The experimental videos in this program analyze and articulate the tension between two potentials for new technologies. Global communications promise to inspire new freedoms and social patterns, yet this promise is, in some cases, subverted by new media forms that reinforce existing hierarchies and power structures. The specter of a “brave new world” looms on the horizon in the work of the four artists included in this exhibition. This New McLennium—a conflation of the words “McDonald’s” and “millennium”—is the sanitized, homogenized, commodified, and Americanized world that these videos critique.

Jesse Drew (American, b. 1955), Manifestoon, 1996, (8 minutes)
Alex Rivera (American, b. 1973), Papapapá, 1996, (28 minutes)
Meena Nanji (Kenyan, b. 1973), It is a Crime, 1996, (5 minutes)
Ken Kobland (American, b. 1946), Shanghaied Text, 1996, (20 minutes)

This program is organized by Mindy Faber, an award-winning videomaker and Associate Director of the Video Data Bank at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.