The Medium Is the Medium(1968)
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.

Movie: The Medium Is the Medium
The Medium Is the Medium
HomePage
Overview
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.
Release Date
1968-06-16
Average
0
Rating:
0.0 startsTagline
Genres
Languages:
Similar Movies
Image Modulator (Document of Installation)(ja)
Yamaguchi writes, "In April 1969, Image Modulator was shown at the Sony Building exhibition Electromagica '69, using three Trinitron color TV monitors behind a glass that created an optical effect. The glass acted as a literal filter, adding a mosaic effect to the video images."
Ooi and Environs(ja)
A video installation using three monitors and mirrors, Ooi and Environs depicts the Tokyo cityscape with electronically modified footage of the city. Aiming to create an interactive environment, images reflected on the mirror shift as audience members move.

Animal Charm: Golden Digest(en)
Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

Negativland: No Other Possibility(en)
In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.

Between Science and Garbage(en)
A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.
Behind a Hill(en)
This documentary is a journey into our own fascination, a collection of portraits of folk musicians living in New England, and a study of the ground on which their music is founded. We listen to them as they tell their stories and play their music. First and foremost, Behind a Hill is a tribute to these musicians and a rare peep into the house parties and basement jams of New England, in the northwestern corner of the USA, with the vain hope attached that maybe you, the viewer, will grow as fond of the music as we have. When we first encountered these musicians, we were overwhelmed by the quality of their musical output. We were entranced by the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and tempos and every other element that constitutes a song (or, as is often the case, a piece of abstract drone music, heavy feedback, or someone banging a steel pipe against a bag of dirt while chanting in a yet undiscovered language, or...).

The Tape-Beatles: The Grand Delusion(en)
Produced in 1993, The Grand Delusion is one of our most completely realized works. In addition to taking the usual form of a Tape-beatles release (a CD), The Grand Delusion was also delivered in the form of an ‘expanded cinema’ presentation involving three-screen motion picture projections and sound. The screen space for this production is intended to be three times the width of the normal 3 to 4 "Edison" aspect ratio of 16mm. The presentation only uses the full width intermittently, so transitions from one form to the next has been translated here by means of a video effect. As a live performance presentation, The Grand Delusion has been screened in dozens of venues across North America and Europe.
Camera, Monitor, Frame(ja)
Camera, Monitor, Frame is the first installment of Takahiko Iimura's "Video Semiotics Triptych" (the other two works are Observer/Observed, made in 1975, and Observer/Observed/Observer, made in 1976). The work analyzes the fundamental components of video: the camera, the monitor, and the frame, focusing on the role of each within a system of video as analogous to the functions of vision and speech.
Hand No.2(ja)
Using video technology as an extension of his body, Yamamoto interacts with a pre-recorded image of his hand displayed on a monitor.

Gloria Mundi(fr)
An actress of political torture movies made by her husband has to finish his latest film and arrange a screening for distributors while the husband, who is also secretly an anarchist revolutionary, is away for some resistance operation.
Vezdekhod(en)
Image by Carlos Casas. Double screen projection with live soundtrack. Images and sound captured on location. Somewhere in the tundra, Chukotka Region, Northeastern Siberia, Russian Federation. Music by Prurient. Published by Von Archives. N 66° 37’ 916, W 172° 40’ 353, Sept 2006.
Biotaxia(en)
A successful actress with three children takes an artist lover to fill a void in her life. This avant garde feature illustrates the alienation of an individual who is lonely despite the wealth and fame her career has brought to her. Jose Maria Nunes wrote the screenplay which relies heavily on verbiage and philosophical symbolism.
Canadian Pacific I(en)
Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.
Kiss 25 Goodbye(en)
Outrage kiss-in at Bow Street police station in London, with a demonstration against homophobic government bills clause 25/28.
The Recognition Construction: Hyojyutsu (Against Application or Mimesis)(ja)
A member of the collective Video Hiroba, Morihiro Wada also used video in his solo projects. In The Recognition Construction, each subject entering the frame is identified by a narrator, while the video camera slowly rotates. As the rotation speeds up the identification becomes more difficult, and the objects ultimately become "indecipherable."

CNN Concatenated(en)
An 18-minute long single-channel video which uses CNN footage cut so that each word is spoken by a different newsperson. The pieces literally asks the viewers questions about media authenticity and give CNN a distinct voice
Un monsieur qui a mangé du taureau(fr)
In 1907, the Gaumont Films company in France made a slapstick comedy (silent, of course) with a title that would translate from the French as 'A gentleman who ate some bull'. Eugene Deslow got hold of that film and added an introduction plus a soundtrack, the latter consisting of commentary narrated by the single-named actor Bétove.

Selva. A Portrait of Parvaneh Navaï(fr)
Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.
What a Woman Made(ja)
In Idemitsu's seminal women's liberationist video, the image of a tampon swirling in a toilet bowl slowly appears, as the artist speaks about the troubling roles, responsibilities and expectations of women in a clinical tone. Minimal in composition, What a Woman Made is a candid critique of the treatment of women in Japanese society.