50 years of moving Image

This video, which is annonymous, presents a moment, a pause, an intermission. A jazz tune is coupled with a static image of a man seated cross-legged, watching monitors levitating in the sky.

A lovers' rendez-vous coincides with an imaginary erotic encounter. Real time is superimposed onto a dream of desire and pleasure, where male and female bodies become animated images in a uni-dimensional space. The body is highlighted in this video ; feedback effects are related to the images of the lovers and give the impression of bodies that can radiate thoughts and desires. Female and male images are superimposed upon one another but they never join. The filming techniques employed involved shooting the characters separately on a white background and subsequently uniting them through such special effects as negative-positive and fade-in and fade-out within the edit. According to Mousse Guernon, this work is the first erotic animation video.

Using electronic feedback, this video is a crazy roller-coaster ride of images circling, bypassing and being superimposed on one another as they dance about the screen. Fascinating to the eye, the images resemble abstract geometric forms. Bursting and streaming images on the screen are backed up by an extremely emotive soundtrack by Michel Hinton.

Like Video Clouds, Fireworks presents electronic colorization tests, here fireworks.

Taking place in an unspecified year in the early 1990s, a night of mindless television channel flipping is slowly interrupted and overtaken by a pirate television signal. A flood of colours emanating from video feedback, warring tribes displayed through a modified oscilloscope, and a flurry of gun violence repeated via luminance keying dominate stations one by one. Abstract imagery through analog video glitch techniques forewarn the passive television viewer that the far-right American political system to come will not be the result of a sudden shift. Instead we will see a rise of increasingly conservative policies followed by a moulding of public perception by broadcast television. As Cable Box progresses, commercials, sitcoms, and nightly news segments begin to highlight the true nature of broadcast television: to serve the financial and neoliberal interests of media conglomerates.

Composed of found footage sourced through hundreds of VHS tapes, Cable Box is faithful to the video-art tradition of turning the analog television signal against itself. Like Nam June Paik and Richard Serra before him, director Rob Feulner (b. 1987) uses broadcast television tools to demonstrate that the television signal controls society for an elite agenda while creating thematic links to our current Internet landscape.

Richard Martin has captured the choreography of a dancer, shooting the performance nine times as a way of accentuating contrasts and producing an abstract composition of form and movement. In the video, contrasts gradually increase until the dancer’s gestures are but abstract black and white movements. The music remains while the commentary disappears.

Puerto Rico Tautology (14 dubs high) was recorded in 2015 and completed in early 2016. Found footage of Puerto Rican families celebrate in the street as the Fania All-Stars perform in the background. The clip, recorded on VHS, is dubbed to another VHS tape and played again. The image and sound gradually decay with each dub, until the image breaks completely.

Inspired by the mass exodus of Puerto Ricans moving to Orlando, Florida, this piece is an illustration of the economic degradation of Puerto Rico. The island, much like the video, is losing its vibrancy and colour, but more alarmingly the island is being robbed of its resources and standard of living through increasing debt of Wall Street hedge funds. This is also represented through the audio, as the crowd and the music are increasingly distorted and difficult to hear. A House of Representatives member can be heard over the VHS audio, pleading with Congress to allow Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy. As the distortion increases, the house member's message becomes less clear, lost in the ether of the ignored United States territory.

Again And Again We Ask These Questions is a video that takes into consideration all species, cultures and lifeways that are no longer in existence or are being driven towards extinction. It commemorates and reaches out to those already gone and to those threatened. The performer reads, from cover to cover, a collection of repeated questions of an existential nature, printed in black ink on newsprint paper. Each time the book is opened and its pages exposed to air and light, the newsprint paper fades and yellows.

A young apathetic woman is watched by a video camera. The camera and its accomplice, Ms. Special Effects, make her re-live a state of profound distress, leading the character to change her perception of herself. They try to provoke a reaction from the character. The young woman experiences the special effects and the camera movements as if she were inside the image. Through the character's upheavals of consciousness, the video's mirror-effect is averted in a playful manner, in order to propose an original and ironic reflection on the notions of identity, self-image, and video art.

Mother and daughter embrace the difficult intricacies of explaining art to each other through an intimate action. This is intercut with a straightforward description of Joseph Beuys’ well-known 1965 performance, How to explain pictures to a dead hare. Absurdity and terderness merge to reveal understanding as a sensory activity.

Louis visits his parents for a week, and wishes to find a way to break the news. His parents are intrigued to see their son making such an effort running around with a camera. So they approach and make efforts themselves to understand what he is doing. They are surprised by how much attention a camera can give to its subject. But what has Louis, Antoine, and Thérèse moving so willfully toward the unknown? They embark together on what becomes a common project, they feel that what is to come must override their fears. The video begins after eight hours of live camera. The author states : "Why should I tell you, you will ask me? Very simply because, or else, I wouldn't have anything to say."

A portrait of American artist, David Fincham, who lives with AIDS. All the while executing a series of still-life paintings in his large studio, Fincham comments on the impact of AIDS on his life and artistic practice. With humour, he discusses catholicism, homosexuality, death, art and the politics surrounding AIDS in America.

News from another pandemic, the one that ‘changed everything’ before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly infected, or those who, like myself, managed a new life after death. Based on a text by David Wojnarowicz.