Phil Morton's General Motors was created in 1976. Then based in Chicago, the late Phil Morton created this project as a playful and critical video response in conversation with a local General Motors dealership from whom he had purchased a van. Segments 'Colorful Colorado' and 'RYRAL' begin after the video-complaints cease. Produced at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where Morton founded the Video Area), this work includes Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti who collaboratively developed the early Video Art scene in Chicago.
Phil Morton's General Motors was created in 1976. Then based in Chicago, the late Phil Morton created this project as a playful and critical video response in conversation with a local General Motors dealership from whom he had purchased a van. Segments 'Colorful Colorado' and 'RYRAL' begin after the video-complaints cease. Produced at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where Morton founded the Video Area), this work includes Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti who collaboratively developed the early Video Art scene in Chicago.
1976-04-18
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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.
Using video technology as an extension of his body, Yamamoto interacts with a pre-recorded image of his hand displayed on a monitor.
Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of every day life in New York City he had taken over the years. This installation is a portrait of the city with its dark secrets, hushed voices and nocturnal images. In this way Cohen tries to bring across an experience to the viewer that relies on absence, waiting and the effort to hear something in the dark.
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.
A collaborative performance, Image of Seeing--Seeing investigates the meaning of television watching. This work was created for television broadcast on the Nippon Broadcasting Corporation's program "Hyōgo no jikan" (Hyōgo Time).
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."
Writes Kobayashi, "In 1972 I started a series of participatory performances where the first person performs an ambiguous action in front of a recording camera; the next person watches the recorded footage and imitates the action in front of a recording camera; the third person repeats the same procedure using the second person's video recording, and so on. Within the repetition of recording and action, the original gesture is transformed by the participants' misunderstanding, interpretation, and memory."
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
Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"
Writes Imai, "As a photographer during the 1970s, my interest in capturing time led me to explore the video medium. After utilizing video in two or three works, I saw a similarity between videotape and an ancient scroll, in that they both capture a story of our time. I started using physical videotape as a metaphorical representation of time, rolling out the magnetic tape from right to left, representing a narrative from beginning to end."
Images and sound captured in Zamboanga city Mindanao, Philippines. During sunset. Part of the Azan series & the Philippines fieldworks.
Outrage kiss-in at Bow Street police station in London, with a demonstration against homophobic government bills clause 25/28.
Writes Ando, "Oh! My Mother was the first work I made using a newly bought 16mm camera I had purchased with the writer Shuji Terayama in Paris. This piece was selected for the Oberhausen International Film Festival. In 1969, there were, of course, no video cameras like ones we see now, and color TVs were only found at broadcast television studios. I had just been employed at the TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System), and I often snuck into the studios after hours to experiment with the equipment. Oh! My Mother was made using the feedback effect, which is produced by infinitely expanding the image by looping the video."
Aggression, Schroeter’s first 16mm film, is the fictive portrait of a woman who is oppressed by her (unseen) boyfriend.
Computer Movie No. 2 is a CGI animation created in advance of video-editing software. CTG programmed graphics on an IBM computer, filmed the screen with a 16mm camera, and assembled the frames as an animated film.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.