Death and Dying

On May 11 2004, Steve Kurtz phoned 911 to report Hope, his wife of 20 years, was unresponsive. When paramedics came to his house, one of them noticed that Kurtz had laboratory equipment, which he used in his art exhibits. The paramedics reported this to police and the FBI sealed off his house.

Authorities later said that Kurtz's wife had died of "heart failure," but he wasn't allowed to return to his home for two days while the FBI confiscated his equipment, and biological samples. They also carted off his books, personal papers and computer.

Part cloning experiment, part documentary, Stories from the Genome follows an unnamed CEO-geneticist whose company sequenced the Human Genome in 2003 — a genome that secretly was his own. Not satisfied with this feat, the scientist self-replicates, producing a colony of clone-scientists to save himself from Alzheimer’s. The animated video switches between misadventures in cloning, and a history of equally improbable theories of human development.

This title is only available on Soft Science.

suicide is 70 packed minutes of a fictional filmmaker's crazed ruminations on travel, family history, death and sex as she traverses a world of malls, airports and train stations, chronicling her fiercely hopeful search for a reason to continue living.

A documentary video about the B.I.T. Suicide Box — a motion-triggered camera developed by the Bureau of Inverse Technology (a private information agency), and installed within range of the Golden Gate Bridge to capture a video record of anything that falls from the bridge, and provide an accurate measure of the suicide rate. The piece points to confusing roles for technology within contemporary culture.

— Whitney Biennial (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996)

Spanish subtitled version also available.

A video diary from March 2020 to May 2023: years that cover the diarist's museum show in Vienna, Covid, the death of Gordon Lightfoot and his mother, what it means to be a queer Nietzschean and why tattoos are always untimely.

Audacious romanticism displays gardens fueled by the human heart where feelings blossom amid leaf and brick.

Sylvia is a portrait of the civil rights pioneer Sylvia Rivera for her memorial service in 2002, as told by her chosen family immediately following her death. "A veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, Sylvia was a tireless advocate for all those who have been marginalized as the 'gay rights' movement has mainstreamed. Sylvia fought hard against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York, and was a loud and persistant voice for the rights of people of color and low-income queers and trans people." --SRLP.org

There is so much to absorb: the wetness from the sky. The hooded figure in the box. A big plate of pasta, and that chair on wheels. Messages of moral guidance clash with actions that are on a collision course with dilapidation. And through it all the water runs, the fridge is full and hearts yearn for that which mellows the melody of God’s glockenspiel. For the winds of change rattle the bones of the grim reaper as he swings his scythe in rhythm to a cacophony of corruption intrinsic to this orchestra pit of purgatorial preludes and egg laying swan songs.

Commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) for the occasion of Eiko receiving the Sam Miller Performing Arts Award. Premiered at LMCC’s A Toast to Downtown on December 9, 2020. Shot at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island.

Performer Eiko Otake.
Director/Editor Liz Sargent.
DP Minos Papas.
Production by Cyprian Films, New York.

"In The Very Very End, Barber points to his medium's plastic possibility by somehow traveling into the future and the past, nodding to Neville Shute's apocalyptic 1957 novel On The Beach, while setting an end-of-days story in a 21st Century holiday resort.

This video was originally an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, part of which included the video collaboration Channels of Desire. Recreating coin-operated porno booths, Channels aired one photo image on seven TVs, interrupted only by the viewer inserting a coin and choosing a segment. The concept behind it was the construction of desire in categorical ways, the form of the piece speaking to sexual desire as something that is constantly evading the viewer. The images present women’s experiences with interracial, lesbian, and heterosexual encounters.

Three Songs of Lenin is an 11-minute piece made from three one-second samples taken from the second song We Loved Him of Vertov's film Three Songs About Lenin. Building on Vertov's second song's structural use of moving and still images to articulate a dynamic of Lenin's passing from life to death, this video employs an algorithmic structure where every other frame is the first frame of the one-second sample. The 29.97 frame rate allows us to almost see moving and still images at the same time as an imagining of Lenin haunting the present.

Behind the yellow gates is a realm that sparkles like diamonds under a desert sun. It is a realm ablaze with outrageous flowers, fragrant and poisonous… A realm populated by bare skin scared by flashing swords and marked with stone idols… It is that subterranean consciousness; a land of Mind-in-Time that sends unholy incense up toward Heaven. 

A cinematic firestorm of found footage and pilfered Hollywood images, Mike Hoolboom’s hallucinatory Tom – described by the filmmaker as, "Cinema as déjà vu, or déjà voodoo" – pays mesmerizing experimental tribute to the life and work of friend and fellow avant-gardist Tom Chomont, and was selected by a national panel of film critics as one of Canada’s Top Ten of 2002.

In this tape the Videofreex document an impromptu experimental art gathering in 1971, hosted by New York artist, Tosun Bayrak. Before entering the gathering, the Freex record their encounters with a police officer, passersby, and a member of Vegetarians for Ecological Action (an animals’ rights activist group) protesting the misuse of animals in performance art.

A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us – his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.

A rumination on Time, with a capital "T". Time and its ravages, which really just means its progression, its nature. Set off by an "old" poem, a T.S. Eliot poem that's literally haunted me for 30? or 40? yrs
... even before I became an old man myself.

(It's an old man's rumblings, and it never fails to move me. I used a quote from it in a film I made 25yrs ago, and the book still calls to me from its place on the bookshelf, its pages yellow, dry as bone.)

Radio reports analyze staged photographs we do not see, showing the victims of a mass murder committed by Mexican soldiers. The politicization of the film accounts for the duality between framing and mis-framing, and also shows the overflowing character of a process of transit.

This film uses historical movie materials ('Son of Tarzan' films from 1920 and 1950) together with materials from a vast number of sources to produce a densely lyrical, tersely compacted meditation on brutality, martyrdom, Colonialism, and loss. The soundtrack - as involved and compelling as the visuals - is equally eclectic in derivation and serves to underscore both the intellectual and emotional charge of the film.

An elegy to the popular demands against ominous social and political events in the recent Mexico.

Vanessa is based on the untimely death of Vanessa Jordan. A work about loss and Michelangelo.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

PASSIONS run deep and LOVE flies high on Cupid’s arrow when ‘Boys’ are the desired target.

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

Directors: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys

Director Of Photography: Samuli Haavisto

Producers: Mariana Silva, Pedro Neves Marques

Co Editors: Zack Khalil, Adam Khalil

Commissioned By: inhabitants, Contour Biennale 8, Natasha Ginawala

Executive Producer: Steve Holmgren

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

Directors: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys

Director Of Photography: Samuli Haavisto

Producers: Mariana Silva, Pedro Neves Marques

Co Editors: Zack Khalil, Adam Khalil

Commissioned By: inhabitants, Contour Biennale 8, Natasha Ginawala

Executive Producer: Steve Holmgren

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

Directors: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys

Director Of Photography: Samuli Haavisto

Producers: Mariana Silva, Pedro Neves Marques

Co Editors: Zack Khalil, Adam Khalil

Commissioned By: inhabitants, Contour Biennale 8, Natasha Ginawala

Executive Producer: Steve Holmgren