Television adheres to an aesthetic that issues a reassuring world of unmodulated texture. This world heightens its authority through seamless craft and a hygienic approach to visual culture. To combat this authority, video artists often assemble motley narratives, intentionally stressing defects and difference in their imagery. This anti-aesthetic then becomes the matrix for other strategies and thematic explorations. Bill Chayes' Equal Time employs highly saturated color and low-resolution black-and-white footage to question its own veracity. A mock "how to" tape, this work delivers a payload of irony, declaring that control is the meaning beneath emptied images. An I for an I uses appropriated footage, text, and shifting points of view to explore the embedded violence of captured experience. The variegated pastiche of Lawrence Andrews' tape isolates codes that occupy cultural imagery. This visual spectacle is revealed as a potent carrier of meaning that overwhelms its own disclosure. In How to Shoot a Crime, Chris Kraus constructs a quasi-documentary with police crime footage, interviews with two dominitrices, and an ersatz mystery sub-plot. Sadomasochism, as an endemic social trait, finds its analog in a "plot" where neighborhood gentrification and crime documentation are two versions of the same thing, aestheticized death. In Kraus' combative work, disparate, degraded images function as meaningful expressions within a self-critical narrative. Steve Seid