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Video Data Bank (VDB) is an international video art distribution organization and resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists. Located in Chicago, Illinois, VDB was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement.
VDB provides experimental video art, documentaries made by artists, and interviews with visual artists and critics for a wide range of audiences. These include microcinemas, moving image festivals, media arts centers, universities, libraries, museums, community-based workshops, public television, and cable TV Public-access television centers. Video Data Bank currently holds over 6,000 titles in distribution, by more than 600 artists, available in a variety of screening and archival video formats. It also actively publishes anthologies and curated programs of video art.
The preservation of historic video is an ongoing project of the Video Data Bank. The total holdings, including works both in and out of distribution, include over 10,000 titles of original and in some cases, rarely seen, video art and documentaries from the late 1960s on. In 2015 VDB launched VDB TV, an innovative digital distribution project which provides free, online streaming access to curated programs of video and media art. VDB TV offers viewers across the United States and beyond access to rare video art, the opportunity to engage with programs conceived by a wide range of curators, and original writing, all while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work. [1] The VDB functions as a Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council.
In 1974, VDB co-founders Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began conducting video interviews with women artists who they felt were underrepresented critically in the art world. After buying a Panasonic Portapak and successfully conducting talks with painters Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin and curator Marcia Tucker, the pair decided to continue the series. "It was really a kind of accident,” noted Horsfield in a 2007 interview. “We were looking for inspiration for ourselves, but we were also looking for information on what was happening. If you read art magazines in the early '70s, it was very rare to see any real coverage of any women artists." [2] In 1976 Horsfield and Blumenthal officially founded the Video Data Bank, taking over a small collection of student video productions and interviews that was begun by Phil Morton at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They went on to add to the archive, conducting talks with prominent artists of the period such as Alice Neel, Lucy Lippard, Lee Krasner, Barbara Kruger, and the Guerrilla Girls, who appeared wearing their trademark gorilla masks.
Lyn Blumenthal died in 1988, and the VDB maintains the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship. Horsfield remained director of the collection until her retirement in 2006, when she was succeeded by Abina Manning, who served as the director until 2021. In 2007 the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) presented Video Data Bank with its Outstanding Media Arts Organization Award.
The Video Data Bank collection includes video produced from 1968 to the present. The early video art represented includes many titles from the Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first and most prominent collection of video art assembled in the United States, produced between 1968 and 1980. These works represent examples of the first experiments in video art and include conceptual and feminist performances recorded on video, experiments with the video signal, and 'guerilla' documentaries representing a counter-cultural view of the historical events of the 1960s. Artists included are Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman and William Wegman. [3] Experimental works by Denise Kaprellian-Bornoff, MFA, in collaboration with Phil Morton and with Jack Bornoff, MFA, were among the earliest titles in the collection.
The collection includes the work of contemporary artists who largely address post-modern themes such as feminism, AIDS, gender studies, guerrilla television, technology, and identity, among them Sadie Benning, Jem Cohen, Harun Farocki, Walid Raad, Paul Chan, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Miranda July, and George Kuchar.
The On Art and Artists collection includes interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics. The interviews focus on the development of the artists' body of work.
In addition, Video Data Bank represents two important video archives: the Kuchar Archive, encompassing the extensive video output of twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar, and the Videofreex Archive, which chronicles the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s as documented by the 10-person collective.
Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. is a 17-hour compilation of experimental and independent video created from 1968-1980, the first decade of video art production produced in 1995. The anthology includes 68 titles by more than 60 artists, and is curated into eight programs ranging from conceptual, performance-based, feminist, and image-processed works, to documentary and grassroots activism.
Chris Hill, former video curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, curated the project. [4]
Valie Export is an avant-garde Austrian artist. She is best known for provocative public performances and expanded cinema work. Her artistic work also includes video installations, computer animations, photography, sculpture and publications covering contemporary art.
Laura Parnes is contemporary American artist who creates non-linear narratives that engage strategies of film and video art and blur the lines between storytelling conventions and experimentation. Her work is often episodic, references pop culture, female stereotypes, history and the anxiety of influence. She was the co-director of Momenta Art with Eric Heist and helped relaunch the not-for-profit exhibition space in New York City; at first as a nomadic space and then as a permanent space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She continued to her involvement as a Board Chair until 2011. Parnes received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She currently teaches in MFA departments at MICA, Parsons, and SVA.
Suzanne Lacy is an American artist, educator, writer, and professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She has worked in a variety of media, including installation, video, performance, public art, photography, and art books, in which she focuses on "social themes and urban issues." She served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, California, and as arts commissioner for the city. She designed multiple educational programs beginning with her role as performance faculty at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Elisabeth Subrin is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, screenwriter, and visual artist. She is known for her interdisciplinary practice in the contemporary art and independent film worlds. She is a professor in Temple University's Department of Film and Media Arts. Her feature length narrative film A Woman, a Part; starring Maggie Siff, Cara Seymour, John Ortiz, and Khandi Alexander; premiered at The Rotterdam Film Festival in 2016. She is also the creator of the blog, Who Cares About Actresses, dedicated to actress Maria Schneider.
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts. New Media art has origins in the worlds of science, art, and performance. Some common themes found in new media art include databases, political and social activism, Afrofuturism, feminism, and identity, a ubiquitous theme found throughout is the incorporation of new technology into the work. The emphasis on medium is a defining feature of much contemporary art and many art schools and major universities now offer majors in "New Genres" or "New Media" and a growing number of graduate programs have emerged internationally. New media art may involve degrees of interaction between artwork and observer or between the artist and the public, as is the case in performance art. Yet, as several theorists and curators have noted, such forms of interaction, social exchange, participation, and transformation do not distinguish new media art but rather serve as a common ground that has parallels in other strands of contemporary art practice. Such insights emphasize the forms of cultural practice that arise concurrently with emerging technological platforms, and question the focus on technological media per se. New Media art involves complex curation and preservation practices that make collecting, installing, and exhibiting the works harder than most other mediums. Many cultural centers and museums have been established to cater to the advanced needs of new media art.
Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970's New York.
Susan Mogul is an American artist primarily known for her work in video art. She also works in photography, installation art, and performance art. Originally from New York City, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Lyn Blumenthal (1949-1988) was an American video artist and writer. She and Kate Horsfield founded the Video Data Bank in 1976.
Catherine Lord is an American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, scholar exploring themes of feminism, cultural politics and colonialism. In 2010, she was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.
Kathryn High is an American interdisciplinary artist, curator, and scholar known for her work in BioArt, video art and performance art.
Chi Jang Yin is an American filmmaker, photographer, curator and educator. She is best known for her experimental films that explore displacement, alienation, the absence of representation, and narrative memory. Yin left China in the latter part of The Cultural Revolution. Her mother, an artist from an aristocratic family, first led the family to Taiwan, and then to Canada. Yin received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Yvonne Rainer and Shellie Fleming. Currently, she is the Head of Photography and Media Art, and an associate professor at the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University. Her research methodology focuses on intersectionality, information literacy, and how digitalization of the arts and humanities can be a form of advocacy. In 2020, she was named the 2020-2021 Presidential Faculty Fellow at DePaul University. Yin is a trained facilitator at The National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, founded by Peggy McIntosh and has received certifications in negotiation from the executive education programs at the Harvard Law School and Northwestern University.
Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.
Sherry Millner is an American artist working primarily in video. She has also worked in photography and installation art.
Hank Bull is a Canadian artist, curator, organizer and arts administrator.
Carole Ann Klonarides is an American curator, video artist, writer and art consultant that has been based in New York and Los Angeles. She has worked in curatorial positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (1997–2000) and Long Beach Museum of Art (1991–95), curated exhibitions and projects for PS1 and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Laforet Museum (Tokyo), and Video Data Bank, among others, and been a consultant at the Getty Research Institute. Klonarides emerged as an artist among the loosely defined Pictures Generation group circa 1980; her video work has been presented in numerous museum exhibitions, including "Video and Language: Video As Language", "documenta 8," "New Works for New Spaces: Into the Nineties,", and "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984", and at institutions such as MoMA, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Contemporary Arts Center, the New Museum, The Kitchen, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her work belongs to the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty Museum, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museu-Fundacão Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and National Gallery of Canada, and is distributed by the Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.
Single-channel video is a video art work using a single electronic source, presented and exhibited from one playback device. Electronic sources can be any format of video tape, DVDs or computer-generated moving images utilizing the applicable playback device and exhibited using a television monitor, projection or other screen-based device. Historically, video art was limited to unedited video tape footage displayed on a television monitor in a gallery and was conceptually contrasted with both broadcast television and film projections in theatres. As technology advanced, the ability to edit and display video art provided more variations and multi-channel video works became possible as did multi-channel and multi-layered video installations. However, single-channel video works continue to be produced for a variety of aesthetic and conceptual reasons and the term usually now refers to a single image on a monitor or projection, regardless of image source or production.
Barbara Sykes into a family of artists, designers and inventors. Since childhood, she has produced work in a variety of different art forms. In 1974, she became one of Chicago’s pioneering video and new media artists and, later to include, independent video producer, exhibition curator and teacher. Sykes is a Chicago based experimental video artist who explores themes of spirituality, ritual and indigeneity from a feminist perspective. Sykes is known for her pioneering experimentation with computer graphics in her video work, utilizing the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago, at a time when this technology was just emerging. Her early works broke new grounds in Chicago’s emerging New Media Art scene, and continue to inspire women to explore experimental realms. With a passion for community, she fostered significant collaborations with many institutions that include but are not limited to University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Center for New Television, and (art)n laboratory. These collaborations became exemplary for the showcasing of new media work. The wave of video, new media and computer art that she pioneered alongside many other seminal early Chicago New Media artists persists as a major influence for artists and educators today. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Metropolitan Museum of Art , Museum of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Metropolitan Museum of Art and SIGGRAPH. Sykes’s tapes have been broadcast in Sweden, Italy, Puerto Rico and extensively throughout in the USA, including “The Independents,” PBS national broadcast, 1985, and national cablecast,1984. Media Burn has a selection of her tapes online and over 200 of her raw footage, master edits, dubs and compilation tapes in their archives. Select grants include a National Endowment for the Arts and American Film Institute Regional Fellowship, Evanston Art Council Cultural Arts Fund and several Illinois Arts Council grants.
Kate Horsfield, is an American artist who focused her work on video art and video documentation. She is also an author and teacher. She is best known for co-founding the Video Data Bank in 1976, an international video art distribution organization with Lyn Blumenthal.