The Ruin

the examination of an inability to get out of bed in the morning.

Computer imagery dances before a techno soundtrack.

Formed in 1969, Videofreex was a pioneering collective of artists and community activists who embraced portable video technology in its earliest days. In 1971 they built the country's smallest TV station in upstate New York, Lanesville TV, and broadcast hundreds of quirky, homemade programs until 1980. Excerpted here are Lanesville TV News Buggy (1976) and An Oriental Magic Show with a min in a box and a barbarian (1973) in a Lanesville TV "live" broadcast with guest host Russell Conner (1975).

A 57-minute long-form music video illustrating the subjects including magic, the nature of reality and chaos - and honouring the works of Robert Anton Wilson, Terrence McKenna, KLF and Alan Moore.

Strange things occur tonight whether the paranormal phenomenon is the invisible invasion of aliens from outer space or light flashes of another dimension? We will never know. Are we alone or may we encounter extraterrestrial species that are coming at night to conquer our dreams, our body and mind? What are you afraid of?

STEINA: “My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition.

Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each gesture. Each articulation of the phrase is given a different emphasis and nuance, as if art were being created from moment to moment. This index of body movements is ironically offset by the repetitive monotony of the exercise.

A video collage created as a backdrop for music.

This live show features the energetic analysis of television network news by Brian Winston. Winston looks at the news as a unique institution, governed by its own conventions and constraints.

How does the "cultured" gorilla, i.e. Koko, come to represent universal man? Author and cultural critic Donna Haraway untangles the web of meanings, tracing what gets to count as nature, for whom and when, and how much it costs to produce nature at a particular moment in history for a particular group of people.

30 minute loop of a rotation around 3d images.

Rhythmically departed from Murata's usual assertive cadence, No Match employs footage from the 1980's game show, Classic Match. The seamless loop of an unyielding contestant's ineptness solidifies as an almost cruel experiment, as the stretched time limit imprisons him in a fruitless guessing game. As 1000 seconds tick off the clock, our relationship towards the disembodied head of the contender shifts from sympathetic support to uncomfortable pity. One cannot help but wonder if this humiliating effort is really worth the grand prize at stake.

In this animated video Shiboogi, American artist Takeshi Murata transforms TV commercials from the 1980s that he had discovered by chance in a record store in Japan. Just as commercials pop up on television screens for 30 seconds and then fade from memory, the imagery used by Murata pixelates and melts into a colorful digital sea. Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that build upon the experience of animation. His innovative practice and processes range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to manipulating the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. He alters appropriated footage from vintage horror films, commercials and movies, and creates fields of color, form and motion, redefining the boundaries between abstraction and recognition.

Experimental video art shot in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle

Experimental video art compiled from video taken on an LG Env3 flip phone circa 2009-2010

A lone man walking across the video screen is the starting point for this dynamic formal exercise. This image and its accompanying sound are subjected to increasingly complex and proliferating configurations to arrive at what Emshwiller calls a "visual fugue" in time and space, structured like musical or mathematical sequences. The walking figure and its de-synchronized footsteps are multiplied, slowed down, accelerated, reversed, syncopated, overlapped and otherwise altered in multifarious variations on a theme, building in a kinetic, almost narrative progression of compositional relationships. The screen is finally transformed into a dance of motion by male and female figures in an abstracted, colorized space. Rather than an analysis of movement a la Muybridge, Crossings and Meetings is a celebration of the potential for representing movement in time and space through video.

"Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" sang the rapper known to his estranged mother as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, but better known to the rest of us as Eminem. That the Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte was attracted to the early-noughties icon is perhaps unsurprising, given Da Corte’s long-held interest in artifice and pop culture, masking and makeup. After a friend noted a passing resemblance, Da Corte started to ‘embody’ the persona of the musician, not least bleaching his hair, in the hope that by taking on these outward signifiers, he might better understand a figure whose politics Da Corte profoundly disagreed with.

An Interface not only between two continually switched over images but also between documentary tape, imagery taken from "reality", and its transformation in the electronic sphere.

In Studies cycle, abstract studies are assembled, which document the Vasulka's early work with electronic material. The visual aspect of Tissues is the work of Steina, whereas Woody engineered the sound.