Video Data Bank (VDB) is an international video art distribution organization and resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists. Located in Chicago, Illinois, VDB was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement.
27-456: VDB provides experimental video art, documentaries made by artists, and interviews with visual artists and critics for a wide range of audiences. These include microcinemas , moving image festivals, media arts centers, universities, libraries, museums, community-based workshops, public television, and cable TV Public-access television centers. Video Data Bank currently holds over 6,000 titles in distribution, by more than 600 artists, available in
54-480: A 2007 interview. “We were looking for inspiration for ourselves, but we were also looking for information on what was happening. If you read art magazines in the early '70s, it was very rare to see any real coverage of any women artists." In 1976 Horsfield and Blumenthal officially founded the Video Data Bank, taking over a small collection of student video productions and interviews that was begun by Phil Morton at
81-747: A global movement of new, DIY -style small cinemas. Notable American microcinemas include Spectacle Theater , Light Industry , UnionDocs, and the Luminal Theater in New York as well as Other Cinema and the Acropolis Cinema in California. In Charlotte, North Carolina , the video rental store VisArt Video has a microcinema that can be rented for private screenings. In October 2022, the 38-seat Screen Door Microcinema opened in Ybor City , Tampa, Florida , as
108-745: A microcinema and café known as the Cinema '76 Café opened in Quezon City . In September 2020, the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer Oppo Mobile opened a pop-up microcinema in the South Bank of London , England. The term "microcinema" was coined in 1994 by Rebecca Barten and David Sherman, operators of the Total Mobile Home MicroCINEMA in San Francisco, and was subsequently used to describe
135-747: A photography show at Robert Miller Gallery in 2009. He is the recipient of the Independent Spirit Award for feature filmmaking, and has received grants from the Guggenheim , Creative Capital , Rockefeller and Alpert foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts . Cohen's films have been broadcast internationally, and are in held the collections of the Museum of Modern Art , the Whitney Museum ,
162-589: A variety of screening and archival video formats. It also actively publishes anthologies and curated programs of video art. The preservation of historic video is an ongoing project of the Video Data Bank. The total holdings, including works both in and out of distribution, include over 10,000 titles of original and in some cases, rarely seen, video art and documentaries from the late 1960s on. In 2015 VDB launched VDB TV, an innovative digital distribution project which provides free, online streaming access to curated programs of video and media art. VDB TV offers viewers across
189-653: Is CineScope , which was established in September 20, 2019, in Narayanganj . This government-sponsored micro cinema has only 35 seats. Another micro cinema is Roots Cineclub, situated in Sirajganj , opened on October 22, 2021. This is also a single screen micro theater, which has only 22 seats. The Chittagong City Corporation authority announced to establish another micro cinema in Chittagong on December 5, 2020. In June 2021,
216-617: Is Momo Inn Cinema , which is situated in Momo Inn Hotel and Resort, Nawdapara, Bogura. It was established in 2018 as a part of the resort. This theater has only 54 seats. The first mini cineplex of the country was established in July, 2018 in Nasirabad, Chittagong , named Silver Screen . This mini multiplex has 95 seat capacity combining two screens, Platinum, a mini theater and Titanium, a micro theater. The first micro single screen movie theater
243-710: The Chain feature film, which was exhibited as a three-channel installation. His concert film of the Dutch band The Ex , Building a Broken Mousetrap , premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006. Cohen was a resident at Eyebeam in 2002. In 2005, Cohen curated the four-day FUSEBOX Festival in Ghent , Belgium . A celebratory gathering "at the crossroads of film, music, and activism," participants included Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine , The Evens , and
270-428: The D.I.Y. ethos of Punk Rock to his film-making approach, he crafted a distinct style in his films through various small gauge formats of Super 8, sixteen-millimetre, and videotape. In an interview with web-site The Lamp , Cohen said, "...it's very inspiring to me, to see people kind of take something outside of the industry, outside of the music industry, and it gave me something of a template to work in film outside of
297-734: The National Gallery of Art , and the ACMI in Melbourne. Cohen was born in Kabul , Afghanistan where his father was working for Columbia University, Teachers College and the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.). He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984, with a concentration in film and photography. Cohen found the mainstream Hollywood film industry incompatible with his sociopolitical and artistic views. By applying
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#1732855298006324-756: The 1960s. Artists included are Vito Acconci , Lynda Benglis , Dara Birnbaum , Joan Jonas , Bruce Nauman and William Wegman . Experimental works by Denise Kaprellian-Bornoff, MFA, in collaboration with Phil Morton and with Jack Bornoff, MFA, were among the earliest titles in the collection. The collection includes the work of contemporary artists who largely address post-modern themes such as feminism, AIDS, gender studies, guerrilla television, technology, and identity, among them Sadie Benning , Jem Cohen , Harun Farocki , Walid Raad , Paul Chan, Guillermo Gómez-Peña , Miranda July , and George Kuchar . The On Art and Artists collection includes interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics. The interviews focus on
351-606: The 1970s. In 1974, a film distribution project known as Equipe de Cinema was instituted at Iwanami Hall [ ja ] , a venue constructed by Iwanami Shoten , in Tokyo , Japan. Iwanami Hall, which was originally used as a multipurpose hall, became one of the first mini theaters, able to seat 220 people. The project was headed by Etsuko Tanakno, general manager of Iwanami Hall, and film producer Kashiko Kawakita , who sought to screen films deemed inappropriate for wide distribution. Mini theaters were popularized throughout Japan in
378-628: The 1980s. During that decade, mini theaters often screened European independent and arthouse films, such as films produced during the French New Wave , as well as films originating from Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria. Mini theaters also screened independent films produced in Japan by relatively unknown Japanese filmmakers. The popularity of mini theaters continued into the 1990s, and some mini-theater operators, such as Theatre Shinjuku and Eurospace, began investing in film production. Several mini theaters in
405-534: The Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first and most prominent collection of video art assembled in the United States, produced between 1968 and 1980. These works represent examples of the first experiments in video art and include conceptual and feminist performances recorded on video, experiments with the video signal, and 'guerilla' documentaries representing a counter-cultural view of the historical events of
432-510: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began conducting video interviews with women artists who they felt were underrepresented critically in the art world. After buying a Panasonic Portapak and successfully conducting talks with painters Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin and curator Marcia Tucker , the pair decided to continue the series. "It was really a kind of accident,” noted Horsfield in
459-589: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They went on to add to the archive, conducting talks with prominent artists of the period such as Alice Neel , Lucy Lippard , Lee Krasner , Barbara Kruger , and the Guerrilla Girls , who appeared wearing their trademark gorilla masks. Lyn Blumenthal died in 1988, and the VDB maintains the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship. Horsfield remained director of
486-659: The Tokyo metropolitan area were closed during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Mini theater Cine Vivant ceased operations in 1999, and Cine Saison and Ginza Theatre Cinema closed in 2011 and 2013, respectively. On April 7, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the Japanese government to declare a state of emergency for Tokyo and six other prefectures, resulting in the closure of movie theaters nationwide. Consequently, mini theaters have suffered significant drops in revenue. In response to
513-524: The U.S. is a 17-hour compilation of experimental and independent video created from 1968-1980, the first decade of video art production produced in 1995. The anthology includes 68 titles by more than 60 artists, and is curated into eight programs ranging from conceptual, performance-based, feminist, and image-processed works, to documentary and grassroots activism. Chris Hill, former video curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, curated
540-610: The United States and beyond access to rare video art, the opportunity to engage with programs conceived by a wide range of curators, and original writing, all while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work. The VDB functions as a Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council . In 1974, VDB co-founders Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal , graduate students at
567-468: The collection until her retirement in 2006, when she was succeeded by Abina Manning, who served as the director until 2021. In 2007 the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) presented Video Data Bank with its Outstanding Media Arts Organization Award. The Video Data Bank collection includes video produced from 1968 to the present. The early video art represented includes many titles from
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#1732855298006594-609: The development of the artists' body of work. In addition, Video Data Bank represents two important video archives: the Kuchar Archive, encompassing the extensive video output of twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar, and the Videofreex Archive, which chronicles the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s as documented by the 10-person collective. Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in
621-475: The film industry. And there are certainly strains of punk that are activist and that are kind of oppositional in nature to the dominant mainstream culture... that's very inspiring to me..." Cohen's longer works include his feature film, Museum Hours , Chain , and the experimental documentary , Instrument , a portrait of the D.C. punk band Fugazi that was ten years in the making. Benjamin Smoke , about
648-623: The first official microcinema in Tampa. In March 2022, Tallgrass Film Association launched their microcinema in downtown Wichita, Kansas. Jem Cohen Jem Alan Cohen (born 1962) is an Afghan -born American filmmaker based in New York City . Cohen is especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats ( sixteen-millimetre , Super 8 , videotape ) and collaborations with musicians. He also makes multichannel installations and still photographs and had
675-501: The life of the frontman of the Atlanta , Georgia band Smoke , covers a ten-year arc. Other works of note are Lost Book Found , his Walter Benjamin -inspired portrait of New York City, Buried in Light , a series of connected Central and Eastern European city portraits, and his short film about the late Elliott Smith , Lucky Three . In 2002, Cohen made Chain X Three , a precursor to
702-421: The negative financial impact of the pandemic on mini theaters, Japanese filmmakers organized movements to help support them. Directors Kōji Fukada and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi launched a crowdfunding campaign to assist mini theaters; the campaign amassed over 100 million yen in donations in three days. In Bangladesh, there are several mini theaters and micro theaters. The first mini single screen movie theater
729-626: The project. Microcinema A mini theater ( Japanese : ミニシアター , Hepburn : mini shiatā ) , mini cineplex ( Bengali : মিনি সিনেপ্লেক্স ), or microcinema is a type of independent movie theater that is not under the direct influence of any major film companies . Mini theaters are characterized by their relatively smaller size and seating capacity compared to larger, non-independent movie theaters, as well as their programming, which typically includes independent or arthouse films . Mini theaters can be found worldwide, and are particularly known in Japan, where they have existed since
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