Devils Reign

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.

In this tape, Ko Nakajima and Video Earth Tokyo interview a homeless man. The subject is initially angry and frustrated, but gradually opens up and shares stories about his life. Under A Bridge was later broadcast on cable television.

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.

A showcase of Paper Rad's individual and group creations in the form of Trash Talking, a show for kids with bizarre characters trying to find their place in the world.

An experimental short film from Mi-sen Wu.

This is the first in a series of films using documentary, industrial and educational film footage from the Prelinger Archive and The Internet Archive. The film explores the theme of technology, showing how the future can be edited and manipulated through advances in computer science. As the narrative in the film says "The art of computer graphics is only in its infancy yet it is already stimulating creative thought in far out areas where research is likely to get complex and unwieldy".

Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Hakudo Kobayashi presented the video performance Eat at Video Hiroba's first exhibition, Video Communication DO IT YOURSELF KIT. Two performers sit at a table. One records the other eating; then they switch roles. The live video feed of the performance was displayed on a monitor in the exhibition space.

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!"

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.

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.

In "Falling. Desert. Syn" there is the body of repetition—not of tautology but of smooth resurrection; a body dying and being resurrected in a dance without suffering. A body of the desert, which is not deserted, but instead possessed by a force of attraction towards the sky, a force as strong as the one towards the earth. A body for the stars, the same one which plunges into the underworlds.

Short video art piece.

Short video art piece.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.