I'd to announce the availability of Americas with/out Borders, a collection of Latin American and U.S. Latino video art available for rental and purchase through the Video Data Bank. The collection is invaluable for teachers of film, video, and television in that it demonstrates a wide range of video practices across two continents. While topics vary, the collection hits on many of the major themes and areas of inquiry important to media studies (race, culture, class, gender, artistic and political expression, to name a few). In fact, the collection is of interest to many disciplines, so please share it with your colleagues in political science, spanish, and women's studies departments as well as your media centers. For more information or to place orders, contact: Video Data Bank (VDB) at the School of the Art Institute 112 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago IL 60603 312.345.0550 The Americas with/out Borders catalogue, curated and organized by Ilene S. Goldman, Chicago IL for the VDB, includes 4 essays which address current issues in video art production. An umbrella essay, excerpted briefly below, puts the collection in context. This is followed by essays written by video producers and curators from Brazil, Chile, and Argentina which focus on the specific issues of aesthetics, production, and exhibition in their respective countries. The collection also includes three compilations--on politics, on performance, and on art--which are available for your programming needs. excerpted from Video without Borders by Ilene S. Goldman "The title of this collection is at once self-evident and fraught with problems. The terms-Americas, borders, and even independent video-have entered our everyday vocabulary in both the art world and academe. Yet their meanings are neither fixed nor universally agreed upon. That this is a collection of video primarily produced by Latin Americans and US. Latinos somewhat clarifies the terms. But the concept of Americas without borders is still complex and somewhat subjective. To further complicate matters, the combination of these terms leads to multiple permutations of meaning. The phrase Americas without borders references the ideologies embedding in its terms as well as ideal "safety zone" in which video makers might experiment with form, function, and concepts. The videos which comprise this catalogue probe layers of meaning, attempting through this medium to explore contemporary political and artistic issues. The collection itself represents an effort to efface actual and ideological borders in order to share independent video production within and across communities. The videos in Americas without Borders ultimately demonstrate that there is no singular Latin American or Latino video art. Rather, there exists a variety of practices. Yet, mostly without knowing the work of those outside their country or regions, these video makers seems uncannily to experiment with similar formal elements and issues. Despite the variety of video practices, independent video by Latin Americans in the US and abroad have evolved in much the same pattern across the Americas. Indeed, Americas without Borders, as a whole, supports the idea(l) of a collective subconscious...The videos in Americas without Borders explore the ideological meanings of Americas and borders. Moreover, they question and defy "borders" by which video (and film) are generally understood. The categories of narrative, documentary, and experimental audiovisual practice are herein demonstrated to be elastic and even random...." ---- To sign off SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]