WAITING FOR TRANSMISSION
1997, Video, 5:00. Camera: Soo Jin Kim
A woman seeks signals while traversing a Californian cliché. It is unclear whether she is successful. This tape is a brief exploration of the body, its desire to merge with the machine and the ongoing search for completion from unnamed sources in unlikely locals.
GRACE(S) 1997, Video, 1:00.
DIDEROT AND THE LAST LUMINARE: WAITING FOR THE ENLIGHTENMENT (A REVISED ENCYCLOPEDIA)
1992, 32:00. Video. Original Audio Works: John Goss. Text/Voice Excerpts: Don DeLillo, Americana, Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God, Salman Rushdie, Ingeborg Bachman, Louis Sullivan, Secretary of Health, ACT-UP, San Francisco, Diderot and d'Alembert The Encyclopedia (1747-1765).
Diderot and The Last Luminare attempts to give new perspective on the aims, processes and structures of the Age of Enlightenment by skewing underlying similarities and examining the evolving differences between the scientific revolution of the past and contemporary nostalgic constructions of the notion of "progress" tinged with fear and desire. Diderot's writings on the function of culture and politics in society and his concept of the distribution of knowledge are made manifest in the plates accompanying the Encyclopedia. These plates structure the video. His subversive model of visual knowledge, designed to democratize information, is used as a springboard to examine current concepts of knowledge control, dissemination and threatened collapse. The tape is an "updated" 20th century encyclopedia with all of the attendant impossibilities, a ludicrous desire to interrogate larger questions through the structures of the past. In a sense it longs for the speculative order of the Enlightenment while realizing the impossibility of its replication. It is about the gap between these two impulses.
DISPLAYED TERMINATION: THE INTERVAL BETWEEN DEATHS
1988, 25:00. Video.
This tape is dedicated to Barbara Terisina Baronique 1949-1987 With: Sanda Agalidi, Joan Hugo, Marina LaPalma, Beverly O'Neill, and Lynn Stadum On-Line Editor: Martha Chono-Helsley. Production Assistance: Joe Santarommana Sound Mix: John Goss. Music: Chaba Fadela "N'Sel Fik", Marlene Dietrich "Das Lied Ist Aus", Ali Baba "Keya Rinia." Text: Marguerite Duras "The Lover."
This tape is both a eulogy and the start of a question. It is about the transfer of history, via electronic signal over the airwaves into the headphones' illustrative images. The tape was meant as a place where images merge into constant illogical and "substitute" pictures. On a more basic level it is about war, storytelling and the location and speaking of (or telling of ) cultural and physical death. There are (contained within the tape), stories obsessed over, cultivated and never absent that belonged to someone who is now dead. They are images that were drawn out from modern "history" and gnawed at until they became bedtime stories that refused to have the covers drawn over them. Stories that bear an uncanny familial resemblance to one another, that speak of cultural and historical amnesia.
MEMORY INVERSION (LOS ANGELES)
1988, 16:30, Video. Written, directed and produced by Lynne Kirby & Erika Suderburg Music and Sound Design: John Goss. On-Line Editor: Peter Kirby. With: Karen Alexander, Carlos Demenzes, Sue Lagudis and Esther Yau. Camera Assistants: Joe Santarromana, Murray Smith and Gary Stella. Aerial Photography: Bruce Schultz. Made Possible with grants from "Open Channels," The Long Beach Museum of Art. A VELOCITY BOOTH PRODUCTION
MEMORY INVERSION (Los Angeles) is an anti-documentary about Los Angeles. The tape deals with other times, spaces and people that inhabit L.A. and in a sense found it, above and below the surface of a city considered to be nothing but surface. Set in an undetermined future superficially identical to the present and past, MEMORY INVERSION evokes what is already different about the urban landscape of one-dimensional stereotypes. In memory inversion, wealth and glamour are cultural exiles, barred from the city. There is pedestrian movement. Nature sheds its cliches. Water is a natural, not political resource. The city's own pre-modern character gives modern settings a hybrid aesthetic; primordial nature stands side by side with tar and concrete. Tar is recognized as a founding substance of the city, oozing into the cracks of icons that refuse to speak. Different spatial Coordinates produce movement that is no longer merely lateral, across vast spaces, but also vertical, up and down, in the depth of an image permeated by familiar sounds made foreign. Access is difficult.
CYMBAL: LIZ PHILLIPS
1985, 15:00, Video.
A documentary on sound installation artist Liz Phillip's audience-computer interactive soundscape "Cymbal."
THE U.S. TRAVELER'S KIT
1984-85, 25:00, Video.
Vignettes depict the U.S. Traveler with the objects of his/her intervention "kit." Surveillance, voyeurism and the day to day ennui of the interventionist are meshed together. The traveler purchases the pieces and learns how to employ them before the invasion. The traveler passes through stages of disintegration. degeneration and attempted assimilation. The viewer is presented with the flotsam and selected documents from the journey, notations of the landscapes and mindscapes the interlocutor traverses and disrupts.
PORTABLE WESTERN LIFE STORIES
1983, 14:00, Video.
Participants were asked to narrate, in sixty seconds an important portion Of their life. Approaches ranged from a puppet performance commemorating the death of a brother to the story of a scorpion under a Texas bed. The theme of the West as a metaphor for "limitless horizons is explored through traditional utopian landscapes from the Southwestern deserts to a careening ride through Bel Air via East Indian airwaves.
LIES, FABLES AND STORIES FOR THE END OF A WORLD
1982, 12:00, Video.
Historical events are examined, from a Chinese movie book on mine warfare to the space shuttle landing. Fabrications and historical "fact" are interrogated. The tape tells of world models and their collapse, a series of souvenir imprint images.
TAPE/ BERNADETTE DEVLIN
1981, 6:30, Video.
An anti-memorial tape made in response to the attempted assassination of Northern Irelands preeminent activist, Bernadette Devlin. through a "re-creation" of the territory of threats and a juxtapositioning of this territory with the U.S. media's obsessive coverage of the Reagan assassination attempt.
TRICK PERFORMED/ DANCE INTERFERENCE
1981, 10:00, Video. With: Fran Zerfas and Lauren Zuckerman
A self-destructing solo dance is performed. The dance becomes frenetic and is interrupted by an observer.
THE FRENCH MAID TELLS HER STORY
1981, 11:00, Video. Made in conjunction with performer Lauren Zuckerman.
A French maid, confined unhappily to a bathroom tells the story of her life while having a small nervous breakdown. She is in the process of giving an interview to an offscreen reporter.
WHEN THE GUNS ARE TESTED/ MIDDLE- AGED REPORTERS
1981, 9:00, Video. Voice: Edward R. Murrow.
Murrow's narration of a World War II bombing raid, a bleak Midwestern warehouse landscape and an explanation of the use of the "Connect" box in Cambodian terrorism are combined to evoke the unpeopled landscape of historical narrative.
CHILD / COLOR / TAPE
1980, 12:40, Video.
One "child1s" obtuse and frustration journey through the bewildering world of object play. She attempts to put everything in place, extract herself from awkward clothes and discover various uses the objects provided her.
BEDROOM / DINNER / SLIDES
1981, 20:00, 16 mm. Written and Directed by Andrea Eis, Erika Suderburg and Lauren Zuckerman.
THE WORK OF MOURNING (TRAUERBEIT)
1981, 15:00, S-8 mm.
SIX VIEWS FROM HER HOUSE
1980, 10:00, S-8 mm
OBJECT MOVIE
1980, S-8 mm.
THE EMPTY LOT
1979, S-8 mm.
THE SURVIVAL TOWER FILM
1979, S-8 mm
NOTES ON A WEDDING
1979, S-8 mm.
