Nancy Buchanan

Started during a residency at the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York in 1982, Nancy Buchanan’s Tech-Knowledge brings together video footage of technology used in a variety of fields—everything from agriculture and food production to communications and video games—as people in voice-over discuss the social, economic, and political dynamics of these technologies.

A man makes soup with mayonnaise and dolls. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I would be the father. There was no written script. After taping for two days, I edited the tapes, making two separate tapes: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. They are often shown together."

Short by Nancy Buchanan.

Experimental video about child abuse. McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I would be the father. There was no written script. After taping for two days, I edited the tapes, making two separate tapes: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. They are often shown together."

Short by Nancy Buchanan.

This is the story of the first martyr of free speech. Socrates is on trial for his life. He will be put to death. 2,500 years later we remember his words.

Short by Nancy Buchanan.

In an homage to Walter Benjamin and his essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Buchanan's video questions how image processing transforms the role of the artist in society, as well as the nature of contemporary society itself, by juxtaposing images of the making and eating of a television-shaped cake, distorted text from writers Georgi Plekhanov and Herbert Marcuse, and footage of herself working.