The discussion, the indispensable preliminary selection and isolation, of a single "text" then automatically transforms it back into a "work," turns the anonymous videomaker back into a named artist or auteur, and opens the way for the return of all those features of an older modernist aesthetic which it was in the revolutionary nature of the newer medium to have precisely effaced and dispelled. In spite of these qualifications and reservations, it does not seem possible to go further in this exploration of the possibilities of video without interrogating a concrete text. We will consider a twenty-nine-minute "work" called AlienNATION, produced at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago by Edward Rankus, John Manning, and Barbara Latham in 1979. For the reader this will evidently remain an imaginary text; but the reader need not "imagine" that the spectator is in an altogether different situation.