The artist as the lonely genius, the hyper-individualist the romantic strategist - these concepts are countered by artists who work collectively. An artist couple (in the field of video there were once Abramovic/ Ulay) might still be taken as a double entity, the embodiment of an opposition or a duality. Yet the collective denies any notion of authorship. It is not by chance that both groups from the USA present at the VideoFest with an installation have chosen a four-letter logo as their name. The medium video is "naturally" linked to the loss of the concept of the original. A video copy cannot be discerned from the original. Why both "art bands", TODT and X-PRZ, present them­ selves strategically as an anonymous collective, what importance they give to the electronic medium - these are questions they will answer in this talk. "TODT is the Gothic German word for 'very dead'. It's an anonymous association, We are a collective of four artists interested in objects and metaphors that analyze the concepts of power, objects that evoke military, scientific, pornographic, medical, all the technological range, and we are interested in the resistances to that power. We are not animated by strict politics, but by the whole idea of the found object. The thrill of this work is based on indigenous material. This is found in the Mid-West, an American accumulation of junk-yards. Recycling is an adventure: how to coordinate or manipulate the object evoking a logic that it is hard to sense that this was a found object." From an interview with TODT at the Venice Biennale 1993. What is this thing called X-PRZ? "Our working process as an "art band" has been likened to a conversation, a multiple personality disorder or a group musical improvisation. It emphasizes the exchange and deformation of ideas over formal hierarchies, authorship, or specific media. Think of a form of play in which the ideas riff off each other, where each member sometimes leads and other times supports, where the production process shifts and undercuts our own expectations. The work is never totalized, it is a constant rehearsal, a mixture of positions. We see it as a willful misreading and misapplication of various cultural practices from critical theory to pop music. A process of innovation through misrecognition, it posits unsuccessful imitation as the motor for ironic developments and useful confusions."