A monitor on a plinth, screening permanently original film material of the escalating student protests against racial discrimination (and in this context a planned new building on the campus) at the Columbia University in New York City 1968. 

Columbia Revolt 1968:In April 1968 some student groups seized the main university buildings for several days and started to establish quasi autonomous self administrative structures. They performed weddings, appointed political committees, developed their own jurisdiction, disscussed, organised. The film outlines the picture of a group of people who temporarily find a way to form identity by acting together as a group in resistance. On April 30, 1968 the police ended the occupation, arresting more than 700 students, 150 were injured. 

The film material was shot by Newsreel, a collective of anonymous American film authors who tried to establish a counter publicity to the official news. They filmed inside the seized buildings with the students while the official American press reported and broadcast from the outside, taking on the perspective of the state authorities. The authors of Newsreel preferred to stay anonymous – out of ideological raison as well as practical reason (to avoid possible arrest).

In 2001 the re-emerged film material was posted on the internet for copyright free download, explicitly intending to bring the events to the conscious of a wider public.  
For the exhibition „Preview“, presented at the Academy of Media Art (KHM) Cologne in July 2002 (and at the Gallery Andreas Binder in Munich in September 2002), the film was downloaded from the internet, converted into a DVD, presented in a monitor on a sculpture plinth, and distributed to the visitors for free, providing the political protest of the sixties a forum in today’s context of contemporary art. 
The presence of such a form of collective narrative as a „memorial“ in an institution offered the visitors/students a discourse about the task of public memorials today, and eventually the historic example of generating an autonomous community as a counterstrike to a „frozen“ restrictive society drew on the discourse of contemporary possibilities for political action in institutions and the public today.