Program I. Body Language/Self Image
These seminal works of the 1970's reflect the dynamic confluence of early video with the process of Body Art, performance and conceptual art. The emergent medium is used to initiate often visceral confrontations with the spectator; face-to-face addresses of the artist to the viewer. Often exploiting video's immediacy, intimacy of scale, and real time duration, they investigate private and public space, viewer and viewed. The camera acts as a mirror, as artists scrutinize the physical body to expose the psychological self. Program II: Mediated Realities
Reflecting the saturation of media and electronic technologies in everyday life, these tapes are engaged with issues of subjectivity, identity and difference in relation to media culture, representation, language and image-making. Dating primarily from the 80's, they are informed by strategies of appropriation and deconstruction, mass media critique, and feminist and poststructuralist analyses. These tapes inquire how perso-nal and cultural mythologies are constructed within historical, economic and representational systems and also reveal an explosion of innovative imaging forms and technologies, as artists devised highly expressive electronic vocabularies and inscribed them with new meaning. The media becomes a looking glass, a theater of collective memory, as visions of contemporary reality are both constructed by and reflected in a televisual mirror. Program III: Identity Politics: Personal and C ultural Interventions
In the late 80's and early 90's, young videomakers are engaged in critical investigations of the politics of identity, examining how the self is historically constructed and perceived in relation to race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. These artists articulate a profoundly politicized subjectivity, rewriting the terms of enunciation from a perspective outside of the dominant cultural narratives, inserting their own voices and retelling their stories, they investigate how the fictions of media culture reinforce embedded sexual and racial mythologies and define identities. The A Ha! Experience Julie Zando