In The Reflecting Pool , all movement and change in an otherwise still scene is confined to the reflections on the surface of a pool in the woods. Suspended in time, a man hovers in a frozen, midair leap over the water, as subtle techniques of still-framing and multiple keying join disparate layers of time into a single coherent image. Viola writes, "the piece concerns the emergence of the individual into the natural world a kind of baptism."

Is based on the structure of acoustic phenomena and the psychological dynamics of a man screaming at the end of a long dark corridor. With each successive scream, the camera point of view hurtles at high velocity along the length of the hallway in decreasing increments. The corridor and the cinematic structuring of the camera's advance act as metaphors for passage and transition between two worlds, bridged by the individual's cathartic screams.
Bill Viola is a major figure in video art. His works, which have received international recognition, are distinguished by a confluence of allegorical resonance and virtuosic control of technology. Viola explores video's temporal and optical systems to metaphorically examine modes of perception and cognition, and ultimately chart a symbolic quest for self. His investigations of visual and acoustic phenomena, illusion and reality, achieve a poetic articulation of visionary transcendence.

Michael Snow's film Wavelength has been acclaimed as a classic of avant-garde filmmaking since its appearance in 1967. In 2003 Snow made WVLNT , a "re-mix" which created a new work consisting of simultaneities rather than the sequential progressions of the original work. WVLNT is composed of three unaltered superimpositions of sound and picture.
Michael Snow is recognized as one of the most important experimental filmmakers, as well as an accomplished visual artist and musician. His groundbreaking and influential 1967 film Wavelength is a key work in the history of structuralist cinema. In recent years Snow has been working with digital media, exploring electronic processes to further his rigorous investigations into the nature of representation and perception.

To create this dense pop collage, Bell-Smith overlaid the first twelve parts of R. Kelly's soap opera/song cycle, Trapped in the Closet , playing them simultaneously. He writes, "I wanted to take this cultural object and amplify its peculiarity by folding the song and narrative onto itself." The result is a thick blur of overlapping forms and ghostly voices atop a plodding beat, all building to a chaotic crescendo and release.
Michael, uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. His work often incorporates the visual vocabulary of the Internet, such as animated gifs and lo-res images, and references the aesthetics and semiotics of common computer programs such as Powerpoint and Web sites such as YouTube. Remixing and reinterpreting sources ranging from industrial videos and music clips to classic cinema and contemporary art, Bell-Smith reconsiders the cultural meaning of these materials in a "post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google" age.

Program II
This program of recent video works, drawn from the collection of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), examines the incursion of technology into the cultural and personal fabric of everyday life. In visions that are alternately dark or humorous, dystopian or celebratory, these works consider the implications of a wired world in which human and social interactions are mediated, and nature and the body are alienated. Remixing and reinterpreting sources ranging from industrial videos to classic cinema and appropriated films, these artists question the cultural meaning of these materials in a landscape saturated with technology and consumerism. These recent works are set against a seminal 1969 video that offers an ironic yet utopian intersection of technology, culture and nature.

MICHAEL BELL-
SMITH
Video Created to Fix Stuck Pixels in Computer Monitors Recast (with Soundtrack and Sunset) as Video to Fix Your Stuck Mind.

In this short work, Bell-Smith combines three found elements: an industrial video designed to fix stuck pixels in computer monitors, an animation of a sunset and a New Age soundtrack.
Michael Bell-Smith uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. His work often incorporates the visual vocabulary of the Internet, such as animated gifs and lo-res images, and references the aesthetics and semiotics of common computer programs such as Powerpoint and Web sites such as YouTube.

PEGGY AHWESH
The Third Body

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations: a human hand is shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conduct virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigate virtual spaces. Cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality.
In Peggy Ahwesh's body of experimental film and video, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance, Super-8 film, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. With playfulness and humor, Ahwesh investigates cultural and gender identities, the role of the subject, language and representation.

Murata employs exacting frame-by-frame digital techniques to manipulate a found source, turning a fragment of B-movie footage (from the 1981 film Caveman) into a seething morass of color and shape that decomposes and reconstitutes itself thirty times per second. Conjuring digital turbulence from broken DVD encoding, he carefully tends bad video compression to generate a painterly, sometimes violent flow of digital distortion.
Takeshi Murata's digital works range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to precise manipulations of the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. Altering appropriated footage from cinema (B movies, vintage horror films), Murata produces astonishing visions that redefine the boundaries between abstraction and recognition.

In Novel City , Thornton confronts the economic and cultural transformation of contemporary China, evoking a spectacle of capitalism run amok. Thornton revisits her 1983 film Adynata , which explored questions of the Other through what she has termed an "Orientalist spectacle." Shooting from her window at the Jin Jiang Hotel in Shanghai, the site of Mao's 1972 meeting with Nixon, she projects images from her earlier film, creating a layered landscape of alienation and dislocation.
Refracted through archival material, texts, found footage and dense soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media. Exploring the aesthetics of narrative form as well as the politics of the image, Thornton forges a unique syntax that poses its critique at the same time that it mesmerizes and confounds.

Trecartin describes this work as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin himself plays multiple roles, jumping back and forth between male and female identities. Self-absorbed and with no attention spans, the stylized characters are constantly on the phone or online. Their e-mail exchanges and Internet searches are channeled into bright animations that intersect with the "real world”; the story moves from person to person like a browser surfing through Web pages.
Ryan Trecartin is an innovative young artist whose fantastical video narratives seem to be conjured from a fever dream. Collaborating with an ensemble cast of family and friends, Trecartin merges sophisticated digital manipulations with footage from the Internet and pop culture, animations, and wildly stylized sets and performances.

NAM JUNE PAIK
and JUD YALKUT
Electronic Moon No. 2

This historical video work from 1969 - the year of the first moon landing -is a seminal electronic exercise by video art pioneer Nam June Paik and filmmaker Jud Yalkut. Set to music by Debussy, Paik's “electronic moon” is manipulated and colorized. The piece is at once playful and lyrical; seen from the perspective of forty years, the artists' vision of the intersection of technology, culture and the natural world is both utopian and ironic.