»Video Art Manual«, 2011 by Keren Cytter.

“Future Memory”, 2010 by Johan Eldrot.

“Please water the plant and feed the fish”, 2008 by Juliette Blightman.

»Cop Head 69«, 2006 by Dean Sameshima.

»Art must be beautiful«, 1975 by Marina Abramović. I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat ‘Art must be beautiful’, ‘Artist must be beautiful’, until I have destroyed my hair and face.

»Oil Painting Self Portraits Made In China«, 2007 by Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen.

Instructions for making the “Ecolo” flower-vase, 1995 by Enzo Mari.

»New York – Las Vegas«, 2007, by Cory Arcangel, instructs viewers on the easiest way to leave Manhattan behind and spend a weekend in Las Vegas. Using Google maps, he describes the fastest route from the Bowery to the nearest Vegas casino.

»Stock Exchange«, 2006, takes the form of a video ‘letter’ written to the footage acquisitions department at Artbeats Software, Inc., a company whose main business is to provide high quality and royalty-free film and video clips for commercial clients. The artist theorizes how the company might go about accepting (or not accepting) footage shot by freelance videographers, eventually asking Artbeats to define their selection criteria. The response, during which a representative of the company lists a set of ‘shooting tips and guidelines’ is juxtaposed with actual clips from the Artbeats catalog. The work as a whole seeks to meditate on the construction of visual meaning in today’s very fluid (and increasingly template-driven) image economy.

»i (towards a reconciliation with technoromanticism)«, 2004, is an inquiry into modes of escapist representation within leisure and entertainment technology. Apple’s iTunes software was modified using Apple’s own plug-in architecture, originally built to allow non-affiliated programmers an opportunity to come up with their own algorithms for the ‘Visualizer’ component of iTunes. In this case the original Visualizer engine was swapped out, not for another synced color/shape generating algorithm, but for a looped video of the artist creating light patterns with common sparklers. The piece was shown orginally on a laptop computer playing seminal classics by Kratfwerk, but any music can be played. By Nate Harrison.

Tomo Savic Gecan