Clarke began using video in 1969, when she referred to it as VT (for videotape). She founded the Videospace Troupe, which toured between 1973 and '75, putting on "interactive video shows with our hosts" as well as creating a Video Ferris Wheel and the Videoracle, with Clarke telling fortunes, for New York's Avant-Garde Festival. In the early eighties, she collaborated with actor and director Joseph Chaikin and playwright Sam Shepard to make Savage/Love and Tongues, rethinking theater pieces as video works. Chaikin presents one-act monologues of shifting personalities, with the jazzlike rhythms of Shepard's language finding visual expression in Clarke's manipulation of the image. After meeting the experimental filmmaker Donna Cameron in 1987, Clarke offered her a reel of home movies of herself as a child, photographed by her mother, for inclusion in a found-footage project. Cameron's Shirley Clarke is a celebration of Clarke and the inspiration she provided. Its attempt to create a subjective portrait of a person and a time bears an interesting relationship to Ornette: Made in America, although here an intriguing element is that the portrait is of the artist as a child. -Kathy Geritz