Born in 1940 in New York, Kostelanetz has published many books of poetry, fiction, criticism and cultural history , including John Cage (1970), Conversing With Cage (1988), On Innovative Music(ian)s (1989). Merce Cunningham (1992), Writing about Cage (1993), John Cage: Writer(1993) and A Dictionary of the Avante-Garde (1993). He recently edited Nicholas Slonimsky: The First 100 Years (1994) and A Portable Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1995). He has been working with audio since 1975, video since 1976, film since 1977, holography since 1978, and his personal computer since 1982. His audio tapes and audio-videotapes have been broadcast and exhibited around the world.
Single-sentence stories (from a 1975 book of the same title) that are either the openings of hypothetical fictions or the closings, read by the author in inventively amplified stereo. (Duration, 60 minutes)
An introductory, comprehensive lecture-demonstration of his "publishing" with audiotape, with examples from over a dozen works. (Duration, 91 minutes)
A hifi stereo videotape of long words in which shorter words are embedded, in increasingly complex configurations, based upon an uncollected long poem by Kostelanetz. Music by Gordon Jillson. (Duration, ca. 28 minutes)
1/2" VHS
Several endless streams of letters composed of overlapping words (including one string in German) enhanced in different ways to the music of Gordon Jillson. (Duration, ca. 30 minutes)
1/2" VHS tape
An audiocassette of two formally experimental erotic narratives, respectively from More Short Fictions and Autobiographies. (Duration, 25 and 31 minutes)
A 60 minute hifi stereo multitrack composition of, and about the sound of, baseball as a reflection of the Americas.
1/2" Hifi stereo VHS
An elaborate, multi-dimensional video synthesis to accompany a continuous reading in German of the first four books of the New Testament as though they were a fugue.
Video tape
A work which rearranges 84 sentence-modules in systematically different ways, with two completely different readings-realizations of the text (which appeared from Tuumba Press, 1978). (Duration, 60 minutes)
An earlier self-retrospective, 45 minutes.
A 55-minute retrospective of early video art, narrated by Kostelanetz and directed by Robert Boynton Weyr.
1/2" VHS
Electronically modified readings of texts radically reworked from the KJV (and since reprinted in Prose Pieces, Atticus Press, 1985.) (Duration, 46 minutes)
A hifi stereo videotape of long words in which shorter words are embedded, in increasingly complex configurations, based upon an uncollected long poem by Kostelanetz. Music by Gordon Jillson. (Duration, ca. 28 minutes)
3/4" Video tape
An videocassette of two formally experimental erotic narratives, respectively from More Short Fictions and Autobiographies. (Duration, 25 and 31 minutes)
Videocassette with hifi stereo sound and kinetic syntheses (1988)
1/2" VHS
A 60 minute hifi stereo multitrack composition of, and about the sound of, baseball as a reflection of the Americas.
An audio-art piece (in six versions) about the sound of the language of prayer, 61 minutes long, in 25 languages, recorded in West Berlin and mixed at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm and subsequently broadcast over radio stations in Germany, Holland, Canada, Australia and America.
A succession of four-word poems, eight-word poems, and sixteen-word poems, sometimes accompanied by aural realizations of the same texts.