///// [in 'chronological order

Sub Accident, 1997

Single-channel video

Color, sound, 21:48

Original edit format: Betacam


Price's BA thesis project at Brown University, Department of Modern Culture & Media.


The work was assembled from footage shot on super 8, 16mm, and VHS, as well Price's own scanned photographs, pen and ink drawings, CGI renders, and appropriated or found footage.


1998 New York Video Festival curator Gavin Smith: "Probing into a photograph doctored for McCarthy era propaganda purposes, Price's cryptic, unnerving video is 'an act of conjuring' that scrutinizes images, from home movies to NASA footage, in search of traces of history's baleful omniscience. Reducing images to their constituent pixels and grain, this tape suggests that as surely as we picture history for meaning or conspiratorial pattern, history is scanning us for signs of dissidence."

Analogue, 1999

Single-channel video.

Color, sound, 4:43

Original edit format: Betacam

Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix


Price captured images from his notebook via the still function of a video camera and output the sound and visuals to Betacam tape in one take, without digital editing. Made in the offices of EAI, where Price worked from 1998 - 2005.


Music: Price’s 1999 track “Jar Jar Binx.”

American Graffity, 1999

Single channel video projection

Color, sound, 15:27

Original edit format: Betacam

Re-edited video version of the 16mm film "Cowboys," 1997.


From Cinemad Magazine, by Mike Plante (issue 5):


Seth Price's awesome film is a portrait of rural manliness and class confusion with culture. Two white, middle-class appearing men are 'interviewed,' looking for a hidden threat behind something heavy-handed like graffiti and kung-fu - even if it's not there, even if they are the ones doing it. GRAFFITY is like a sci-fi cigarette ad straight from 1970, in what that year means for saturated color and high school educational films. Vivid camerawork and eerie sound design to match, breaking it all down to flickering, perceived notions about crime and art... Price brings up the issue of street graffiti as a recognized art form. It is illegal and media-connected to poor areas and violence, but a museum curator would love to take advantage of it, at least in a modern art arena. Paint a canvas and you have a pursuit. Spraypaint a wall or a tree, you have a fear. This is generalizing, but I don't think too much. The popular culture that is funneled through our country from the coasts is always diluted and changed, and funny sounding, to hear a Midwest man with a hunting jacket talk about Chinese traditions, adapted into his own lifestyle and speaking accent. Are the original misconceptions from television and late-night movies still there, just tolerated, or eventually thrown away if it's the cool thing to do? The Marlboro Man thinks he's on a safari adventure, but it's just Jersey City.

Male Feeling Disorder, 2000

Single-channel video

Color, sound, 15:51

Original edit format: Betacam
Re-edited video version of the 16mm film "Recital," 1999.

Triumf, 2000

Single-channel video.

Color, sound, 19:18

Original edit format: Betacam (shot in miniDV)


This version is an action edit, cut down from the original 60-minute performance tape.


“An old drinking buddy of Ronald Reagan's paused for a moment by his rural log cabin. The sun was at its zenith. In the sudden stillness one could hear the buzz of dying June bugs and the mournful trilling of August's last tree-frog: Autumn was on her way. The breeze had Bin laden with the rich smells of dark loam and decaying leaves. He squinted against the pale October sun. It would only be a month or so before his old friend's legacy would be borne out by the highest court in the land. He shook his head slightly, a smile playing over his rough-hewn features, and took up his axe: he had a great deal of wood to split before dusk.”


- Excerpt from a note distributed with festival screenings

"Painting" Sites, 2000

Single channel video projection, intended for cinematic screening

Color, sound, 19:02

Original format: Betacam, output from FinalCut Pro

Story written and narrated by Price

Music: Bela Bartok

Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix


“The first in a series of videos investigating the use of digital effects on appropriated imagery, "Painting" Sites compiles pictures arbitrarily yielded by an Internet search for the word "Painting," and peppers the resulting series of images with digital graffiti, courtesy of editing software. When Price began the piece, in 2000, automated image-search tools did not yet exist online; instead, the artist used text-based searches, taking arbitrary screenshots of each and every page that was returned and then cropping out all but the image, an approach that occasionally yielded visual hallmarks like improperly loaded data or the appearance of the cursor.” - EAI


Related reading: "Painting Sites," 2000


Related reading: "Seth Price: Video as Paradox, by Ben Portis," 2003

Industrial Synth, 2000

Single channel video projection

Color, sound, 16:37

Original edit format: Betacam

Distributed by EAI


“A dense montage of graphics, charts, and animations, Industrial Synth takes up the tradition of the experimental essay film and flattens it into an oblique composition that reflects on the technological and consumerist dimensions of Modernity. Negating cinematic elements of narrative, performance, and conventional signification, Price's video nonetheless conveys a sense of the pathos of a contemporary digital society, which, despite its promise of the new, relentlessly circles around issues of obsolescence and death.” - EAI


Originally screened at The Modern Museum of Art, New York in 2001, with an accompanying printed text handout by Price titled “Industrial Synthesis.” An excerpt from the video's soundtrack appears as the track “Industrial Synthesis” on Price’s LP "Honesty" (2011, AVA).


Related reading: "Industrial Synthesis," 2001

New York Woman, 2001

Color, sound, 7:20

Original edit format: Betacam


Video supplement to a lecture-performance by the same title on the subject of electronic music production, delivered at MoMA in 2001. Price’s EP recording “New York Woman” was freely distributed to the audience; the mini-CD contained five instrumental songs. An later audio recording, "Iron Curtain Girl" (2002) takes up the tracks from New York Woman and adds female vocals in former Eastern-bloc languages. See interview with Fia Backstrom: http://www.northdrivepress.com/interviews/NDP2/NDP2_BACKSTROM_PRICE.pdf


'The business of living in a ruined house. In forgotten albums of genre music - say, house music - it was in the "filler" songs that he found the blank, thoughtless patterns laid bare - the leavings of prevailing styles. Autopilot verses, no ornamentation, just the cruise control of production values revealing, inadvertently, the secrets of the time.’' – from "Distributed History," S.P."

Niuew Jacxz Swingje (aka NJS, New Jack Swing, and NJS Map), 2001-2002

Color, sound, 2:21 (duration varies from version to version)

Distributed by EAI


“Excerpted from Price's 2001 video-lecture ‘New York Woman,’ which explored the ways in which music production techniques change over time, NJS Map uses animated diagrams to lay out the historical development of one period in pop music, the briefly-lived but influential genre often called ‘New Jack Swing.’ “ - EAI


At least three versions exist, each with different audio: silence; whistling; and an electronic track by Price.


Related reading: "New Jack Swing," 2003

Related audio recording: "NJS," 2003 (mixtape)

Related audio recording: "Nie Jacxz Swingje," 2003 (album track from Iron Curtain Girl)

2 For 1 Piece, 2002. (also titled Global Taste, A Meal in 3 Courses, Element 1, 1985, by Martha Rosler)

Video installation.

Color, sound, 29:29


This video was originally exhibited and sold with an accompanying Xerox book made in collaboration with Josh Smith. The booklet contained email correspondence between Price and Martha Rosler discussing why he wished to appropriate one channel from her video installation Global Taste, her reluctance and eventual agreement.


Related reading: Global Taste, Seth Price & Josh Smith (2003)
Related reading: Interview that discusses 2 For 1 Piece

Modern Suite, 2002

Video installation

Color, sound, 10:28

Original format: Betacam, output from FinalCut Pro


The soundtrack for this work is composed and produced by Price, following research into modernist, atonal music. Originally exhibited with a framed poster by Price which is ideally to be placed in proximity to the projection. First exhibited at Artists Space, New York, followed by the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck, and then the Ljubljana Biennial, for which Price made a collage to compliment the project (see below)


Related reading: "Modern Suite," 2003.

Poster: 1 2

Playground, 2002. Made in collaboration with Michael Smith

Single channel video with installation components

Color, sound, 2:58

Music, editing, and graphics by Price.


Video made to accompany Price & Smith’s installation Playground at Galerie Emi Fontana, Milan (2003) and at CAN, Neuchatel, Switzerland (2002). The exhibition was comprised of an installation of wooden toys and video projections. Baby Ikki, Smith’s alter ego, is featured in the video. Additional performance videos were placed on monitors.

Digital Video Effect: "Holes," 2003

Sculptural work; TV/DVD player in its own original packaging.

Color, sound, 7:25


Related reading: discussion of human speech as an instrument in "Décor Holes" (2003-05)

Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance, 2003

Single-channel video work.

Color, sound, 10:38


"Rejected or Unused Clips... purports to be a collection of unused video and audio clips left over from the artist's other works. Interlacing voice-over and sound with the sorts of graphic imagery that could belong equally to advertisements, corporate reels, amateur home pages, and video games, Price takes on religious and scientific discourse, the history of experimental cinema, the interrelation of culture and technology, and the social naturalization of violence. At the same time, however, this index of material at once discarded and made useful, with its claim to a formal structure based on "importance," provokes the question of how much its themes and messages are actually intended to cohere and communicate." - EAI

Romance, 2003

Single-channel video work.

Color, silent, 32:00

Distributed by EAI


"A performance tape of sorts, Romance documents Price's progress until death through Adventure, one of the earliest computer games. The game was created in the mid 1970s by programmers and engineers in their spare time, and, foreshadowing today's "open source" software, the program's code was freely shared, replicated, and re-authored by many people over the years. Devoid of the intensive graphics, sounds and action of current computer games and game-related art, the video unfolds as a silent conversation in which the presence of the artist is evoked through typing, with its real-time hesitations and corrections. Evoking instant messaging as well as Arthurian Romances, Romance investigates language, the durational aesthetics of structuralist film, and the fluid boundary between participation and spectatorship." - EAI

Digital Video Effect: "Spills," 2004

Sculptural work: TV/DVD player in its own original packaging, playing manipulated home movie footage shot by Joan Jonas circa 1970

Color, sound, 11:06


Related reading: "OK, Just Send Me The Bill" (2004), an altered transcript of Jonas' original video treated as a piece of postwar literary fiction.

Folk Music and Documentary, 2004

Single-channel video work

Color, sound, 6:11

With James Christopher Kendi

Distributed by EAI


"A corollary to Price's written piece "Sports," Folk Music and Documentary takes on questions of political speech and political image in a time when terms like "globalization" or even "politics" itself are so emptied out as to be meaningless in everyday usage. The 1990s were years of newfound engagement and activism among the young, if we are to believe the international press and its invocation of a new class of anarchist, "anti-globalization" youth. Price gives voice and image to this cliché in what is at once a screen-test, an audition, and a proposition with no clear intent or message." -EAI


Related reading: "Sports," 2003

COPYRIGHT 2006 SETH PRICE, 2006

Sculptural monitor installation

Raw CBS & ABC news footage, with manipulated speed and color

Color, silent, 12:38

Untitled Film/Right, 2006

16mm film installation

Color, silent, 15:00 loop


Part of a three-gallery exhibition, featuring a video version of the film (see above), which went into unlimited distribution at EAI, and a second 16mm film, Untitled Film/Left, which was exhibited at Reena Spaulings.


The three films were proposed as different considerations of filmic abstaction, both historically and contemporaneously, in both the art world and the world of underground or experimental film. Price’s thoughts on the issue were collected in the book "Notes on this Show," published on the occasion of the exhibition.


Untitled/Right was based on a short, black and white clip purchased from an online distributor of "multi-use video backgrounds.” Such video loops serve as content aids in presentations, promotions, and advertisements, as well as more serious applications like TV news backdrops. Price's purchase of this computer-generated, six-second clip includes screening rights, and he visually altered the clip and repeated it hundreds of times before transferring the digital file to film.


When exhibited at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006, the film was presented with Price’s lithograph series 'Addresses', which featured a web-derived image of Caravaggio’s David and Goliath. As an installation, the film and the lithographs can be considered part of a series of works Price made over the years on the subject of beheading, headlessness, and the digital circulation of imagery.


Note: A digital video version of this film, with a soundtrack, was made later (Köln Waves/Blues, 2005-2008.)


See also Eight Photographs (2007) a suite of photographic prints by Price, developed from this film


Related reading: Notes On This Show (2006)

Digital Video Effect: "Editions," 2006

Single-channel video projection

Color, sound, 11:05


"This video was created and released into distribution as one work in a solo exhibition that Price held simultaneously at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York in September 2006. The video serves as a sampler of Price's editioned videos to date, all of which have been sold through the galleries. Here, fragments of sound and image from the editions have been brought together, yielding a montage that, while bordering on incoherence, provides access to these publicly unavailable artworks. Price juxtaposes disparate authors, editing strategies, and histories, yielding a work in the essay-film tradition, at once lyrical and messy, highly-edited and arbitrarily composed." -EAI

Untitled Film, Left, 2006

16mm film installation

Color, sound, 10:00 loop


Part of a three-gallery exhibition featuring a video version of this film and a second 16mm film, Untitled Film/Left. See above for details.

Freelance Stenographer (with Kelley Walker), 2007

Performance video component

Color, sound, 32:27


In performaces the video is played, followed by an artist Q&A with the audience; all of this is meanwhile transcribed live by an onstage stenographer. The resulting text is then xeroxed on-stage for the audience to take as a booklet. Performed at The Kitchen, New York, in 2007, and at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, in Vienna, in 2009.

Chords, 2007

Three-channel video installation with any available cheap, portable, video players

Color, sound, 12:48


The older video COPYRIGHT 2006 SETH PRICE is showed in a staggered fashion on 3 portable, consumer-grade players. Each of the 3 versions has a different soundtrack of spare electronic piano chords, played by Price. In installation form, a random sound composition is generated.

Redistribution, 2007 - present (Ongoing)

Single channel video

Color, sound, length variable, currently 74:07


The video began in 2007 as a slide lecture Price gave at the Guggenheim Museum; he then took the museum's documentation and edited and added to it, shooting new footage and crafting new documentary components. The work has grown to incorporate additional subjects and themes, and has been shown in five different versions thus far. It exists as never-finished, constantly updated work. Each version of the work is unique.


Zurich version: 2008, Bologna Version 2009, Berlin Version: 2010, Amsterdam Version: 2017


Related reading: "Redistribution Transcript," 2008

Köln Waves/Blues, 2005/2008

Single-channel projected video work

Color, sound, 11:36


Video version of the 2006, silent, 16mm film 'Untitled Film/Right,'' with a soundtrack originally created as a stand-alone audio piece in 2005

SS12, 2011

Single-channel video component of fashion presentation

Color, silent, 15:26


This video was showed at the 2011 Tim Hamilton/Seth Price fashion presentation in downtown Manhattan, on monitors, as accompaniment to the presentation. It consists of the pre-existing video COPYRIGHT 2006 SETH PRICE in a new edit, with periodic freeze-frame interstitials in which the word SS12 is superimposed across secret service agents sporting early '80s clothing and facial hair.

Language Lesson, 2011

Video for projection or monitor display

B&W, sound, 4:19


This video features the spoken-word piece 'Pencil Legs' (featured on the Honesty LP, as well as in the video Fire & Smoke). There is no image aside from onscreen text translations of the story as narrated. The video was first exhibited in France, with French text, and then in Lithuania, where it picked up Lithuanian titles. As it plays in further locations it will gather additional juxtaposed translations.




Online Music Videos
From 2010 on.


In 2010 Price turned his attention to the short-form, web-distributed music video form, in part to circulate some of his older music, which was produced before the existence of online music distribution platforms like Myspace or Soundcloud.


Although the videos are intended for online circulation Price has also exhibited them in gallery and museum contexts, often by installing an arcade of single-user kiosks in which visitors must stand inside, don headphones, and press play. In writing, Price has described the thinking that lead to this mode of display:


"The history of film, or more accurately the moving image... performed a three-part arc, veering from individualistic beginnings to a mass middle period before finally returning to individualism with a vengeance. Early cinema enthusiasts had been briefly excited about a personal experience of film, devising zoetropes, phenakistoscopes, and other devices in which the viewer needed to lay hands on the machine physically to set the film in motion. This culminated in the kinescope, a coin-operated booth that ensured a controlled, strictly private experience of the moving image. Before long, however, cinema bloomed as a mass medium, and over the ensuing decades film came to mean the crowd, and a shared experience that encompassed not only the theatrical audience but the culture at large, even the nation. In exchange for this expanded sphere, the moving image was removed from the physical touch and control of viewers, departing the individual body and entering the social body. This was the middle period. By midcentury, though, things had already started to change due to the proliferation of television, which again allowed a person to touch the machine, to push a button, to manipulate the picture physically. Such a viewing space was bodily and domestic and no longer quite so communal. However, while this new public may have been spatially scattered, they were compelled to watch the same broadcast, and thus they still composed a single audience, albeit one united within the time of the image. The introduction of the VCR, however, uncoupled even this temporal link, and by the ’80s neither the time nor the space of the image had to be shared with anyone else. The spread of the PC, the internet, and all the ensuing mobile devices only reinforced this situation. By the hundredth anniversary of The Birth of a Nation the pivot was complete: now, just as at the beginning of cinema, moving images were consumed largely by individuals, who once again laid hands on their machines to set private pictures in motion, thereby fully commanding both the time and the space of the image."
- Fuck Seth Price, 2015





No Such Thing (aka Happy Boots, aka Relaxation), 2010, song 2001

This track dates from 2002 or so. The footage is left over from material intended for my video Redistribution (2007—). The track appears as 'Relaxation' on the LP 'Army Jacket.'

NY Sorrow, 2010, song 2001

I shot the video in March, 2001. Part of it appeared in the New York Woman video lecture. I made the song shortly after 9/11; it appears on the LP 'Army Jacket.'

Army Jacket, 2010, song 2002

I captured the footage in 2002, during online Jihadist research, and never knew what to do with it. The song was another one that I made soon after 9/11, I think I finished it early in 2002. Appears on the LP 'Army Jacket.'

Keep Hollywood Close, 2010, song 2001

I got this online, soon after the Tsunami, but again it didn't seem like anything I could possibly use. I recorded the song in 2000 or 2001. Appears on the LP 'Army Jacket.'

The Rolling Skull (aka Tale of The Skull), 2010

I first told this story in 2002, during a story-telling performance at Ocularis. The video is more Jihadist footage gathered in the months after 9/11, once again stowed away for some future use. The track appears on the LP 'Honesty.'

Fire & Smoke (aka Pencil Legs), 2010

I videotaped this footage off a 16mm film I saw in 1999. I wrote and recorded the story in 2010. The audio track appears as 'Pencil Legs' on the album 'Honesty.' The audio was also used for the video projection Language Lesson (2011).

Tale of the Mountains, 2010

Story originally recorded in 2002, during my performance "Folk." From LP 'Honesty,' on AVA Records. Footage shot out the window of my apartment in 1999.

Sister Ray, 2011, song 2004

From the record 'Army Jacket.' I made the music in 2002. A Sequential Circuits and a Korg. In '04 I recorded Fia Backström singing some lyrics adapted from the song 'Sister Ray,' cut up her vocals and added them to the track in a way that sounded OK. That was supposedly for a Reena Spaulings record, but it never made the cut. Added it to the Army Jacket LP when I reissued it. The source for the video is a piece I made in 1995 called Ghost Story/Curiousitas, shot on 16mm. It features my sister, who coincidentally happens to be named Rae.

Ugly Kill, 2012, song 2001

Diggin in tha crates... Another banger pre-9/11 ... vid is of someone who lived in close proximity, around 1998, Prospect Heights---I believe on Washington Avenue right near Lincoln Place, next to Love Liquors, rear top apartment--- love u babe, still. ---"Sef"

"I am a killa / comin 4 u / im gonna kill u / whatevah u do/ whether stranglin /u in ur sleep /or shooting u / the pain is deep... becuz.... (chorus: Kill Kill Kill, Die Die Die, etc)... to the ones/ who left u behind/ lookin like a low speed kind / dont worry / them along / something something / their road is not long / becuz... (chorus) ---etc

Lookin' Back, 2012, song 2001/p>

Post-9/11 rewrite of 'Jack and Diane'
--------------------------------------
Every time I'm lookin around
Somewhere in the Heartland.
In the course of seeing things,
Breadbasket of America.
No one saw it coming...
Everybody saw it coming.
We are lookin back
You are lookin back
Please help me:
lookin back.
(Breadbasket of America)
We are lookin back,
You are lookin back,
We are lookin back.
You...
Lookin back.
It's not good enough
If we don't like
Rough stuff.

Whipz, 2012, song 2001

No Way, 2012, song 2001

Additional vocals: Zhana Clic

Feeling in the Eyes, 2012, song 2002

From the LP Army Jacket.

Sickly Air/Dying Air, 2012, song 2003


Footage of my own wedding
back in the day
Times ain't so easy
That's what they say
(uh-huh)
Say don't let no one tell you
Life ain't no picnic
all roses and bubblee
(Uh huh)
Say yeah don't let no one
Not tell you
Life ain't be no un-pic-nic
In opposite-world.
So I'm out, yeah,
Out on that warpath,
Sayonara Holmes, cause
We eating Bugles here,
in the depths of a den,
Or leaning on a Corian counter,
abstractly pushing fingerfuls of yum
down the hatch,
So yeah, if you need me, girl
(just raise your voice a bit with a slightly reproachful tone)

Social Synth, 2016

Video for projection

color, sound, 11:07 loop


We used the computer-controlled robot camera to gather thousands of photos of a squid carcass; photos then were collated, compressed, stitched algorhythmically, tiled, and imported into a 3D cinema program to add motion, reflections and ambient light.