Standby Program 1

Being in the world means consuming images or being consumed by them. These works take on the spectatorial sublime with a sublimity all their own. Peter Callas's Neo Geo (1989, 9:17 mins) creates a charged cultural sensorium with hundreds of emblematic images, rendered on a Fairlight graphics system, whirling about in the crammed confines of hyperspace. Marshall Reese and Nora Ligorano's Black Holes/Heavenly Bodies: Hell (1992, 15 mins) is a high-tech nightmare in which a suburban couple is condemned to a media-saturated afterlife. Inspired by the Helms Amendment, Tom Kalin's defiant They are lost to vision altogether (1988, 12:56 mins) uses shards of American culture-snippets of film footage-to reinscribe eroticism as an ambivalent activity. The atmosphere is thickly Oedipal in Ken Kobland's Flaubert Dreams of Travel but the Illness of His Mother Prevents It (1986, 20 mins), where a claustrophobic apartment is the staging area for some morbid imaginings. This exquisite tape stars Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, and the Wooster Group. Lynn Blumenthal and Carole Ann Klonarides's Arcade (1984, 11 mins) is a hail of recycled images from TV and film, intensifying the blur between the televised and the real.

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