John Sanborn

This is a documentary about video artists Bill & Louise Etra, Woody & Steina Vasulka, and Kit Fitzgerald & John Sanborn.

"Awakening from the 20th Century" contends with the collision between the actual and the virtual in the city of San Francisco. "Is life becoming virtual?" Lord asks. "Are we witnessing the end of the City? Will the computer replace the automobile?" These questions are taken up by six prominent writers, musicians, and multi-media workers, who describe their own shifting relationships to technology and public space within the city. Awakening from the 20th Century is structured around imagery from several San Francisco sites: the broadcast transmission tower Sutro Tower; "Critical Mass," an activist bicycle event; and locations from the Dashiel Hammet Walking Tour, which are interspersed with scenes from The Maltese Falcon.

This work explores perception, time and memory, based on the concept that "science has yet to determine the actual resolution of the eye." Using time-lapse, slow dissolves, and ghostly, ephemeral images, the artists manipulate linear time and dimensionality. Evoking subconscious memory, Remains Vivid recalls childhood experiences through use of the "after-image," while Over/Time subtly transposes physical and temporal distance as contrasting, equally resonant landscapes. POV explores the subjective eye versus the camera eye, and the nature of artistic creation. Using a split-screen technique, Similar Nature dissects the activities of four people in a study of time, motion, and simultaneity of gesture. Sax and Violins is a conflation of sound and fragmented image in which the musicians perform separately and are brought together only in the post-production process.

Director John Sanborn attends his 40th high school reunion with a film crew to interview former classmates and gain a measure of closure on some open-ended chapters in his life.

Abstract video art by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler. Dedicated to Ed Emshwiller.

Buried inside the epic American opera for television, “Perfect Lives” are the boogie-woogie lessons being sold by Buddy to untalented people in the middle of America. This pilot for the series is an abstraction that plays on the meaning of life (which is unknowable) and how to make art (impossible to teach) featuring the sublime mysteries of the traveling musician.

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in response to the last frame of the previous minute.

Director John Sanborn attends his 40th high school reunion with a film crew to interview former classmates and gain a measure of closure on some open-ended chapters in his life.

Set in the American Midwest, Perfect Lives is “about” bank robbery, cocktail lounges, geriatric love, adolescent elopement, the changing of the light at sundown, et al. One of the definitive text-sound compositions of the late 20th century, it has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s".

Set in the American Midwest, Perfect Lives is “about” bank robbery, cocktail lounges, geriatric love, adolescent elopement, the changing of the light at sundown, et al. One of the definitive text-sound compositions of the late 20th century, it has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s".

With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure. — Charles Ruas

In the year 2023, following the death of Randy Rose, the lead singer of The Residents, his son Randy Junior discovers that his father's ashes have been stolen and listed for sale on eBay by a mysterious culprit. While investigating, Junior discovers the footage for the group's unfinished feature film Vileness Fats in a foot locker in his mother's basement.

Set in the American Midwest, Perfect Lives is “about” bank robbery, cocktail lounges, geriatric love, adolescent elopement, the changing of the light at sundown, et al. One of the definitive text-sound compositions of the late 20th century, it has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s".

"In C, Too" illuminates how close our dreams are to a common reality. Through structured visual improvisational techniques, the work explores how humanity survives because of our imagination and desire to transcend. "In C, Too" is also an origin story, operating in renunciation to mortality, focused on life's essentials - existence, exploration and how entropy ignites evolution.

A short survey of the small-gauge narrative film, beginning with the Kuchars' Sylvia's Promise (1962). Primarily focused on East Coast artists, the work of Eric Mitchell, Manuel DeLanda and Ericka Beckman is highlighted.

Created in 1984 for the opening of the Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. By Dean Winkler and John Sanborn. Music by Jamaaladen Tacuma.

Computer animation that follows a mysterious egg, directed by art pop musician Todd Rundgren. 3 years of production for 3 mins of animation.

Employing single-frame edits from broadcast television, the artists construct a rapid-fire media barrage of sound and image.

This documentary is a history of The Residents hosted by Penn & Teller. It contains excerpts from most of their videos and some are in their complete form. It also contains the complete "Don't Be Cruel" video, their performance of "From the Plains to Mexico" and "Teddy Bear" on Night Music, and other TV appearances.

Italian video producer Magmart asked me to participate in their F.I.V.E. project - a collection of 25 artists exploring the five senses. This series showed around the world at both traditional venues (museums and galleries) and unusual spaces, like a grocery store in Canada. I was assigned the sense of "touch" and created a sensual piece with dancer Laura Bernasconi. The process was juried based on open submissions. I was pleased that the resulting work called "INTEMERATA" was selected for their world tour.

The Planets is an epic video feature commissioned by the new music ensemble Relâche. The score took composer Kyle Gann twelve years to complete and became a multi-media immersion into the myths and mystery of the planets when Relâche commissioned video artist and director John Sanborn to take viewers on a journey out into space, and inside the play between reality and fantasia. The work is in ten parts, each focused on a single planet, and blends together things we know and elements that we imagine about the heavenly bodies in the sky. We see them only through lenses, mental and physical—and we dream up more about them than we understand. We have praised them for the origins of humankind and we have blamed them for controlling our fragile lives from moment to milestone.

Short film by John Sanborn

A sequel to Ear to the Ground, Ear-Responsibility finds avant-garde percussionist David Van Tieghem roaming the streets of New York, discovering the inherent rhythms and music in ordinary objects, from sidewalks to subway cars.

Commissioned for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York, Olympic Fragments is a taut, expressive reinterpretation of athletic movement, a tour-de-force of dynamic editing and post-production techniques. Through sophisticated visual and aural juxtapositions, Fitzgerald and Sanborn isolate the gestures and movements of athletes in a controlled, powerful display. Eschewing the "thrill of victory" tradition of broadcast television sports coverage, they allow a portrait of individual skill and grace under pressure to emerge from their manipulation of highly fragmented and choreographed imagery — what they term the "skill, beauty and sheer joy of kineticism.

In Ear to the Ground, David Van Tieghem uses the city of Manhattan as his musical instrument, playing the surfaces of the sidewalks, buildings and phone booths with his drumsticks to elicit an ingenious range of percussive sounds.

Short by John Sanborn

Sister Suzie Cinema is a fantasy about fantasies - about the way movies, music and other cultural artifacts shape what we feel.

Commercial for spray-on video

Shot in Saskatchewan, And Now This... transforms landscape through technology, evoking the pristine lines of wheat fields and abandoned farm buildings.

A boy travels through the world of M.C. Escher.

A boy travels through the world of M.C. Escher.

A live adaptation of art rock band The Residents' 1988 concept album about a disgraced evangelist and his obsession with gender-fluid conjoined twins.

A live adaptation of art rock band The Residents' 1988 concept album about a disgraced evangelist and his obsession with gender-fluid conjoined twins.

A live adaptation of art rock band The Residents' 1988 concept album about a disgraced evangelist and his obsession with gender-fluid conjoined twins.

Conceived & Performed by David Van Tieghem, Produced & Directed by John Sanborn, 1979

Endance is a witty take-off of a public television documentary. Choreographer Tim Buckley solemnly discusses his life, work, and decision to stop dancing, in a convinving narrative built on a false premise: the end of a dancer's career.

A video memoir in which artist John Sanborn explores the seismic artistic upheaval wrought by three great artists: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Nam June Paik, celebrating the ways each artist challenged assumptions about what defines an artist, art, and the relationship of creator to audience.

In Visual Shuffle, Moulton's choreography becomes part of a fantastic landscape of floating pop icons and symbols.

Abstract video art set to the music of Philip Glass.

Abstract video art by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler. Dedicated to Ed Emshwiller.

Video gallery of the seminal artist's work.

THE RESIDENTS ONE-OFF SECRET 50TH ANNIVERSARY PERFORMANCE! RECORDED LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 2023. CONCERT FILM DIRECTED BY JOHN SANBORN.