The earliest newsreels to today's tv news engage our desire to see what we can't actually witness. Street battles in South Africa, figure skating in Canada, tornadoes in Kansas are transported to our living rooms via the evening news, giving us the illusion that "we are there." While the "content" of the news may be in the commentary, it is the visual images which seem to "guarantee" its veracity. However, some of the earliest newsreels were faked. Some like Georges Méliès' The Dreyfus Affair, reconstructed important events of the time. Both fanciful and factual, the footage "visualized" Dreyfus' trial for those who had no access to the "real thing", a democratic notion not shared by the French government which banned the film until 1950. While The Dreyfus Affair might be termed a docu-drama, tonight's program also includes early footage of the Boer War and the Battle of Santiago Bay released as newsreels, but created far from the actual events-the privileging of the visual realm taken to an extreme. Keith Sanborn's An appearance and a public statement re-presents kinescope footage of "live" tv coverage following Kennedy's assassination, prior to Johnson's inauguration; it is "dead time" (and as such contrasts with the fast-paced, short news segments of the "usual" evening news) considered newsworthy out of the television practice of covering national crises, even when "nothing" is happening. In The Eternal Frame, Doug Hall as Artist-President Kennedy re-enacts the Zapruder footage of the motorcade in which JFK was shot-footage so massively and repeatedly witnessed that it seems to constitute a national memory. Creating images of images, this T.R. Uthco videotape explores both the power and limits of representation in a society whose access to world events is primarily through television-through mediated experience rather than direct encounters. Nick Gorski, who has worked in tv news for almost ten years, collects "found" images from the tv newswires which he then manipulated in RESOLUTION: a tv trilogy. In Gorski's "broadcast," the corporate world is saluted by world leaders, the weather is magically orchestrated by weathercasters, and the competitive spirit breaks out of the sports world. As Gorski comments, "It's all video, you're not involved AT ALL. You're not there, and you're not doing ANYTHING." In ABSCAM (Framed), media-reality meets artist-reality when videomaker Chip Lord intervenes in the news; he and Skip Blumberg re-create the Abscam video "evidence," mixing footage of themselves and the original surveillance, casting doubt on the old adage, "seeing is believing". -Kathy Geritz