In person: EZTV Director / Founding Member Michael J. Masucci and videomakers Nina Rota, James Williams aka Thor Johnson, Dave Curlender, Cally Lindle, and Programmer/historian Elizabeth Purchell
When the EZTV Video Gallery first opened in the summer of 1983, founder John Dorr envisioned the space as presenting “an alternative vision of contemporary culture and reality, a vision in no way controlled by the mass media, lowest-common-denominator ethic.” This was done through EZTV’s wildly varied programming, which featured everything from more traditional narrative video to live performance and cutting-edge video and computer art—and often works that incorporated multiple elements from all of the above. For this program, we’ll present three mid-length works that were originally packaged together in August 1985 as Avant Video: New Works by Video Innovators, along with a handful of shorter pieces spanning the breadth of EZTV’s history.
About The Series:
Video Capital of the World: 45 Years of EZTV in L.A. is an expansive weeklong screening and performance series programmed by Elizabeth Purchell and Hollywood Entertainment. The series honors both the diverse range of artists, videomakers, and communities that have found a home at Los Angeles’s EZTV over the course of its first 45 years of existence and the global influence that it has had on the development of video, digital, and performance art. Featuring a wide range of unique events at REDCAT, Brain Dead Studios, Whammy! Analog Media, 18th Street Arts Center, the Velaslavasay Panorama, Los Angeles Filmforum, and online, Video Capital of the World: 45 Years of EZTV in L.A. is a first-of-its-kind tribute to a still under-understood L.A. institution.
dir. James Kent Arnold, 1985, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 30m
Video of Rachel Rosenthal’s elaborate performance staged as part of 1984’s Carplay series at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
dir. T. Jankowski, 1985, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 15m
“A frenzied, voyeuristic interpretation of the Stabat Mater.”
dir. Jamie Walters, 1985, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 23m
“Exploration of the themes of human alienation through technology.”
dir. James Williams, 1983, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 6m
Minimum budget and maximum creativity marry to produce an ever-changing mandala of light and color.
dir. James Williams, 1984, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 5.5m
An expressionistic video poem exploring the creative urge in its purest form.
dir. Dave Curlender & David S. Goodsell, 1985, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 2m
“Larger Than Life” is a digital animation that incorporated early motion-capture techniques and other innovative computer graphics techniques. Using the university's molecular biology supercomputer, this was a project by then UCLA engineering/design student Dave Curlender and UCLA medical research doctoral candidate David S. Goodsell. This finished project premiered to the public at the collaborative event On the Threshold (see “On the Threshold” promotional video) and was one of a number of early computer graphic works screened at EZTV, first as a work in progress and then numerous times over the years. Most recently, this 1985 piece was used as part of the finale for the opening of the Getty Museum's Pacific Standard Time.
dir. Nina Rota, 2006, video transferred to digital, color, sound, 5m
An exploration of gender and flesh in eight scenes of luscious pencil-drawn animation.
dir. Cally Lindle, 2024, digital video, color, sound, 3.5m
Science tells us that the static “white noise” from an old analog TV set is an energy remnant of the Big Bang. What if one uses the mind and emotions to navigate the realities within that primordial static?”
