The Medium Is the Medium

Jun 16, 1968

0h 28m

★ 0.0

Overview

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini — to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.

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Electronic Arts Intermix

GBH

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A 30-year-old actress named María struggles with deep-seated dissatisfaction and emotional emptiness within her marriage. Seeking a remedy for her existential restlessness, she attempts to reconnect with a former lover. Her journey of self-discovery unfolds across the modernist architecture of Barcelona.

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0.0

Vezdekhod

Jun 22, 2012

Image by Carlos Casas. Double screen projection with live soundtrack. Images and sound captured on location. Somewhere in the tundra, Chukotka Region, Northeastern Siberia, Russian Federation. Music by Prurient. Published by Von Archives. N 66° 37’ 916, W 172° 40’ 353, Sept 2006.

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0.0

Hokus Fokus

Oct 1, 2004

A filmmaker gets lost in a world of his own creation, literally. He is plotted against by his outer demons, searches for his lost sex scene and contends with several other versions of himself. A joyful rule-breaking carnival ride through a filmmaker's dreamland.

9.0

The Pink Auto

Jan 1, 1964

The Pink Auto, screened using two projectors, is one of the very first examples of expanded cinema. Jeff Keen walks as a zombie and carry his dead bride through brown English fields.

4.7

Final Flesh

Jun 9, 2009

The Pollard family is calmly discussing their impending death by atom bomb when Mrs. Pollard recounts a dream in which she sensually bathes herself in the "Tears of Neglected Children."

5.7

Helicopter String Quartet

Oct 17, 1996

One morning, the late Karlheinz Stockhausen awoke from a dream that told him to take to the sky. Stockhausen envisioned four helicopters swirling in the clouds, with each of a quartet’s members tucked inside his own chopper, communicating through headsets, stringing away in sync to the rotor-blade motors. He immediately set forth to make that dream a reality. In 1995, Dutch film director Scheffer followed Stockhausen in the days leading up to the premiere performance of his Helicopter String Quartet in Amsterdam. The resulting film offers a rare glimpse of Stockhausen as he patiently dictates every agonizingly detailed measure to the Arditti Quartet.

5.8

Nocturna Artificialia

Jan 1, 1979

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

6.8

The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer

Jun 20, 1984

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

6.1

This Unnameable Little Broom

Jan 1, 1985

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

6.5

Street of Crocodiles

Jul 1, 1986

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

6.5

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies

Jan 1, 1988

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.

6.7

The Comb

Oct 11, 1991

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

6.5

Anamorphosis

Apr 9, 1993

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

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6.7

The Darkness of Day

Nov 19, 2009

The Darkness of Day is a haunting meditation on suicide. It is comprised entirely of found 16mm footage that had been discarded. The sadness, the isolation, and the desire to escape are recorded on film in various contexts. Voice-over readings from the journal kept by a brother of the filmmaker’s friend who committed suicide in 1990 intermix with a range of compelling stories, from the poignant double suicide of an elderly American couple to a Japanese teenager who jumped into a volcano, spawning over a thousand imitations. While this is a serious exploration of a cultural taboo, its lyrical qualities invite the viewer to approach the subject with understanding and compassion.

5.9

Stille Nacht III: Tales from Vienna Woods

Jun 1, 1993

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

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0.0

Sweetly Broken

May 1, 2012

A boy puppet falls in love with a girl puppet. In a cruel twist of fate,they are separated when they are purchased by different people. When they chance upon each other again, the boy puppet does everything in his power to return to her side.

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0.0

Amy

Aug 31, 2004

'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing toward and then across the screen in ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls’ chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson’s God Only Knows. Widely eclectic lensing and looks in various media and in color and black-and-white flow nicely from one section to the next, aided by gifted editor Mark Karbusicky.' ~ Robert Koehler, Variety - Part 7 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004).

6.4

The Calligrapher

Jan 1, 1991

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all the hands and pens in unison, drawing an elaborate feathered wing, which comes to live, peeling off the page, and, now a quill pen, slips in to his hand. He tucks it behind his left ear.

6.1

The Phantom Museum: Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection

Jun 26, 2003

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

The Medium Is the Medium

Overview

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The Medium Is the Medium Trailers

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