The desire to relinquish control to the imaginary is at thebase of every televisual experience. Whether this desire is cultural,primal, or technological is of little consequence; the seductivetransaction of watching begs explanation. But for media artists whoenvision their audience as sentient participants, disrupting thepleasure of the gaze is a requisite strategy. In L.A. Hawks's Be a GoodLittle Girl (1991, 7 mins) a doctored montage obliquely depicts thecruel jurisdiction that adults have over the life of a young girl. Adissociated soundtrack and intentional "glitches" and "snow" amplify thecruelty while pointing out our cold distance from it. Brazilian EderSantos trades in the televisual for the cinematic in his cross-formatThis Nervous Thing (1991, 14 mins, In French and Portuguese with Englishsubtitles). Simulating color mis-registration, film shudder, and surfacescratches, Santos adds perplexity to a work about the anxiety ofeveryday life. In The Distance Between Myself and My Losses (1983, 10mins, In German with English subtitles), Marcel Odenbach heightens thevoyeurism by masking portions of the frame with black bands. Thiswithdrawal of information echoes the self-censorship of the psyche. In amost fundamental way, Nori Sato's Reservoir (1988, 8:05 mins) emulatesmemory by dwelling on the threshold of perception. Hazy, temporallymanipulated images recede like faint recollections. Joan Jonas'slandmark Vertical Roll (1972, 19:38 mins) employs an unstable videosignal, or "vertical roll," to undermine the space of femaleconstruction. The relentless disruption of Jonas's image reveals afractured, barely contained self-portrait. -Steve Seid