French filmmaker Chris Marker was one of the most highly regarded and experimental figures in cinema. His 1962 film La Jetée is a recognized classic. Marker also worked in video and interactive technologies, creating documentaries, poetic meditations, and idiosyncratic essays.

Martin's early works of the 1960s and '70s were created in collaboration with new music composers Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, and David Tudor and in cooperation with The San Francisco Tape Music Center, NYU Intermedia Department, and Experiments in Art and Technology. His solo exhibitions at the Howard Wise Gallery were pioneering in their incorporation of the psychology and aesthetics of the viewer as a direct, necessary part of the art "object." For the past decade, Martin has employed available analog and digital hardware/software to produce interactive image making.

Addressing an intensely private discourse through the public forum of video, Pier Marton has produced a body of work that is unified by a confrontational, psychodramatic search for identity. Marton's early, performance-based work is highly charged and theatrical, executed with immediacy and aggression.

Victor Masayesva, Jr. has created a rich body of video and photographic work that represents the culture and traditions of Native Americans — particularly the Hopi of Southwest Arizona — through poetic visualizations. Masayesva employs computer animation and graphics in lyrical translations of Hopi myths, rituals and history. Articulating the richness of his heritage in his own language, he allows the Hopi voice to be heard.

Gordon Matta-Clark's thoroughly unique artistic project was a radical investigation of architecture, deconstruction, space, and urban environments. Dating from 1971 to 1977, his most prolific and vital period, his film and video works include documents of major pieces in New York, Paris and Antwerp, and are focused on three areas: performances and recycling pieces; space and texture works; and his building cuts.

Los Angelean Cynthia Maughan produced nearly 300 videos from 1973 to 1980, creating mostly short, direct-camera performances in which she stars in scenarios borrowed from a range of cinema and television sources. The dry wit and pictorial economy of her works also shows the influence of then contemporary California artists working in video, such as William Wegman, Paul McCarthy and Martha Rosler. Absorbing Hollywood's beguiling superficiality, Maughan treats the closed-circuit camera as a two-way mirror, in which and for which she prepares her public persona.

McCarthy was an influential figure in the Southern California art and performance scene for decades before achieving international recognition. His performance work in the late 1970s explored areas of Dionysian and shamanistic initiation rituals, as well as the body and sexuality. The intensity of these performances, which often included the graphic depiction of taboo subjects, eventually led to his use of video and installation as primary media.

Founded in 1971 by the members of the video collective Videofreex, Media Bus operated out of New York's SoHo district before relocating to the upstate New York town of Lanesville. Reflecting the spirit of idealism and activism that characterized the early video collectives, Media Bus offered an alternative model for the production and distribution of television programming.

Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta's ritualistic performances and haunting "earth-body" sculptures of the 1970s resonate with visceral metaphors of death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Much of her work expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement . A seminal figure in feminist art practice, Mendieta devised an emblematic female iconography that is infused with power and poetry.

Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen began collaborating as MICA-TV in 1980. Fusing elements of pop culture, television and contemporary art, their witty productions mimic and subvert the formulas and genres of television. Their portraits of visual artists include Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Laurie Simmons.

Embedding social themes within experimental forms, Branda Miller approaches video-making as an educational tool. Working with urban youth and community groups, she crafts multi-cultural, social-issue tapes in which the production process is a vehicle for empowerment. This collaborative project stresses media literacy as a means of giving voice to under-represented communities.

Closely associated with the Fluxus movement, Larry Miller has produced a diverse body of experimental art works. Miller was a key figure in the emergent installation and performance movements in New York in the 1970s, presenting work in spaces such as 112 Greene Street Gallery, Franklin Furnace, PS 1, and the Kitchen. His installations and performances have been groundbreaking in their integration of diverse mediums and materials.

Described by composer Edgar Varese as "the Jeanne d'Arc of new music," Charlotte Moorman was a central figure of the New York avant garde of the 1960s and '70s. In 1963 she established the Annual Avant Garde Festival in New York, which she directed for two decades. As a performer, she was a longtime collaborator of Nam June Paik, who created many of his best-known pieces for her, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV-Cello(1971).

Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny.

Antoni Muntadas has produced a body of work across diverse media, including photography, video, publications, the Internet, multimedia installations and urban interventions. In his projects, Muntadas addresses social, political and communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigations of channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor information or promulgate ideas.

Takeshi Murata produces extraordinary digital works that refigure the experience of animation. His innovative practice and evolving processes range from intricate computer-aided, hand-drawn animations to exacting manipulations of the flaws, defects and broken code in digital video technology. Whether altering appropriated footage from cinema (B movies, vintage horror films), or creating Rorschach-like fields of seething color, form and motion, Murata produces astonishing visions that appear at once seductively organic and totally digital.

In writing, performance and visual art that incisively satirizes pop culture and the art world, Jayson Scott Musson provokes the boundaries that define cultural and racial stereotypes. His most well-known creation is the "art critic" Hennessy Youngman, whose episodic Internet talk show Art Thoughtz has become a viral video phenomenon. In the guise of Hennessy Youngman, Musson uses hip-hop vernacular to critique the exclusionary language of art discourse, hilariously pitting hip-hop and art world idioms against each other in a dual parody of cultural clichés. Engaging hybrid media and contexts, Musson uses platforms such as YouTube to circumvent traditional art institutions and reach a mass audience on his own terms.

Rita Myers' multi-media installations create theatrical, metaphorical spaces that fuse video, text, sound, and sculptural and natural forms. Juxtaposing elements of landscape and architecture, her symbolic environments are contemplative sites that resonate with the ritualistic and the mystical. Artist's website: https://www.ritamyers.com/