Movies: Tony Conrad

Tony Conrad provides useful & alternative grading tips for teachers. Made in Buffalo, NY....

Mrs. Claus complains because Santa is away....

A trisection of the spectators’ power over their own image language: word, trance, and command are installed as valences of the artist’s license, revealed as figures of parental authority. How peculiar that people like being an audience because they ...

“Coming Attractions” looks backward into the memories and forward into the future of Francis Francine, an elegantly dowdy transvestite of, and indeed beyond, a certain age. The memories, haunted by a Spirit of Seductions Past (played by a quite glori...

Four Square is a film designed for four screens surrounding the audience. Through its spatial distribution of abstract image and sound it begins to build up a TIME/SPACE experience where the mental construction of the events do not clearly differenti...

Based on the ideas of Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, Anton Vidokle’s film was shot in Siberia, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. Fedorov, like others, believed that death was a mistake, “because the energy of cosmos is indestructible, because true relig...

The visual track of Weak Bodies and Strong Wills comes from my 1973 film, Enlightenment through Experience: Interim Semester at Albright College. The found film images had been kept in a closet at Albright College, where I was invited to teach a work...

“Cycles of 3s and 7s is a doubled statement. First and foremost, it is a commentary on computer art and the role of computers in video. Secondly, its arithmetic project has some bearing on the construction of musical scales. In reclaiming the compute...

A film consisting of alternating black and white frames....

Straight and Narrow is a study of subjective colour and visual rhythm, although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause most viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory colour effects. Through...

"A curiosity, Movie Show looks backward to the era of structural films, particularly Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. The clip of film used in this performance is taken from my Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, the work with w...

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To make Loose Connection, Conrad built a camera that moved in two directions simultaneously: it could be rolled backward and forward on a waist-high rig made with baby carriage wheels, and it automatically rotated 360 degrees. When he finally develop...

Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 t...

A young woman, on the brink of sexual awakening, is shocked by the presence of her mother in bed. The imagined presence of the mother's body haunts all further sexual encounters and desire, directing and controlling the scene of passion. Writes Zando...

A deliberately non-synchronous film, shot in 8mm with the sound on tape. Piero Heliczer reads his poem "The Autumn Feast," and the visuals interact with, but does not literally represent, what is read....

Stroboscopic vertical lines on a loop accompanying minimalist drone music compositions....

Hey Bud begins with the suicide of Bud Dwyer, a government official who killed himself on television. Writes Zando: "I view the suicide as pornographic. The suicide, exposed to a wide television audience, becomes a kind of sex act that plays upon the...

A machine-gun film roll of 4-X negative film was exposed using pressure (hammering) and was flashed in its exploded physical configuration....

A Dracula parody where the camera moves to the eye of Count Flickerstein and the image changes to static-like patterns....