John Sanborn

The story of Stargate SG-1 begins about a year after the events of the feature film, when the United States government learns that an ancient alien device called the Stargate can access a network of such devices on a multitude of planets. SG-1 is an elite Air Force special operations team, one of more than two dozen teams from Earth who explore the galaxy and defend against alien threats such as the Goa'uld, Replicators, and the Ori.

An avant-garde omnibus that features works by off-the-wall artists in many different disciplines.

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.

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".

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.

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

Untitled pays tribute to the life and work of the dancer and choreographer Arnie Zane, who died of AIDS in 1988. His long-time partner Bill T. Jones evokes memories of Zane through a stark, eloquent dance-lament and a parade of ghostly portraits and photographs.

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

"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.

Abstract video art set to the music of Philip Glass.

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

Short film by John Sanborn

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.