Humor

Probably the World's Smallest TV Station -- Video Television Review: Lanesville TV

The town of Lanesville, NY was home to the Videofreex for more than ten years, and their house was know as "Probably the World's Smallest TV Station." This overview details the regular activities of the collective and their work, and includes examples of productions they made for the Media Bus project. Russell Connor hosts the program and interviews various Media Bus members.

Includes:

Videofreex

Sybil

Nancy Cain interviews an upside down chin face about Women's Liberation, asking "Where do you stand on the subject?" The chin face professes to be happy with her lot, and says she enjoys living alone with her cat.

This video was shot in the Prince Street loft/studio used by the Videofreex.

Videofreex

Mes and Youse

A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person. The exercise is repeated by Nancy Cain and Bart Friedman as the music speeds up.

Videofreex

Laughing Song and Crying Song

A Videofreex performance. Bart Friedman plays the pump organ and David Cort sings. He asks Bart to "Play something that I can laugh to," and much laughter ensues. Then, "because of American society," there is a sad song, and much wailing ensues.

Marc Schwartzberg

Shooter

Shooter explores the idea of overt manliness, exposing it to be a flaccid gesture and an exercise in posturing. In the video, I assume the persona of a metal head wandering an urban landscape, making threatening yet empty gestures to passersby to create an exaggerated sense of power and machismo. I use three different songs by Motorhead, that are never allowed to get past the opening guitar riffs, to further construct a sense of masculinity that falls back onto itself. I also utilize humor to facilitate exposing the paradoxes contained within my actions.

Kirsten Stoltmann

I Spill My Guts Everyday for Nothing

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.

Cooper Battersby, Emily Vey Duke

Lesser Apes

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Stephanie Barber

BUST CHANCE

The audience's engagement with the smallest subtleties and less than (usually considered) spectacular elements of theater is impressive and speaks volumes on the patience and acuity of modern viewers. Their finely tuned sense of humor and rapt and continuous focus warms the cynics' icy exterior. Likewise, the feedback loop of mutual artistic understanding and respect from the performing elements and receptive viewers, and back again, fortifies those who wish to love art and believe it must have revolutionary value. All are satisfied and joyful in the showing of satisfaction.

Jeanne C. Finley, John Muse

Manhole 452

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.

Bobby Abate

A Party Record Packed with Sex and Sadness

A high & low fidelity record of obsessions past & present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman named Shadow-La and a girl in a rose colored wig. Belinda (Heaven on Earth), Madonna (Live to Tell), and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. Home. The Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1980. That orange bedspread, that red flowered couch.

Edward Rankus

Poolside Manners

Skating softly, but carrying a big stick, performer Kristin Elliott engages in an interlocking series of skits involving simple, slapstick activities performed by a pristine outdoor pool and in a venetian blind windowed corner of a room. Bodies of water - an aquarium is transported into the interior space - become a major link between these two settings. These containers of water end up functioning as both wombs and graves.

Mike Kuchar

Splatter Movie

Sex, sleaze, drugs, blood, and much, much more!

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Jungle Thrills

"Nature on a rampage in a land gone mad!!", quotes this fake promo.

-- Mike Kuchar

HalfLifers

HalfLifers: The Complete History, 1992 - 2010

HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends and fellow media artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony M. Discenza. Embracing a gestural improvisation-based performance style and championing a rigorously low-fi aesthetic, HalfLifers engages a shifting region of speculative fictions, from play therapy and improvised crisis re-stagings to zombie architectural systems and psychic sandwich surgery.

George Kuchar

HotSpell

This final weather diary travels through some rough inner and outer domains. Social interactions blend more smoothly than the clash of air masses which threaten to clobber a prairie town in a vortex of violence.

Flashbacks and flashpoints flare-up along with thunderheads that loom and boom with vibrations of doom, their every move charted with vivid vibrancy on videographic maps which detail developing devastation.

Desire and death are in the air along with some aromatic wisps of ethnic edibles, so be sure to sniff it all.

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