Jeff Krulik, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, 1986, still image from trailer
formatted for YouTube

MEDIUM COOL: Art in General's 10th Annual Video Marathon
Organized by Hanne Mugaas
79 Walker St, New York NY

Regarding Jeff's People
A talk by Ed Halter
6:30pm, 10 January 2008

Transition Objects
Curated by Thomas Beard
10 January - 12 January 2008

Artist Looking at Camera
Curated by Hanne Mugaas and Fabienne Stephan
10 January - 12 January 2008

Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)
A project curated by Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel,
performed by Cory Arcangel
6pm 12 January 2008

Flipped Chips
A screening and lecture by LoVid
7pm 12 January

As part of Art in General's annual Video Marathon, organized this year by curator Hanne Mugaas, writer and media critic Ed Halter presents a talk this Thursday on Jeff Krulik, author of 80s cult video documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot and several dozen other videos on the fringes of pop culture. Halter will use Krulik as a point of departure in a discussion that the press release promises to touch upon "the utopian hopes and mundane realities of public access television, the question of fandom and subjectivity, underground VHS bootlegging as proto-file-sharing, criticism of art and comedy, and the challenge of defining the term 'artist', and in particular, 'video artist'." The final point is especially interesting in the contemporary climate of media production moving from the world of art practice to social practice, the unregulated proliferation of webcams, and the amnestic resurgence of dot-com capital aspiring to the fever pitch of the late 90s backing it all.

Also opening on 10 January at Art in General are two concurrent video exhibitions: Transitional Objects curated by Thomas Beard examines some the medium's shifting roles in art and society, and Artist Looking at Camera curated by Hanne Mugaas and Fabienne Stephan, "highlights artists who use the tools of re-enactment, appropriation and moving image manipulation to question how history is produced and how facts are modified and reinforced through distribution." Later this weekend Cory Arcangel performs Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet), a talk and performance he first presented early last year at The Office of Contemporary Art Norway, New York, in which Arcangel, then partnering with curator Hanne Mugaas, faux-naively surfed the web looking for representations and reproductions of a weighty cast of mostly conceptual artists. One imagines the talk has been updated in the intervening months, so it will worth a visit even if you saw it at the OCA. Also on Saturday, glitch video artists LoVid present Flipped Chips, a show the duo has curated examining presented alongside a lecture examining various forms of tactile video practice and the artists who tinker with or construct their own video hardware, from Dan Sandine and Steina and Woody Vasulka to more contemporary practitioners like Paul Slowcum and noteNdo.