In this video diptych, Snyder uses image and music to depict opposing forces in semi-abstract terms. Exploring processes of fracture and permutation, Hard and Flexible Music contrasts two groups of images, gridded architectural structures and fluid natural imagery, on opposite sides of the screen. The experimental music soundtrack carries two synthesized tracks with differing musical qualities.
This title is also available on Bob Snyder: Sound and Video 1975-1990.
Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.
A hyper-collage endurance test of sado-masochistic proportions, mixing an anthology of corporate video music with a feng shui video.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
Kirsten Stoltmann's video, I Spill My Guts Everyday for Nothing, is exactly that, a portrait of the artist spilling her Guts with a blank expression on her face. Again, Kirsten emerges as an empathetic anti-hero, who, in her own need for confessional exposure, must be regarded as equal parts comic and tragic. The work has unexpected power in its simplicity and humor.
-- James Rondeau
This title is only available as a 3x loop on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
"'I am nice. I... am nice. I am... nice," repeats the narrator, in this personal and highly poetic exploration of the construction of self. Mirra favors repetition as the device for reconstructing the stage of development when a child learns its name. Like a bedtime story, the narrator unfolds the tale of a child who identifies herself as a bear. The story becomes increasingly complex as it moves from one voice to two, in which bear and child gradually become distinct entities and the haiku poetry of the child’s identification, 'I, Bear,' is ultimately forsaken for the name Helen.
Using the image processor as it was intended as a performance instrument, Icron exploits the processor’s real-time capabilities: the image and soundtrack were generated through simultaneous improvisation, although the color was added later. The title of the piece is a neologism created by fusing "icon" with "chron" as a reference to the effect of temporal changes on images. Snyder combines iconographic elements of broadcast television with the structural features of music by deconstructing the face of a newscaster into scan lines.
Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.
This title is only available as an excerpt on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
Dykes and trans guys take over the Jackhammer for a punk show.
This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.
A queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago from the point of view of French writer Jean Genet. Along the way Genet will meet, amongst others, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, the Yippies, the Black Panther Party and the Chicago police force... Ultimately, the video is about the difficulty of aligning political and sexual desires.
An experimental documentary about resistance, balance and fame. Kings of the Sky follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy.
Letter to a missing woman, based partly on memories of someone who has been a political fugitive since 1983, combines documentary "evidence" and fiction in an imaginative reconstruction of public documents and private history. This is a quiet, obsessive piece addressing the human costs and repercussions of re-inventing oneself – one’s body, memories, and future – as a living piece of propaganda. The writer/narrator of this "crazy letter" is an unreliable one, a composite of half-truths, paranoid digressions, and feelings of loss.
Fuelled by lavish doses of disjointed hyper-editing, super-talented Jim Bailey dances with wild animals in Animal Charm's hot and exciting performance of "Fever."
Lines of Force opens with footage of a dramatic explosion. For most of the piece, the screen is divided, into a triptych at first, and slowly into horizontal and vertical bars. Electronically manipulated footage shows a man walking, a marching band, ferns, cartoons, a window, and a train arriving on a set of tracks. The naturally occurring lines in the array of images presented mirror the electronically created bars and lines that divide the screen. Natural scenes provide a respite from the frantic pace of the images.
September 24th, 2016, North Avenue Beach, Chicago. It was a sunny day. According to the weather report, the temperature was 75°F, with the barometer reading of 30 inches height and the wind speed of 13 miles per hour. The time was 2:27 pm, I was standing by the Michigan Lake. In my hand there was a waterproof camera that weighs 2.6 ounces. I pressed the record button on the camera and threw it into the lake. The camera sank into the lake immediately and embarked on a mysterious journey. During the journey, it was elevated, pressed, panned, rotated, and spun by the water.
Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary Queer discourse. Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality, dislocated from ‘real time’, into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss and anger is palpable.
Love Songs #1 is composed of three pieces that pose questions about urban culture, race, and politics. Found footage images are manipulated and juxtaposed with popular music; the effects are unsettling, ironic, and sometimes humorous.
¡Macho Shogun! was created by Reed Anderson and Daniel Davidson over a single weekend some time in 2000. It's your basic monster-robot / destroy-city kind of video that we wanted to make when we were kids but never did.
This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
¡Macho Shogun! was created by Reed Anderson and Daniel Davidson over a single weekend some time in 2000. It's your basic monster-robot / destroy-city kind of video that we wanted to make when we were kids but never did.
This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
This 12-minute video by Tom Palazzolo and Chicago writer Jack Helbig tells the story of the recently discovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier. Though she was unknown in her lifetime, her extensive body of work is rewriting the history of post-World War II American street photography. The video, told from the point of view of Maier herself, recounts her life and work, from her childhood in France to her move to NYC in 1951 and subsequent relocation to Chicago, where the majority of her work was done.
Meatballs - (Bill Murray + leading cast) = Marbles. A Hollywood classic re-visited and re-edited until our hero is no longer in sight.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
An electronic disturbance created during a live audio meltdown by Animal Charm as part of their Hot Mirror Mix in the fall of 1998.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
Kipnis describes this tape as "an appropriation of the aesthetics of both late capitalism and early Soviet cinema—MTV meets Eisenstein—reconstructing Karl Marx for the video age.” She presents a postmodern lecture delivered by a chorus of drag queens on the unexpected corelations between Marx’s theories and the carbuncles that plagued the body of the rotund thinker for over thirty years. Marx’s erupting, diseased body is juxtaposed with the “body politic", and posited as a symbol of contemporary society proceeding the failed revolutions of the late 1960s.
In this 2004 interview, Kori Newkirk (b.1970) describes his lifelong apprehension of being rooted in any one place for too long. Asserting that the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was the fifth school he attended in four years, Newkirk begins by describing the fortuitousness of his relocation to Chicago following his expulsion from Cooper Union. Recounting how he fled from the fiber department in favor of painting, Newkirk details how it was a studio visit from Deborah Kass and an exchange program to England that crystallized his burgeoning ideas about “painting without making paintings.”
A two part treatise on needs, met and unmet. A painter putters around his apartment. Spoils his cereal with rotten milk, gets a do-over with a fresh gallon. Over the course of the filming the relationship between the performer and the filmmaker unravels into disclosures of childhood sexual abuse. Rotten milk is the metaphor for all human suffering.
A trans performers enacts an improvised strip-tease in silence, adhering to directions of positioning and movement. The performance fails to reveal genitals. Perspective oscillates between three stages of distance from the subject; re-focusing and reframing the (lack of) genital revelation.
