These tapes, made from inside the crisis by passionate participants, convey to a remarkable extent what it was like to be caught up in the epidemic. The tapes in this series were drawn from the Royal S. Marks Collection of AIDS Activist Videotapes of the New York Public Library. This collection resulted from an effort by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a project of the Alliance for the Arts, to preserve the grassroots response of artists and activists to the AIDS crisis. Made possible by major support from the New York Community Trust - Royal S. Marks Foundation Fund with additional support from the Snowdon Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, the collection consists of over 2,000 hours of masters of finished work and original camera tapes. One thousand hours of these tapes will be remastered for archival and research purposes.
All works are video, color and sound except where noted.
Collectives formed the vanguard of the AIDS Activist video movement. The impulse for videotaping derived from a political movement and numerous tapes featured demonstrations. Having many people with cameras facilitates the documentation of multi-faceted events. Conversely, collective editing is very inefficient. Testing the Limits is arguably the first true AIDS Activist videotape and, in many ways, provided a model for others with its lack of voiceover and quick editing, often to the beat of disco and rap music.