Miss Video 4 u (NYC): Third Transmission

Presented by Cactus+

Miss Video 4 u (MV4u)

For every 10 videos Miss Video receives, she compiles the videos onto a single USB. She then makes 10 copies of this USB for distributing to each contributor. Along with the videos, contributors are invited to share a zine page & other ephemera related to the submission to contextualize it: a reading list, manifesto, bloopers, storyboards, reflections. This digital ephemera lives together with the videos on the USB. The zine pages from each artist are combined, printed, and packaged together with the USB & mailed back to all contributors.

MV4u is the film festival reject reel. Miss Video is rotting in your desktop’s trash bin. She was just booted off her third YouTube account for using a copyrighted song. She’s a re-uploaded vine compilation. She’s an unedited acting audition tape. She’s the never-before-seen footage of a cryptid caught on camera. She’s the VCR-recorded season finale of The Simpsons in 2001. She’s a screen recording of her forty-minute doomscroll

Submit to MV4u by filling out this form.

The 10 Videos 0f the Third Transmission

Babylon Alicia Nieto

Shot in a theater in Berlin.

The Great Path to a Foreign Body ​​ Lau Mota

Video essay portraying crossdresser community on flickr between 2004-2010.

Snooping Lenny Farinholt

Nix works as a petsitter. While staying over at a client’s house,  they start catching glimpses of one of the neighbors dancing, and cannot look away.

Who Do You Think You Are Mary Filippo

In “Who Do You Think You Are” (1986, 10 minutes) the main character, a filmmaker, investigates her own cigarette smoking habit while wishing she could make “a film about injustice.”  She wishes, in other words to do something heroic.  She has been seduced by the image of the cigarette-smoking hero, but an image is only an image.

Prelude Paulina Jamieson

A single shot, improvisational dance film set to Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold: Prelude.

Another Great Day Ruth Peyser

Another Great Day was made in 1980 and is a product of its time. The film depicts a day in the life of a housewife as she routinely performs her daily chores; TV, radio and pulp novels form her world of fantasy. She moves in this world of distorted values, ineffectual, uncomprehending, only able to recognize her own despair. Another Great Day was animated with painted, inked and collaged black and white photos, shot sequentially, which results in a pixilation-like effect.

Embryonic               Jackie Blue Weddell

This stop motion short film was made in the winter of 2023 when I was living at home in Michigan after graduating college.  The installation consisted of fifteen crocheted posters with the image of a young Lady Gaga on them in blue. This appropriated portrait symbolizes myself at my core, an embryo basking in her own potential like Lady Gaga did before her explosion of fame. The physical resemblance between me and the image validates this self-seeing.  The act of posting information on wooden telephone poles is one that evokes communal connection without technology. I chose to use this mode of communication to translate and infuse my art into the minds and environments of my community members at the time.   The art in question looks at the viewer as they are looking at it and is reminiscent of the feeling of being seen by the surplus of shrines and altars housing pictorials of Mother Maria in Southern Italy.

Shifting Borders               Tess Usher & Frances Mitchler

How do distinguished spaces come to be? How do these borders impact human relationships with land? This project explores the creation and decimation of boundaries between the built and natural environments at the decommissioned Manresa power plant in Norwalk, Connecticut. With each element encroaching on the other, there exists a continuous battle for autonomy. In the format of experimental ethnographic videowork, visuals of shifting boundaries seek to evoke this complex relationship. Excerpts from interviews with community members situate the power plant within its affected surroundings. With the horizons warming, how might these powers continue to shape each other?

Los Angeles Movie               Ankha Cros-Roig

A film I made shortly after the LA fires that began in Jan 2025. It is made up of footage that I’ve taken over the past 5 years in this city.

The Red 70s               Derek Caterwaul

A paranoiac peep through crimson-colored glass at the latent menace of a media-soaked decade, augmented by a few red herrings.

CACTUS+

Our mission is to create an artist-centered model for multimedia arts education and community building that champions accessibility, inclusivity and sustainability. Founded in 2022, Cactus+ is our effort to formalize and broaden the reach of our arts education and community building programs including workshops, youth internships, and accessibility initiatives.

Cactus+ Moving Image’s vision is to create an environment conducive to critical engagement by showing work that takes risks, challenges norms, and opens conversations by showcasing a wide range of artist-driven independent media. As a series, we hope to offer a space for inter-generational attendees to engage with film, expanded cinema, and integrated moving image arts practices made by artists from a variety of backgrounds.

To keep a flow of new perspectives, the monthly programs are curated by Cactus+ as well as visionary guest programmers. We have hosted installations, video jockeys, workshops in stop motion, teen film-making, hosting screenings, and cinema studies.

For more information or to submit a guest curation form visit our MI page.