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Torsten Zenas Burns (Born 1968, Laguna Beach, California) is an American video and installation artist, curator, and educator who lives and works in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His work explores "zombie and afterlife relationships, experimental space programs, fictional medical practices, physical and psychic slapstick." (eyebeam note)

Burns received a B.F.A. from the School of Art & Design at Alfred University in 1990 (note), and an M.F.A. in video and performance from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. (note)

Works
Burns's solo and collaborative videos have been screened in museums, galleries, and festivals internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Eyebeam (New York), Hallwalls, Impakt Festival, and the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. His work has been included in the major historical surveys, The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Radical Light: Avant-Garde Film and Video in the Bay Area, 1945-2000, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. His work is distributed through Video Data Bank, Electronic Arts Intermix, LUX, and Vtape.

Solo Work
Burns     screened at the New York Video Festival, Massachusets Institute of Technology, His work is featured in ETC: Experimental Television Center 1969-2009, a comprehensive five-DVD box set that documents the wide range of electronic media work produced at the Experimental Television Center's Residency Program.

HalfLifers
While at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s, Burns began collaboration with fellow student Anthony Discenza; under the name of HalfLifers, Burns and Discenza produced more than twenty videos together over an 18-year span. A box set retrospective titled HalfLifers: The Complete History 1992-2010 was released in 2010.

http://www.vdb.org/titles/halflifers-complete-history-1992-2010 http://halflifersprojects.blogspot.com/2011/08/film-comment-magazine-halflifers-dvd.html

In 2013, the University of Illinois at Chicago's Gallery 400 organized an extensive survey of their work, entitled I THINK WE’RE READY TO GO TO THE NEXT SEQUENCE: THE LEGACY OF HALFLIFERS (UIC note). Departing from a standard career survey format, the exhibition featured a condensed 45-minute reedit of their full video oeuvre as its centerpiece; it also included works by artists with whom they are closely associated, including Kari Gatzke, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Bjørn Melhus, Shana Moulton, Caspar Stracke, and others, along with THE LAST KNOWN PHOTOGRAPH OF THE HALFLIFERS, a book conceived for the exhibition as "an alternative self-portrait that catalogs key materials, sources, influences, and other touchstones". (UIC note)

http://gallery400.uic.edu/exhibitions/i-think-were-ready-to-go-to-the-next-sequence-the-legacy-of-halflifers

With Darrin Martin
Their videos include Recall, I Am Today's Lesson Plan, ''What-If? Beyond a Carnalove, The Abominable Freedom'', and others.

With Others
Burns has also collaborated on projects with a number of other artists, including Anne McGuire, Caspar Stracke, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, and Virocode; in 2010, Burns released UNKNNOWN COLLLABORATIONS, a self-published book of drawings produced with the filmmaker James Fotopoulos. (note)

Articles
http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/quest-what-video-halflifers http://www.mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ39/fryepage.html