Movies: Tony Conrad

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

Made out of six patterns of alternating black and white imposed upon the full surface of the film strip....

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....

"Originally intended as one scene in a larger work concerned with the metaphorical destruction of the viewer (through demolition of the camera), Concord Ultimatum unexpectedly became the occasion of the larger project’s demise. In addressing the came...

The story of Joan of Arc as applied to the present revolution in arts and more. The Gothic is applied to the War in Vietnam. The film is experimental in the sense that in it the visual becomes tactile....

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 ...

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...

“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...

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

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

This exquisite single shot is a complement to Combat Status Go. Here the viewer is positioned casually, even though every other element in the film experiences a painful precision: piano, gun, wardrobe; conversation directed at (and across the bow of...

“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...

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...

Tradition, mystical revelation, the passing on of family secrets--all that is lost in translation. In this magical fairytale Grandma Baba struggles with the impossibility of telling what needs to be told. How can she pass on the traditions and storie...

A short video by Tony Conrad....

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...

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

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...

Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen....