Video Data Bank
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Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history a
Join us tomorrow evening, Thursday, November 6 at 6pm, for the final CATE program of the season, Laura Huertas Millán: Pharmakon Ecologies.
Laura Huertas Millán’s hallucinatory THE LABYRINTH journeys into the memories of Cristobal Gomez Abel, who worked for drug lords in the Colombian Amazon in the 1980s. Wandering the forest and the ruins of a narco’s mansion—modeled after Dynasty’s Carrington estate—he recounts a harrowing near-death experience.
Millán returns to CATE with a program exploring the coca plant through the lens of the pharmakon—a substance that can both poison and cure. Blending documentary, collaborative ethnography, and speculative fiction, her works reframe colonial legacies, Andean knowledge systems, and ecological violence. Followed by a conversation between Laura Huertas Millán and Claire Pentecost.
Tickets at the link in bio. The program is free for SAIC students with ID.
.art.and.ecology
10/15/2025
Tune in today, Wednesday, October 15: Artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese — LigoranoReese — will install a sculpture of the word "Democracy" carved in ice on the National Mall at 3rd Street NW between Madison and Jefferson Drives, SW. Last Call – DemocracyICED launches in one hour at 11am CT / 12pm ET with a press conference featuring the artists alongside retired defense experts and spokespeople from faith-based communities who will talk about the impacts of militarization on our society. Cultural, public health, education spokespeople have been invited to talk throughout the day.
You can watch the live stream of the event on VDB's website at https://www.vdb.org/content/now-streaming-last-call-democracyiced, or on meltedaway.com, beginning one hour from now. .us
The sculpture, weighing over 3000 pounds and measuring 17 feet wide, will melt away and disappear during the day. This is the artists' fourth installation of this kind. First staged in 2006 and 2008, these works transform the abstract crisis of democracy into something visible and visceral: massive, solid, and seemingly permanent in the morning, then vanishing into memory by nightfall. DemocracyICED marks the third major artist-driven event of the UP IN ARMS campaign — a four-year effort to expose the dangers of militarizing U.S. society and to transform runaway defense spending into a kitchen-table issue ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections.
Learn more about LigoranoReese's practice by visiting their artist profile, which includes videos spanning the past three decades and the history of their ice sculptures in The State of Things (2006), A Thousand Cuts (2011), and Truth Be Told (2019).
10/14/2025
How can Black experiences be represented in experimental film, video, and new media?
Join Emily Martin, distribution manager at the Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for a curated screening and discussion at Broad Underground: Black Experimental Moving Image on Friday, Oct. 17, from 7–9pm at North Kedzie Hall Student Café, Room N219. Learn more + register for free at broadmuseum.msu.edu/events/broad-underground-black-experimental-moving-image
This event is in partnership with the MSU Department of African American and African Studies.
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