with electronic image and sound manipulation.
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Fri, July 21 at 7:00.
MIRRORING:
The films in this program make use of the simplest and most traditional technique for creating feedback loops: the mirror. Whether setting two mirrors face to face to create infinitely receding reflections or using reflective surfaces to allow the artist or performer to interact with their own image, these works utilize literal mirrors to explore the capacity of the moving-image to “mirror” reality.
Robert Morris MIRROR 1971, 9 min, 16mm, silent
“In MIRROR, the artist himself holds a large reflective surface and walks backward, facing the camera, through a snow-covered field. The surrounding trees and sky appear in the mirror as a frame within a frame, and, as Morris retreats, he seems to be stealing, magically, a piece of the landscape.” –Robert Shuster, VILLAGE VOICE
General Idea DOUBLE MIRROR VIDEO 1971, 6 min, video
In this early conceptual experiment by General Idea, the artists manipulate reflecting surfaces to generate optical “feedback.” Two mirrors are positioned to face one another over the edge of a lake. The mirrors are gradually tilted as the camera zooms in and out, revealing fragments of faces and rippling water. The multiplication of reflections produces a kaleidoscopic, disorienting effect.
Joan Jonas LEFT SIDE RIGHT SIDE 1972, 9 min, video
Exploring video as both a mirror and a masking device, and using her body as an art object, Jonas undertakes an examination of self and identity, subjectivity and objectivity. Creating a series of inversions, she splits her image, splits the video screen, and splits her identification within the video space, playing with the spatial ambiguity of non-reversed images (video) and reversed images (mirrors).
Joan Jonas DUET 1972, 4.5 min, video
In this seminal exploration of the phenomenology of video as a mirror and as “reality”, Jonas, face-to-face with her own recorded image, performs a duet with herself.
Dara Birnbaum MIRRORING 1975, 6 min, video, silent
“In this early performance-based work, Birnbaum investigates the notion of video as a mirror to create a psychological self-portrait. Devising a simple but ingenious formal exercise, she layers real and reflected images to articulate metaphorically the duality of internal and external selves.” –Lori Zippay, in “Dara Birnbaum: The Dark Matter of Media Light”, eds. Karen J.Kelly, Barbara Schröder, and Giel Vandecaveye
Stan VanDerBeek MIRRORED REASON 1979, 9.5 min, video
A Kafka-inspired tale, MIRRORED REASON tells the story of a woman who is haunted and eventually replaced by her double.
Ara Peterson KALEIDOSCOPE FEEDBACK 2004, 16 min, digital
Ara Peterson & Jim Drain LARGE VIDEO KALEIDOSCOPE 2004, 2.5 min, digital
These short video works by Ara Peterson – filmmaker, artist, and a founding member of the art collective Forcefield – emerged from an installation centering around a large-scale glass kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope functioned both as a sculptural element and as a kind of screen reflecting Peterson’s manipulations of a feedback loop created with a handheld video camera, resulting in endlessly morphing abstractions.
Dan Graham PERFORMER/AUDIENCE/MIRROR 1975, 23 min, video
“A document of one of the many performance pieces with which Graham in this period explored questions of public and private identity, consciousness, and self-presentation. In this film, he positioned himself between the audience and a wall-size mirror, alternately describing his own actions and appearance, and those of the audience, who were visible to Graham and to themselves.” –CINEASTE
Total running time: ca. 90 min.
Sat, July 22 at 6:15.
FILM FEEDBACK:
Though video is a technology more ideally suited to the creation of feedback loops, thanks to its innate ability to create imagery instantaneously, the works in this program find ingenious ways of achieving similar effects using 16mm film.
Tony Conrad FILM FEEDBACK 1974, 15 min, 16mm, b&w, sound. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation.
“Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?” –Tony Conrad
Paul Sharits EPISODIC GENERATION 1977-78, 30 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“The visual ‘degeneration’ of the image…through successive rephotography is paralleled by the compression of verbal information to the point of its loss of legibility; yet, both the ‘degenerated’ sound and image are perceptually engaging, even in the most advanced stages of ‘degeneration.’ It is obvious why the film has its title, because of the strategies of its coming into being, but, paradoxically, at the level of effect, its dynamics arise from its ‘Episodic Degeneration.’” –Paul Sharits
Takashi Ito SPACY 1981, 9 min, 16mm
A film whose subject is the place (a gymnasium), the time (the ten minutes the film runs), and the unconformity of the reality (the gymnasium) and the illusion (the representation of the gymnasium). All the components are strictly combined in an endless cycle, a Möbius strip, an Escher’s film in a Japanese tempo, from Slow to Fast, from Pianissimo to Fortissimo.
Total running time: ca. 60 min.
Sat, July 22 at 8:30 and Sat, July 29 at 6:30.
PRINT GENERATION:
In each film in this program, a species of “feedback loop” is achieved by multiple instances of re-photography and reprinting, leading to a magnification of the film grain that is inherent to the medium of film.
Ernie Gehr HISTORY 1970, 22 min, 16mm, silent
“I’d like to say more, but words fail me. This is historically reductive. That won’t do. One makes choices. Choices are made. The opacity has been tapped. The black quivers, the matter is set in motion. There is light. Its primeval. Pre-historic. At last, the first film! It trembles in the eye-mind. Unique.” –Michael Snow
Paul Sharits AXIOMATIC GRANULARITY 1973, 20 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“In spring 1972 a series of analysis of color emulsion ‘grain’ imagery was undertaken (the word ‘imagery’ is significant because only representations of light sensitive crystals, or ‘grain,’ remain on a developed roll of color film.) […] [It] was clear that a ‘blow up’ of the situation was called for; a set of primary principles was needed and, particle by particle, AXIOMATIC GRANULARITY seemed to formulate itself.” –Paul Sharits
J.J. Murphy PRINT GENERATION 1974, 50 min, 16mm
“J.J. Murphy’s feature-length experimental film is a meditation on light, chemistry, and the properties of photographic emulsion. Beginning with points of red light, the film takes a single minute of film and reprints it over and over, moving through several levels of abstraction, before reversing course.” –UCLA
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sun, July 23 at 4:00.
BROADCAST TELEVISION, PROGRAM 1:
The works in this program were all made for or presented on TV. Whether they were aired thanks to the intervention of adventurous public television producers who were open to devoting airtime to experimental moving-image works, or, even more surprisingly, reflect the integration of experimental techniques into the realm of mass-market programming (in the case of Ernie Kovacs or the producers of DOCTOR WHO), these works represent an unusual marriage of avant-garde approaches and mainstream broadcast television.
Ernie Kovacs KOVACS ON MUSIC 1958, ca. 5-min excerpt, video
Bernard Lodge, Ben Palmer, Hugh Sheppard, and Norman Taylor DOCTOR WHO credit sequence 1963, 30 sec, video
“The opening title sequence appears as if out of the tailpipe of a rocket, smoke dissolving into clouds that disperse into fog. […] The video feedback ‘howl-around’ technique was created by BBC electronics engineers Ben Palmer or Norman Taylor, and the titles created by graphic designer Bernard Lodge.” –Gabrielle Jennings, ABSTRACT VIDEO: THE MOVING IMAGE IN CONTEMPORARY ART
DOCTOR WHO credit sequence 1966, 30 sec, video
DOCTOR WHO credit sequence 1970, 30 sec, video
OUTER LIMITS credit sequence 1964, 45 sec, video
Lutz Becker HORIZON 1966-68, 5 min, 16mm
“In 1966, Becker met the electronics engineer Ben Palmer at the BBC Television Centre, and hoped ‘we might find some kind of visual equivalent to electronic music.’ Together they explored ways in which visual effects could be created through utilizing a feedback loop between TV cameras and monitors. Made in the age of black and white TV, the film had color added later, and was transmitted by the BBC in 1968.” –ENGLAND & CO. GALLERY
Aldo Tambellini, Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, and Nam June Paik THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM 1969, 17 min, video
Includes:
Aldo Tambellini BLACK 1969, 4 min, video
Allan Kaprow HELLO 1969, 4.5 min, video
Otto Piene ELECTRONIC LIGHT BALLET 1969, 4.5 min, video
Nam June Paik ELECTRONIC OPERA #1 1969, 5 min, video
Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists – Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini – to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.
Peter Weibel TV + VT WERKE 1969-1972 1972, 17 min, video
“The video compilation TV & VT WORKS consists of short performances that deal with the relationship between reality and the film/TV camera while also addressing how television has changed our perspectives on reality. Several ‘Tele Actions’ and ‘TV Death’ moments, as the artist calls them, show actions that define the ontology of an artwork within a televised setting. The common element linking the individual segments consists in fake news reports from Austrian television, which is where the work was ultimately broadcast.” –KONTAKT COLLECTION
Peter Donebauer ENTERING 1974, 7 min, video
“Donebauer was inspired by Jordan Belson’s cosmic cinema, as well as his work on 16mm film before switching to video. His live video-music collaboration with composer Simon Desorgher, ENTERING, was made at a studio at the Royal College of Art, shown on the BBC, and was very light show-like in its layering, erasure, and transformation of abstract imagery. Donebauer worked with electrical engineer Richard Monkhouse’s Spectron, and the two artist engineers decided to collaborate on creating a video synthesizer, the Videokalos.” –HANDMADE CINEMA
Total running time: ca. 60 min.
Sun, July 23 at 6:30 and Sat, July 29 at 8:30.
BROADCAST TELEVISION, PROGRAM 2:
Nam June Paik & John Godfrey GLOBAL GROOVE 1973, 28.5 min, video
This radical manifesto on global communications in a media-saturated world is rendered as an electronic collage, a sound and image pastiche that subverts the language of television. With surreal visual wit and an antic neo-Dada sensibility, Paik brings together cross-cultural elements, artworld figures and Pop iconography. Paik subjects this transcultural, intertextual content to an exuberant, stream-of-consciousness onslaught of disruptive editing and technological devices, including audio and video synthesis, colorization, ironic juxtapositions, temporal shifts and layering – a controlled chaos that suggests a hallucinatory romp through the channels of a global TV. With its postmodern content, form and conceptual strategies, GLOBAL GROOVE stands as a seminal statement on video, television and contemporary art.
Skip Sweeney ILLUMINATIN’ SWEENEY 1975, 29 min, video
ILLUMINATIN’ SWEENEY features interviews with the artist, as well as excerpts from his early image-processing experiments. Sweeney’s credo – “to make tapes as satisfying to me as listening to music” – is explored in short pieces that use the Moog Vidium process, which improvises and abstracts images using musical feedback.
Steina & Woody Vasulka VASULKA VIDEO: STEINA 1978, 29 min, video
In 1977 the Vasulkas were commissioned by public television to create six half-hour programs for broadcast on WNED in Buffalo, New York. In the resulting series, entitled VASULKA VIDEO, the Vasulkas introduce and contextualize their works and discuss their processing techniques, providing invaluable insights into their groundbreaking experiments with electronic image and sound manipulation.
Total running time: ca. 90 min.
Sun, July 23 at 8:30.
EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN VIDEO FEEDBACK:
Eric Siegel EINSTINE 1968, 5.5 min, video
In EINSTINE, which was based on the installation Psychedelevision in Color, a photograph of Albert Einstein is colorized and manipulated to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov.
Scott Bartlett OFFON 1968, 10 min, 16mm
OFFON is a dynamic abstract display of virtuoso film and video techniques used directly and poetically to evoke a visceral awareness of fundamental realities below the surface of normal perception.
Shridhar Bapat ALEPH NULL 1971, 12 min, video. Made in collaboration with Charles Phillips. Courtesy of the Charlotte Moorman Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.
“A video feedback fantasia. Bapat was a key figure in the emerging video scene as both the first video curator at The Kitchen during its most freewheeling period and the ‘finest feedback camera turner in New York City.’” –BIDOUN
Steina & Woody Vasulka DISTANT ACTIVITIES 1972, 6 min, video
The protagonist is a video feedback loop, processed and controlled through a video keyer. Sound is from video signals interfaced with an audio synthesizer.
Woody Vasulka VOCABULARY 1973-74, 5 min, video
A program designed to convey in a didactic form the basic energy laws in electronic imaging. The process of keying, timing and system feedback is discussed visually.
Stan VanDerBeek STROBE ODE 1977, 11 min, video
STROBE ODE is an exercise in video feedback and analog imaging, in which a circular image-field is modified and abstracted by strobe flashes.
Gusztáv Hámos SUPERMAN 1982, 6.5 min, video
SUPERMAN is an early performance experimentation with video as mirror.
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Mon, July 24 at 6:30 and Sun, July 30 at 8:00.
LATER EXPERIMENTS IN VIDEO FEEDBACK:
These 21st-century works find the artists extending and expanding the experiments of their predecessors in ingenious ways, either by shooting with a modified video camera (Ian Helliwell), filming televisual feedback loops with a Super-8mm camera (Guillaume Vallée), showcasing the internet’s capacity for new kinds of feedback (LoVid’s INFINITELY UNRESOLVED), or exploring the potentialities of entirely new kinds of digital and computer-generated feedback (Mike Stoltz and Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten).
Ian Helliwell LIGHT ACTIVATION FEEDBACK 2010, 2.5 min, digital
Ian Helliwell PROTEAN FEEDBACK 2016, 5.5 min, digital
Ian Helliwell MULTIFORM FEEDBACK 2022, 5 min, digital
Robert Beatty CRACKED SCREEN TEST 2016, 3.5 min, digital
Guillaume Vallée SELF-TALK WITH NOTHINGNESS 2017, 4 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
Guillaume Vallée WHAT IS BEYOND THE HELLRAISER? 2017, 2.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
Mike Stoltz TOMORROW: IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO JOIN 2022, 7.5 min, digital
Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) SURFACE TENSION 2017, 3 min, digital
Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) ORTS 2023, 4 min, digital
Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) STATIC ECHO 2023, 9.5 min, digital
Billy Roisz HAPPY DOOM 2022, 3 min, digital
LoVid INFINITELY UNRESOLVED 2019, 7 min, digital
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Mon, July 24 at 8:30.
PETER DONEBAUER: THE CREATION CYCLE
THE CREATION CYCLE was a series of seven pioneering video recordings made over five years. They arose from an exploration of the nature of the universe, the nature of human consciousness, and the connections between the two. The imagery and sound were performed and recorded by Donebauer and Desorgher “playing” and improvising around a theme together in real time with both participants having visual and aural feedback of each other’s transforming contributions as they affected the piece in real time and thus in turn their own continuing contributions. The resulting recorded tape represents the best live “take” from several recordings done at the time. This was the first example of the visual techniques Donebauer had developed through access to the old ATV color studio donated to the Royal College of Art by Lew Grade. These techniques involved manipulating the studio in ways for which it was never designed, enabling the development of a form of “Electronic Painting” equivalent to the “Electronic Music” that was being first developed around that time.
PART 1: BEGINNING 1973, 17 min, video
PART 2: ENTERING 1974, 8 min, video
PART 3: STRUGGLING 1974, 12 min, video
PART 4: CIRCLING 1975, 12 min, video
PART 5: TEEMING 1975, 15 min, video
PART 6: DAWN CREATION 1976, 11 min, video
PART 7: MERGING-EMERGING 1978, 14 min, video
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Tues, July 25 at 7:30.
TELEVISION/NEWS FEEDBACK:
Reversing the process of passive reception that so often defines the relationship between viewers and mainstream media, the artists in this program interrogate and critique news broadcasts, formulating a subversive form of feedback that calls into question the ideological bases and propagandistic techniques pervading the news.
Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut VIDEO TAPE STUDY NO. 3 1967-69/1992, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
This tape is a direct media intervention, in which Paik distorts and manipulates footage from news conferences by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and New York Mayor John Lindsay. In a witty performative gesture, Paik briefly asserts his presence by wagging his finger at the screen.
Michael Shamberg MEDIA PRIMER 1971, 16.5 min, video
Raindance’s MEDIA PRIMERS reflect the group’s theories of alternative television and video, and their engagement with mass media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed – media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior – illustrate their experimentation with the technological and conceptual underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video. In Shamberg’s MEDIA PRIMER, rhetoric and gestures are skewered as he examines the political structure of alternative media.
Anthony Ramos ABOUT MEDIA 1977, 25 min, video
Ramos’s astute deconstruction of television news focuses on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters, and his personal involvement with the issue. Ramos, who had served an eighteen-month prison sentence for draft resistance, was interviewed by New York news reporter Gabe Pressman. Using repetition and juxtaposition, he contrasts the unedited interview footage – and patronizing comments of the news crew – with Pressman’s final televised news report. In his ironic manipulation of the material, Ramos exposes the illusion and artifice of television news.
Antoni Muntadas BETWEEN THE LINES 1979, 23.5 min, video
BETWEEN THE LINES examines the “invisible mechanisms” that control and contextualize media information. Analyzing a news report to demonstrate how facts are mediated by television’s limits, Muntadas focuses on the role and responsibility of the reporter – the person between the facts and the audience. Following a reporter for WGBH-TV, Boston, as she covers a meeting between Mayor Kevin White and a community development group, Muntadas observes the decisions, selections, schedules and editing that determine how the “news” is transmitted on TV.
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
Wed, July 26 at 7:30.
AURAL FEEDBACK, PROGRAM 1:
The films in this program emphasize the technique of aural feedback, manifested either individually (Serra’s BOOMERANG, etc) or technologically (the work of Mike Stoltz, and of Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovačič).
Lynda Benglis NOISE 1972, 7 min, video
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.
Richard Serra BOOMERANG 1974, 11 min, video. With Nancy Holt.
[See “Audience/Actors” program above for description.]
Billy Roisz & Dieter Kovačič smokfraqs 2001, 4 min, digital
“Eight short 30-second sequences punctuated by black frames. smokfraqs, a serial work, is made compelling in part by its structural clarity and formal simplicity.” –Isabella Reicher
Billy Roisz blinq 2002, 7 min, digital
“Billy Roisz had 10 musicians from Austria, Germany, and Japan produce short electronic sound files. These fragments, some lasting only a few seconds, were then transformed into visual patterns by means of feedback loops which function as electro-acoustic impulses and are then further manipulated. The resulting images, each of which conforms to a clear reduced visual concept, were taken out of synch with their original soundtracks.” –Gerald Weber
Billy Roisz elesyn 15.625 2006, 10 min, digital
“This piece goes back to the fundamentals of electronic sound and image synthesis – the electromagnetic signals, their frequencies, amplitudes which are the basis for colors, lines, tone pitch, movement and dynamics. Moving images and music are generated by ‘simple’ forms of signal routing like acoustical and optical feedback, radio waves, bended circuits.” –Billy Roisz
Mike Stoltz WITH PLUSES AND MINUSES 2013, 5 min, 16mm
A ground-less and boundless 16mm film in which a wall becomes a window to a swirling landscape.
Total running time: ca. 50 min.
Thurs, July 27 at 7:00.
AURAL FEEDBACK, PROGRAM 2:
Jacob Kirkegaard
AION
2011, 50 min, digital
AION is a portrait of four abandoned spaces inside the so-called “Zone of Alienation” in Chernobyl, Ukraine: a dripping swimming pool, a ruined concert hall, a mold-infested gymnasium, and an old village church. Two decades after the disaster, Jacob Kirkegaard visited the exclusion area with his recording equipment. His approach was inspired by Alvin Lucier's work “I am sitting in a room” [1970]. While sitting in a room, Lucier recorded his own voice reciting a text which he then played back in the room. He repeated this process over and over again until the different layers of his voice began to merge into a constant drone. Kirkegaard didn’t record his own voice but the voice of the room itself. He put up a microphone and a speaker, started the recording and left. After ten minutes, he returned, stopped the recording and played it back into the same space. With each new layer, the subtle sounds of the room were enlarged and deepened until they finally turned into one humming sound with many overtones. For the visual representation of the four rooms, Kirkegaard explored a variety of techniques, working with layers, overexposure and video feedback, that can be understood as analogous to his acoustical method.
Thurs, July 27 at 8:30.
VITO ACCONCI:
Vito Acconci THREE RELATIONSHIP STUDIES 1970, 12.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital, silent
In this three-part exercise, Acconci explores the dynamics of the artist’s interaction with or manipulation of an other. Each study involves a form of mirroring. In SHADOW-PLAY, Acconci spars with his own shadow image, aggressively confronting himself as other. In IMITATIONS, Acconci attempts to mirror another man’s gestures and actions. In MANIPULATIONS, Acconci – seen by the viewer in a mirror – faces a nude woman and directs the movements of her hands over her body through his own hand motions.
Vito Acconci
FACE-OFF
1973, 33 min, video
FACE-OFF is an ironic collusion of private and public, of exposure and masking, a tense ritual wherein Acconci divulges and then censors his self-revelations. Acconci turns on a reel-to-reel audiotape recorder and bends down to the speaker to listen to it, his face barely visible in the frame. The audio is a recording of his own voice addressing himself and the viewer, recounting intimate details about his life. However, whenever the material becomes too personal, he tries to drown out his voice and prevent the viewer from hearing, yelling: “No, no, no, don’t tell this, don’t reveal this…” Reacting to his recorded voice, he becomes increasingly agitated as the tape proceeds.
Vito Acconci
RECORDING STUDIO FROM AIR TIME
1973, 37 min, video
A documentation of a 1973 performance at Sonnabend Gallery, this is one of Acconci’s most psychologically intense exercises in the inversion of the public and the private. Alone in an “isolation chamber” in the gallery every day for two weeks, Acconci sat with the camera focused at his reflection in a mirror. To the gallery public, his image was seen on a video monitor, while his voice was heard through audio speakers. Isolated in his confessional, Acconci begins a stream-of-consciousness monologue about his five-year relationship with a woman, recounting explicit details of their life together and his most intimate feelings towards her. In AIR TIME, video is a vehicle for both an extremely intimate introspection, and for the transmission of this self-examination into the public sphere.
Total running time: ca. 90 min.
Fri, July 28 at 7:30.
VIDEOFREEX:
Videofreex
KNITTING AND FEEDBACK
1970, 33 min, video
“Comprised of alternating, meshed images – Carol Vontobel quietly knitting, and passages of televisual feedback – the video gets its title from the interplay of these two sequences. It subtly combines socio-political commentary with formal experimentation, existing between the two dominant modes of video art. Traditionally associated with femininity, and subordinated as women’s ‘busy work,’ Vontobel’s knitting provides a source of distracted attention, displaced away from, and in spite of, Nixon’s anti-protest rhetoric droning on out of frame. As images of her bleed into closed-circuit feedback, one gets the feeling of human-machine parallels. Just as she is engaged in the continuous looping of threads, the video-apparatus itself is looping its own signals between screen and viewfinder.” –Nicolas Holt
Videofreex
LAST PARTY AT WEST END AVENUE BEFORE LEAVING FOR THE COUNTRY
1971, 30 min, video
“In this video, the Videofreex host a party during which the main source of entertainment is a video-television feedback loop. In one room, a video camera linked up to a television set allows party guests to see themselves, as if in a mirror, while guests in the other room can also watch the recording, and may speak to them through a microphone. […] Using masks and other props, they experiment with the feedback loop’s possibilities for communication and mistranslation. The last fifteen minutes of the tape become increasingly surreal as the high pitch of the sound system increases, and the camera, now rotated to its side, creates a world of total spatial and audio misalignment. While the party context is a playful one, the larger implications of this feedback installation resonate with the politics of representation utilized and constructed by the news media. It was exactly these types of mistranslations in the media’s coverage of Vietnam and Civil Rights events, conditioned by the misalignment of visual and audio information, that alternative media groups, such as the Videofreex, and activist collectives like the Black Panthers, sought to expose and critique.” –Faye Gleisser
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sun, July 30 at 6:00.
AUDIENCE/ACTORS:
This program features works that take advantage of video’s capacity for feeding the performer’s and/or the audience’s image back to itself, drawing the audience into the work and creating a dynamic, often disorienting, and always revealing interplay between the viewer and the image.
Footage of the RCA “See Yourself on Color Television” pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair 1964, ca. 4-min excerpt, video
“[This piece documents] the first time that color television was presented to the public, [where] it was shared as a participatory rotunda where individuals, passing in front of a camera, would immediately see their color image on a television set. In eye-popping color, this footage is a fascinating look at a public spectacle of real-time feedback loops.” –Ava Tews
Andy Warhol OUTER AND INNER SPACE 1965, 33 min, 16mm dual projection
“A mesmerizing double-projection starring Warhol’s Superstar Edie Sedgwick. Each of the projections presents Edie twice: ‘live’ Edie side-by-side with a pre-recorded video image of herself in profile, appearing to speak into her own ear. This was the first of Warhol’s experiments with a split screen, and it is a dizzying rupturing of filmic time and an inspired exercise in the reflexivity of new media.” –Ava Tews
Allan Kaprow HELLO 1969, 4.5 min, video
“In 1969, Kaprow created HELLO, an interactive video happening for THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM, a 30-minute experimental television program with six visual artists [the other contributors included Aldo Tambellini, Otto Piene, and Nam June Paik]. Five television cameras and 27 monitors connected four remote locations over a closed-circuit television network. Groups of people were dispatched to the various locations with instructions as to what they would say on camera, such as ‘Hello, I see you,’ when acknowledging their own image or that of a friend. […] HELLO offered a critique of the disruptive manner by which technology mediates interaction. It metaphorically short-circuited the television network, thereby calling attention to the connections made between actual people.” –Kristine Stiles & Edward A. Shanken, MISSING IN ACTION: AGENCY AND MEANING IN INTERACTIVE ART
Richard Serra BOOMERANG 1974, 11 min, video. With Nancy Holt.
“Originally broadcast on public television in Amarillo, TX, BOOMERANG features Nancy Holt framed in a medium shot with a pair of headphones on her ears. We observe her as she speaks and then hears her words relayed back to her through a delayed transmission. Remarkably eloquent for one caught in such a feedback loop, Holt provides a monologue on experiencing time, thought, and oneself through technology.” –Ava Tews
C. Spencer Yeh LAUGHING GIRL LAUGHING AT LAUGHING GIRL 2008, 40 sec, digital
C. Spencer Yeh LAUGHING GIRL LAUGHING AT LAUGHING GIRL LAUGHING AT LAUGHING GIRL 2008, 40 sec, digital
In these short videos, C. Spencer Yeh brings OUTER AND INNER SPACE and BOOMERANG into the age of the internet meme.
Dan Graham PERFORMER/AUDIENCE/MIRROR 1975, 23 min, video
“A document of one of the many performance pieces with which Graham in this period explored questions of public and private identity, consciousness, and self-presentation. In this film, he positioned himself between the audience and a wall-size mirror, alternately describing his own actions and appearance, and those of the audience, who were visible to Graham and to themselves.” –CINEASTE
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Wed, Aug 2 at 7:30.
