Filmforum 50, program 14: The 21st Century Odyssey

Los Angeles Filmforum, EZTV, and Hollywood Entertainment present

Filmforum 50, program 14: The 21st Century Odyssey

with co-director Barbara T. Smith in conversation with Michael J. Masucci

Sunday June 14, 2026, 1:00 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90057

The film’s two chapters will be presented with a short intermission featuring international snacks from some of the countries visited in the film.

NOTE THE CHANGE IN TIME

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members. 

The 21st Century Odyssey is a video travelogue through love, liberatory technology, social and personal mythology, and the pleasures and rigors of making life into art told in part through the pixelated beauty of the videophone. Though rarely screened, it is a rich and resonant chapter in the legendary Barbara T. Smith’s careerlong experiments with machine innovation. Her partnership with Kate Johnson and EZTV documents an epic befitting their shared goals of evolving and synthesizing video art and performance art’s past and future. The film’s patient veneration of the quotidian alongside the grand coupled with the ache of long-term romantic longing re-embodies the interpretive act of translating this two-year-plus durational performance project into its video form.

The film sees Smith from 1991 through 1993 sending photo messages to her lover, physician Roy Walford, while he is sealed inside the Biosphere 2 and serving as its resident physician. Highlighting the newly-available and newly-aesthetically-permeable availability of transmissions via broadcast and teleconference by the Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, the film spans four continents and even the subject’s college reunion. Smith and Johnson’s resulting document of a durational performance is a stirring and strange tale of Smith as Odysseus. Unlike her inspiration, she can reach her (doctor) Penelope via semi-frequent messages. But the resulting tensions of their avant-garde and at-times intangible communication creates new permeations of distance-via-intimacy that are being newly defined as they happen, resonating profoundly in the world that these pioneers created for us. This is documentary as video art, love as performance piece, and a must-see for admirers of Smith, Johnson, and EZTV. 

Special thanks to Mara McCarthy and The Box.

““Performance art is ordeal art,” she explained. “Like this trip, it is about breaking barriers, opening doors, uniting with people, moving beyond the mundaneness of daily life. It’s not about performing or acting, it’s about actually doing it.” -  “‘Odyssey’: A Dialogue Between Two Worlds : Performance art: The Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica is linking communications between a global traveler and a physician in Biosphere 2.” - LA Times, July 7, 1992

“It was a journey to establish a global consciousness for myself. I was carrying with me a thread of goodwill and openness, not trying to convince anyone of anything nor take anything from them, just to experience and learn. I was also embodying the myth of Odysseus ... It was an art issue too. What is a durational artwork? What constitutes it? I think this is also about consciousness. To hold an art consciousness for a long and varied duration. I think that changes or enhances everything I did during that time.” -  Barbara T. Smith via The Box

Barbara T. Smith:

Barbara Turner Smith (born 1931) is an American artist known for her performance arti, exploring themes of food, nurturing, the body, spirituality, and sexuality. Smith was part of the Feminist Movement in Southern California in the 1970s and has collaborated in her work with scientists and other artists. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected by major museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, MOCA, LACMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Craft and Folk Art Museum,  Pomona College Museum of Art, Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, lBrand Library, San Francisco Library and at galleries including Hauser & Wirth, Cirrus,18th Street Arts Center, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Armoury Center for the Arts, Galerie Parisa Kind, Maccarone, Capp Street Projects, 

Since the 1960s, Barbara T. Smith’s work has demonstrated an engagement with issues of spirituality, gender, and power, making vital contributions to both feminist discourse, and the history of West Coast performance art. In 2023 she received solo retrospective exhibitions at the Getty, the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and was included in LACMA's survey of early computer art: CODED. 

Smith received her BA from Pomona College in 1953, and MFA in 1971 from University of California, Irvine where she was a founding member of F-Space with Chris Burden and Nancy Buchanan. She has exhibited widely since the 1960s, and her work has been represented in several historic survey exhibitions that include Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?, Office for Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway, 2009, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MoCA, Los Angeles, 2007, State of Mind, New California Art since 1970, Orange County Museum and Bronx Museum and The Radicalization of a 50’s Housewife at University of California, Irvine. She has performed internationally, including locally at LAICA, LACE, Highways.Beyond Baroque, SPARC, She has been represented by The Box and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from University of California, Irvine.

Kate Johnson (1969-2020) was an Emmy-award winning producer/director, as well as a writer, photographer, animator, performance artist, coder, publisher, and educator. From 1993, she was a principal force behind EZTV, largely responsible for its survival into the 21st century. A cisgender woman, her efforts preserved a seminal archive of LGBTQ+ videotapes, artworks, and ephemera from EZTV’s early history. She was one of the first instructors in digital media at the American Film Institute and then, for 20 years, was assistant professor of Digital Media at Otis College of Art and Design. She guest lectured at  institutions including Kandinsky Library Centre Pompidou, CalArts, SF Public Library, UCLA, USC, Santa Monica College, SIGGRAPH.

Her collaborative work has been seen at institutions including Cannes Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art (NY), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Lincoln Center, PBS, the Getty Center, Los Angeles City Hall, the History Channel, SIGGRAPH, CalArts, Channel 5 in France, AFI/Los Angeles Internationalal Film Festival, The Ford Amphitheater, the American Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archive, LA Filmforum, Bergamot Station Arts Center, Barnsdall Art Park, 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles Theater Center, Track 16, CalState Northridge, CalState LA, CalState Long Beach, Barret Gallery at Santa Monica College, and Columbia College.

Johnson designed many large scale and site-specific projection-mapped works, creating some of the largest digital images seen in Southern California. She co-produced/co-directed an Emmy-winning PBS documentary about acclaimed ballerina Mia Slavenska and as an artist created video art collaborations with celebrated LA based contemporary dance companies. The City of Santa Monica named a media arts grant in her honor.

Michael J. Masucci has been producing digital and multimedia since 1980 and curating it since 1984 A founding member of EZTV, he has collaborated on projects at institutions including the Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (London) the Centre Pompidou, Lincoln Center, PBS, UCLA, the School of Visual Arts (NY) New School/Parsons, the University of Helsinki, SIGGRAPH, Disneyland Paris, Caltech, Anthology Film Archives, LA Filmforum, DEFCON, Humanity+, Burning Man, Highways Performance Space, Wilshire One, as well as at numerous festivals, and professional conferences. A retrospective of his early video art has been staged at REDCAT.

An author and lecturer on topics ranging from information security, transhumanism, and the role of art in the digital world. His work is in the permanent collection of USC and UCLA. He has been included in Getty’s PST in 2011 and 2024, co-founded DNA Festival Santa Monica and has been profiled in various publications and appeared on a number of podcasts and in several documentaries. A cisgender man, he helped save an archive of seminal early Queer media art. 

Masucci has served as Chair of the Santa Monica Arts Commission and is the recipient of six City of Santa Monica commendations for his contributions to the arts. He was an artist-in-residence from 2000-26 at 18th Street Arts Center. He holds a degree in law and certifications in music production, graphic design, computer coding, entrepreneurship and mediation/conflict resolution. Among his awards is a Cine Golden Eagle.