Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011)

Dennis Oppenheim has received international attention for a body of conceptual artwork that includes performance, sculpture, and photographs. In the early 1970s, Oppenheim was in the vanguard of artists using film and video as a means to investigate themes relating to Body Art, Conceptual Art, and performance. In a series of works produced between 1970 and 1974, Oppenheim used his own body as a site to challenge the self: he explored the boundaries of personal risk, transformation, and communication through ritualistic performance actions and interactions. During these four decades Dennis Oppenheim's practice has employed all available methods: writing, action, performance, video, film, photography, and installation (with and without sound or monologue). Land Art, Body Art, video and performance in the ’60s was followed in the ’70s by installations which questioned the nature of the artistic process, the self and the concept of representation. Large-scale machine iconography was used in the sculpture of the ’80s as a metaphor for the thought process.

Oppenheim was born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington. Oppenheim lived in New York City until his death in 2011.He received a B.F.A. from the School of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California, in 1965, and an M.F.A. from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, in 1966. He received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1969, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1974 and 1982, an Excellence in Transportation award from the State of California in 2003, and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale.

Ivens Machado (1942)

Ivens Machado was born in Florianópolis, in 1942, and moved to Rio de Janeiro, in 1964, to study engraving and art education at the Escolinha de Arte do Brasil. Throughout his career, he taught art at several institutions and become one of Anna Bella Geiger’s students from 1968 to 1969. In the year of 1973, Machado creates his first installation, Cerimônia em três tempos, which was awarded at the 5th Salão de Verão do Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), in Rio de Janeiro. At the same year, he made his debut at the International Biennial of Sao Paulo and, in 1974, made ​​his first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in Rio de Janeiro.

In the 70s, Machado produces his first videos, which as well as the photographs, were records of performances. He soon emerged as one of the pioneers of video art in Brazil, alongside with Anna Bella Geiger, Sonia Andrade, Leticia Parente and Fernando Cocchiarale, among others.

From the late 1970s, Machado began to devote himself to the production of sculpture, using often construction materials, such as iron, cement, clay tiles and glass, which confer harsh, rough and irregular formats to his works.

In 2008, Machado was invited by Oi Futuro to get back to the video production in order to create the exhibition "Encontro/Desencontro" devoted to his videos made in the 1970s, as well as to the video installations designed specifically for the occasion. Thus, besides some restored pieces, such as Versus (1974), Dissolução (1974) and Escravizador/Escravo ((1974), there were also the following new ones: Encontro/Desencontro, Ordem Unida, Paranoia, e Perseguição, all of which directed by Machado himself and Samir Abujamrasuch.

Joan Jonas (1936)

An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas' elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry. Jonas first began using video in performance in Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), Her classic early works, including Vertical Roll (1972), explore the phenomenology of the video medium — its one-on-one directness and function as a mirror — to create a theater of the self and the body.

Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York. She received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas has performed and exhibited her work extensively throughout the world.Since 2000 Jonas has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Letícia Parente (1930 - 1991)

Leticia Parente, who was born in Salvador in 1930, is one of the pioneers of video art in Brazil. After receiving a PhD in chemistry, she joined the faculties of the Federal University of Ceará and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She studied arts at the NAC (Center for Creativity and Arts), in 1972, with Pedro Dominguez and Hilo Krugle. In the 1970s, she participated in one of the most important Brazilian video art exibitions, which occurred both in Brazil and abroad. In 1973, Parente held her first solo exhibition, entitled Monotipias, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Fortaleza, and, in 1976, the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), displayed her installation called Medidas, which is considered the first Brazilian exhibition devoted to explorarion of the relationship between "art and science". Besides being part of the Projeto Vermelho, developed by the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), in São Paulo, with the object installation, entitled Constatação (1986), she was also part of the the Projeto Arte Postal, developed in the 16th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, in 1981.

Between 1970 and 1991, Parente worked with paintings, prints, objects, photographs, audiovisual, mail art, xerox, videos and installations, in which predominate the experimental and conceptual dimensions. Her video Marca Registrada (1975), in which she embroiders the words "Made in Brazil" on the soles of her feet, has become a Brazilian reference in terms of video art. She died in Rio de Janeiro in 1991.

Mako Idemitsu (1940)

Recoding the conventions of soap opera melodrama, Japanese artist Mako Idemitsu creates domestic narratives that examine the cultural role and identity of women within the context of the contemporary Japanese family. In works that both echo and subvert the popular family dramas of Japanese television, Idemitsu applies a feminist critique in her multi-levelled fictions of the psychology of the "family romance".

Mako Idemitsu was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1940. She studied at Waseda University, Tokyo, and Columbia University, New York. From 1963 to 1975, Idemitsu lived in the United States, where she was involved with Jungian analysis and feminist studies. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Fukuyama Museum, Tokyo, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Idemitsu lives in Tokyo.

Martha Rosler (1943)

In her work in video, photo-text, performance, critical writing and installation, Martha Rosler constructs incisive social and political analyses of the myths and realities of contemporary culture. Articulated with deadpan wit, Rosler's video works investigate how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. Presenting astute critical analyses in accessible forms, Rosler's inquiries range from questions of public space to issues of war, women's experiences, and media information.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works. She received a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. She has taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her works in several media are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Guggenheim Museum in New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 2012, Rosler will present Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) & Jud Yalkut (1938)

Nam June Paik is a major contemporary artist and a seminal figure in video art. His video sculptures, installations, performances and tapes encompass one of the most influential and significant bodies of work in the medium. From his Fluxus-based performances and altered television sets of the early 1960s, to his ground-breaking videotapes and multi-media installations of the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Paik has made an enormous contribution to the history and development of video as an art form. Exercising radical art-making strategies with irreverent humor, he deconstructs and demystifies the language, content and technology of television. Paik's early works display the signature image manipulations and colorizations of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, a device he developed in 1969 with electronics engineer Shuya Abe. Paik's experiments with the Paik/Abe Synthesizer helped to revolutionize the technological grammar of the medium. Paik's tapes often take the form of collaborations with or tributes to the avant-garde artists who were his friends and colleagues, including John Cage (A Tribute to John Cage, 1973), Merce Cunningham (Merce by Merce by Paik, 1978), Allen Ginsberg and Allan Kaprow (Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, 1982), Julien Beck and Judith Malina (Living with the Living Theatre, 1989) and (MAJORCA-fantasia, 1989).

Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932, and died in 2006. He studied music and art history at the University of Tokyo, producing a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg, and graduated in 1956 with a degree in aesthetics. Paik's studies continued in Germany at the Universities of Munich and Cologne, and the Conservatory of Music in Freiburg. From 1958-63, Paik worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the WDR Studio fur elektronsiche Musik in Cologne. After meeting Fluxus founder George Maciunas in 1961, he participated in numerous European Fluxus performances, actions and events. Paik's works have been the subject of numerous exhibitions and recipient of numerous awards.

As an underground filmmaker and video artist, Jud Yalkut participated in seminal moments of early video art. In 1965 Yalkut became a resident filmmaker for USCO, a countercultural collective. Starting in 1966 and continuing into the 1970's, he collaborated with Nam June Paik on a series of video-film pieces in which he used the medium of film not merely to document performances, but, through editing and juxtaposition, to create conversations between film and video.

Yalkut was born in New York City in 1938. He has organized important exhibitions of video and experimental media art, such as Computer Art: An Ohio Perspective at the Dayton Visual Arts Center in 1993 and Art From Virtual Realities at DVAC in 1996. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Writing-In-Media grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for his manuscript, Electronic Zen: The Alternate Video Generation, Yalkut has also been a writer on the arts and media since 1966.

Woody Vasulka (1937)

Bohuslav Vasulka (Woody) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on January 20, 1937. From 1952 to 1956, Woody Vasulka studied metallurgy and mechanics at the industrial engineering school in He later graduated from the faculty of cinema and television at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

In 1965, he emigrated to New York City with his wife, Steina. Working as a multi-screen film editor and designer, he began experimenting with electronic sound, stroboscopic light, and video. In 1968, Woody Vasulka conducted his first experiments with electronic images and put aside cinematographic form in favour of video. From 1969 to 1971, with support from a Portapak mobile production unit, Steina and Woody Vasulka amassed video segments documenting the concerts and performances they attended at venues connected with New York's counterculture movement. To meet a need expressed by artists for a centre to produce and show electronic art, the couple, together with Andrea Manick, opened The Kitchen in 1971. In 1974, the Vasulkas moved to Buffalo where they taught at the Center for Media Studies at the State University of New York (SUNY). From 1976 to 1980, Woody worked with Jeffrey Schier on building the Vasulka Imaging System or Digital Image Articulator, one of the first devices able to generate algorithm-based images and to convert them into analog signals.

In the eighties, several solo shows devoted to Steina and Woody Vasulka were mounted at museums and art centres in the United States, France, Italy and Japan, and their videos were screened within media art festivals worldwide. In 1998, Steina and Woody Vasulka received an honorary doctorate degree from the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, Calif., United States) and an award from the San Francisco National Association of Media and Culture (San Francisco, Calif., United States) recognizing their remarkable achievements in media arts. In 1999, the couple held the workshop Techne and Eros: Human Sensory Space and the Machine in Santa Fe and founded the Arts and Science Laboratory (Santa Fe, N.M., United States) with the composer David Dunn and the physicist James Crutchfield.