Congratulations to the 2010 Images Festival Award Winners!
We announced our winners on Saturday April 10 at St. Anne’s Church, followed by a celebratory Closing Night Party at the Workman Arts Theatre for artists and festival-goers. Special thanks to our 2010 audiences and supporters — see you in 2011! (Festival dates April 7-16, 2011)

The 2010 Competition Jury included Candice Hopkins (Director and Curator of Exhibitions at Western Front, Vancouver and the Sobey Curatorial Resident, Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada), Henriette Huldisch (Associate Curator at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin) and Irina Leimbacher (independent film curator and scholar, San Francisco).

Look for our Off Screen & Performance Projects Calls for Submission for 2011 soon!

AWARDS
Images Prize for Best Canadian Media Artwork:
Tie: Nicolás Pereda (Mexico/Canada) for Todo, en fin, el silencio lo ocupaba
and Jayce Salloum (Vancouver) & Khadim Ali (Afghanistan) for (the heart that has no love / pain / generosity is not a heart)

Deluxe Cinematic Vision Award:
Josh Bonnetta (Montreal) for Long Shadows

Best International On Screen (film) Award:
Kevin Jerome Everson (USA) for Erie

Best International On Screen (video) Award:
Emily Wardill (UK) for Game Keepers Without Game

OCAD Off Screen Award:
Emma Hart and Benedict Drew (UK) for the installation Untitled Seven

Steam Whistle Home Brew Award
For “excellence and promise in a local artist”:
Shary Boyle (Toronto) & Christine Fellows (Vancouver) for their performance The Monkey and the Mermaid

Overkill Award
For work that “challenges our notions of edgy, experimental practice”:
Polydactyl Hearts Collective (Guelph) for their performance Hello Adventure

Marian McMahon Award
Presented by the Images Festival and sponsored by Kodak Canada. Honours strong work in autobiography, the complexity of subject and the spirit of Marian McMahon.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh (The Netherlands) for The Past is Never Dead

Tom Berner Award
Presented by LIFT and Images to “an individual who has provided extraordinary support of independent filmmaking in Toronto and beyond”:
Margaret Wagner, Exclusive Film and Video

Student Awards
Determined by audience vote:
York University Award for Best Student Film: Fern Silva (Bard College, USA) for Sahara Mosaic
Vtape Award for Best Student Video: Jose Luis Ruvalcaba (Instituto de cine de Madrid, Spain) for Autocasting

As we finish our ten days of On Screen and Live Images programming, most of our gallery exhibitions are still open.
Until April 17: A Man Called Love (Tamar Guimaraes) at Women’s Art Resource Centre
The Wrath of Math (Tara Downs, Andrew Gavin Hicks, Amy Jenine, Michael Lawrie and Alize Zorlutuna) at XPACE Cultural Centre
Sea Oak (Emily Wardill) at YYZ

Until April 24: The Past is Never Dead (Wendelien van Oldenborgh) at A Space Gallery
Craneway Event (Tacita Dean) at Gallery TPW

Until May 1: Expand and Contract (Matthew Biederman, Franziska Cordes and Anna Wignell) at InterAccess
Hereafter (Brenda Goldstein) at Mercer Union

Until May 2: (the heart that has no love / pain / generosity is not a heart (Khadim Ali & Jayce Salloum) at the Institute for Contemporary Culture ROM

Until May 8: Extra-territoriality (Ursula Biemann, Jayce Salloum, Sobhi al-Zobaidi and Leah Decter) at Trinity Square Video

Until May 15: Honey (Andrea Cooper) at Vtape Video Salon

Until May 24: Sharon Lockhart, Peter Campus, Joachim Koester and Ryan Trecartin at The Power Plant

Until June 6: Emotional Feelings (Daniel Barrow) at Art Gallery of York University

Images Blog 8 - 2010 Andrew James Paterson

Notes on the International Experimental Media Congress 2010

Note that in 2010 Toronto is hosting an International Experimental Media Congress, whereas in 1989 it was the metropolitan host to an International Experimental Film Congress. And the first panel of the first full day of the congress - Session Number One as it is called in the programme - was indeed titled The Place of the Medium.

Well, the place of what medium? I mean, we are in the 21st century. Right? But… film and film stock are indeed endangered species, both as materials themselves and as exhibition formats. But….debates concerning purity of materiality are at least as old as the 1989 congress. And times have of course changed. Back then galleries did not particularly figure into the equations. Festivals mixing video and film were a relatively recent venture. Now so many people might shoot on film, transfer to video for editing, perhaps (or perhaps not) transfer back to film as an exhibition and distribution format, and so on. Now video installation is not only de rigeur in galleries (although many video installations and projections are on film), video is considered by many to be a more feasible material for exhibition (cheaper for shipping and devoid of the aura of being the original and so on.). Now many artists are composing videos and (yes) films out of non-camera images, whether be found materials or original graphics. And now of course there is You Tube and My Space and VIMEO and the World Wide Web and copies of copies of copies of copies etcetera. How many hits has Michael Snow’s Wavelengths enjoyed (or endured) on You Tube. Somewhere between five and six thousand, I believe.

Artists and curators and academics tend to agree that artists’ original intentions should be respected if possible with respect to materials. If conceived as and shot and mastered as a film, then preferably projected as a film. But, at this date, very few would lock themselves into a fixed position here. If a video transfer is more practical, then go with the flow. Panellist Pip Chodorow (of Re:Voir Video, France) did take the absolutist position - that film is an essentially preferable material to video, that film is the original material and video duplication of a specific film is either a copy or an essentially inferior material, that film is film and video is something else. I can admire Chodorow’s commitment to his preferred medium of celluloid film, but I think he did box himself into a corner. The other panellists seemed prepare to deal with materiality on a case by case basis - if a filmmaker insists on celluloid presentation then go for it if at all possible. And if a filmmaker thinks Betacam-Video or DVD is an acceptable exhibition format, then get on with it. “Let’s Get It On”, in the immortal words of a famous deceased soul singer.

Resolution is crucial, everybody did agree. Film does possess a depth that video tends to lack - many video artists work with that medium because the relative flatness is the attraction. But of course there are so many hybrid of hybrid of hybrid works. And what looks transferable or communicable on You Tube tends not to look so great or so deep in either a festival or gallery setting, unless the You-Tube-ness of the work is part and parcel of the point. We must remember that a lot of particularly younger artists are not terribly material-specific. They might indeed be visitors to their selected materials - they might actually be “experimenting”.

Another panel did indeed reference omnipresent questions regarding the logistics of “the cinematic” within art galleries and also art systems. Many filmmakers and “media artists” have indeed found ways to occupy space within museum structures. This panel concerned museums - not artist-run galleries which have traditionally provided space for what they tend to generalize as “time-based art”. New York-based curator Christopher Eamon was relatively candid as to why some media-works are gallery-friendly (this installation would make no sense in a theatre or cinema) and why some are simply not (three hour Yvonne Rainer films are something intended to be viewed in a theatrical situation). However, filmmakers and other media artists with documentary and archival-centred practices have been infiltrating museum circles to considerable effect - Harun Farocki is a prominent example. Farocki’s films are not unlike assemblages often found in vitrines, and there have always been parallels between archivism, documentary, and museology. With Farocki and others, language is transported or translated from the obligatory museum signage to the bodies of the films or videos themselves.

Why might a film or video artist want (or not want) to adapt themselves to the museum? Well… perhaps broader audiences, or greater residuals or even sales (real estate?). Perhaps cinematic structures are disintegrating or have never been that supportive to begin with? But do moving images necessarily imply the cinematic? Actually, what is the cinematic? Does this adjective refer to an experience formed from viewing what is cinema? And is “cinema” something that is actually viewed in a cinema - a movie house or whatever the synonym? How satisfactorily do what for convenience can be called “cinematic” or moving pictures translate to or oscillate between the black box and the white cube? Are theatrical and gallery audiences necessarily “seated” and “ambulatory”? I believe there are individual works that can play in either one or the other, but there is the matter of assumed attention spans. Film audiences consent (sign a contract) to be seated for a lengthy duration; gallery viewers are reputed to look at individual works for an average of less than a minute. But surely serious viewers have been known to not just stare at object art on walls and floor for longer durations? I mean, I have done it myself - whether seated on a bench or walking on foot around the focused painting or sculpture or even video-projection. Surely one should spend time with art - no matter what the medium or its materials? Time-based is arguably a misnomer, to put it mildly. But… I have seen enough works in galleries which have beginnings, middles, and ends (whether or not in that order) and felt that they would best be served in a theatrical viewing situation - lights down and nobody else’s footsteps making noise by walking around. Theatrical and gallery-viewing contracts are exactly that - contracts.

Yes…galleries hold out promise to some of the panellists, especially documentarians frustrated with limitations of theatrical and television situations. Documentary is not unrelated to history, and history (herstory?) is of course the stuff of archives. What is stored and how? What is accessible and to whom under what conditions? Who gets remembered and by who under what circumstances? Media-art, if not filmic material, has always had a sense of the ‘now” about it. New technologies are “now” - they don’t tend to age well and neither does film stock. It is not just the museums that haven’t had a clue what to do with their collections. So many storage-location factors enter the picture as to why stocks and materials deteriorate - reliability of electricity, extreme temperatures, and priorities of maintenance in the first place. The word that won’t go away, with regards to concerns regarding preservation and also restoration, is “authentic”. Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles was particularly specific as to his processes of duplication, preservation, and restoration. (He spoke in precise detail at both the conference and at the Images Festival screening of restored films by queer New York filmmaker Tom Chomont.) An original print or source material may no longer exist in its entirety or it may be seriously damaged. Here things get delicate. They might even get digital. But this raises concerns about copies of copies or moments where the colours are not quite matched (not to mention the stock). Are the artists involved in the restoration process to a satisfactory degree? Are the artists around to be involved and, if they are not, then who is ultimately in charge?

Concentration upon archival issues - whether preservationist or creative archive-hacking and “appropriation” - kept colliding with a sense of death. Death was a word that would not die during this panel. Ellie Epp asked about preservation and maintenance and dissemination of works by deceased artists. Well, some make arrangements in their wills or with their estates and some don’t. Some are lucky enough to have friends who take on these commitments. But such commitments are time-consuming and bank-account draining. I did find myself thinking about very good artists who for various reasons fall through the cracks.

Archiving of not only dead and not only historical but also present-tense artists is a huge concern for film and video and media-artist communities, but a low priority for many museums as socio-political structures. “Avant-garde” or “no commercial potential” are routinely dismissed as elitist and not of concern to “real people”. Some panellists and delegates advocated a do-it-yourself grass-rootsism here - don’t wait for the state and so forth. But funds are required, and where might they come from in order to engage in serious archiving of the so many artists who deserve to be rigorously archived? Well?

Does the analogue necessarily have to enter the digital in order to survive and be presentable? Is the degeneration of the original image(s) a necessary compromise? If the degenerating (the fading) of images is unacceptable, then what is? Commitment to materials is important if applicable. And surely this decision is up to the individual artist, if practical and feasible et cetera? Yes…the individual artist.

So many of the sessions and panels at the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress were concerned with history. Titles included: Carrying History Forward, Permanence in Flux: Archival Practices, and Raiding the Archive. These titles all imply using history to forge futures. Canadian aboriginal curator Steven Loft warned of the dangers about setting up situations in which both individuals and collectives spent all of their time recovering the past, and good on him for saying so. But didn’t some famous sci-fi writer once opine that he (she) who controls the past controls the future? Well, yes, that is a truism. And so many experimental film and media practices have been ephemeral, to relative degrees, within museum structures and the media-at-large. There was a noticeable absence of not only futurism (no capital letters here, please) but aggressive present-ism (otherwise known as modernism). So many of the works excerpted or even screened in entirety by presenting panellists deployed rescanned or re-jigged archival stocks or source materials from the public realm. A delegate (actually yours truly) enquired at one point about abstractionism. I witnessed very few examples of abstractionism (what about animation?) during the conference. Abstractionism is of course associated by so many with obscurantism and refusal to engage with any social realm and, well, modernism. Abstractionism is not associated with realism, even though abstract thought patterns are in fact the reality when recorded realties and thought patterns alike begin to first lock into repetitive patterns and then begin smashing those patterns. Abstractionism can be both a comfort zone and a danger zone, just like archive-raiding or media-pilfering or whatever the practice.

Linguistics was, as de rigueur, a frequently surfacing concern. Why are we (and who are “we) still using the words “experimental” and “avant-garde”? And Dont Rhine of the Los Angeles-based sound activist group Ultra-red asked what this word “media” is. For so many in earlier years (think the sixties and seventies of the last century), media was alternative to museums. “Media” referred to a public realm outside of the private galleries and obscure artist-run networks. “Media” connoted television, and the popular press. (The late Malcolm McLaren was arguably a media-artist, a practitioner of detournement.) Yet “media” is a catch-all term including not just film but video and web-art and other ephemera. Media attempts to encompass the analogue which must be preserved and proudly flaunted, as well as the digitalia which preserves the analogue and, in many cases, proudly replaces it. Words, words, words.

Now…the steering committee of the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress highlight the word “experimental”. That is also a word that has been used to describe this and then describe that - this and that either being oppositional or incompatible. It has been some time since only work existing outside of mainstream media or dominant production models can safely be labelled “experimental”. Or, what constitutes “experimentalism”? This noun for some time has been knocked off its modernist perch, by factors including pluralism and, well, postmodernism. Experimentalism is not an attitude - it can be many different attitudes or mindsets among those who choose to experiment - meaning mix this with that and so on. Montage? Bricolage? Throw in some performance or at least something performative? Perhaps that dangling gerund or participle “experimenting” is a better word than “experimental”? “Experimenting”, like all dangling gerunds or participles, can become a useful adjective. This is an individual or collective (a lot of collectivism at the congress and not much individualism) who or which is experimenting (an experimenting project) - with presentation formats as well as material content. Why traditional proscenium theatrical seating plans? Why position screens against white walls as in a traditional gallery floor plan? Why proclaim everything to be in cyberspace and outside of theatres, cinemas, and art galleries? What the hell does “avant-garde” now mean? Ahead of everybody? Manning (pun possibly intended) the front lines? Serious committed radicalism refusing assimilation? Some panellists wished to banish the term “avant-garde” and some held onto it. Not unlike other conferences.

And why are moving images necessarily “cinematic”? What are the limits of the term “expanded cinema”? Should there indeed be any limits? Are You Tube videos meant to be “cinematic”, whether or not they are transported or translated into theatrical or gallery spaces? Are You Tube or VIMEO pieces meant to carry that aura - to provide cinematic experiences? Actually, I doubt it.

The 1989 conference was of course a ghost, and ghosts would not be ghosts if they did not persist in making sneaky sporadic appearances. It was remarked that, at the 1989 conference, the presence of a feminist essayist such as Yvonne Rainer would have been a no-go. Well, in 2010 Yvonne Rainer was the keynote speaker. And quite the speaker she was. Yes, we are now in the twenty-first century.

Speculations that dance seems to be a prevailing theme (or at least the subject of a friendly affinity) at Images this year is not entirely offbase. The few mentions I’d like to make here under the banner of “dance performance” are meant to eschew a reductivist categorization (as some are wont to do), and rather, these examples make a case for the discipline as a medium for other, broader concepts.

I’m kicking myself for missing Yvonne Rainer’s talk on Wednesday night and robbinschilds performances at Dancemakers, but I caught a couple of standouts one of last Sunday’s screenings. In Kaitlin Till-Landry’s short silent film First Words (or Momma Dadda) Till-Landry uses her hands, then a long shawl falling from her shoulders to block the light from an overhead projector shining right into the camera, creating a flashing effect. Channeling the specter of Isadora Duncan, Till-Landry created a compelling choreography regardless of her encoded message.

Dutch dancer Cynthia Loemij is the subject of Manon de Boer’s film Dissonant, which followed Till-Landry’s film. Loemij loops through a gorgeous, elastic routine several times and continues to move even after the camera’s film runs out. It’s a testament to two incredibly disciplined artists: a dancer who knows her choreography inside out and de Boer, who must follow an equally complex choreography with her camera and prepare to reposition it in the black spaces between reels. de Boer’s film reiterates how much dance has to do with memory—especially of the body. At the beginning, we watch Loemij quietly absorbing the music, seemingly rehearsing the routine in her mind and relating those echoes of engaged muscles to aural cues.

Wednesday night’s program at Polish Combatants Hall, Revenge of the Theory Persons, or Don’t Just Sit There, Gentle Presence was curated and presented by Oliver Husain and Kathleen Smith on a stage littered with objects. In light of Husain’s past performances—such as Rushes for Five Hats, presented at Gallery TPW in 2007—I assumed that the objects would intercept the projection, but Husain and Smith arranged their set pieces with modest restraint, framing the image on the screen upstage instead. Smith revealed pre-performance that the collection of objects was selected based on a certain “essence,” and I think they worked for the most part, although from my vantage point not much could be seen from the audience. Several long objects oriented vertically (giant pencils?) accompanied Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie, mimicking the tentative movements of Rainer’s fingers. A small spare arrangement of an oversized martini glass and fake tea lights flickered downstage during Takahiko Iimura’s bleached-out butoh dancers in Rose Color Dance.

But Babette Mangolte’s document of Trisha Brown’s Water Motor was exceptional. This is the standard for dance on film: a steely-eyed camera moving in sync with Brown’s moves, both fluid and on fire. Capturing the dance is no easy feat, given the adjustments needed to complete one long take (you can read Mangolte’s description of shooting the film here on her website). But it’s not merely documentation of a performance but also of a body moving through space. Brown practically owns the stage, sidling and grooving across the spare studio. Seen once in real time and then in slow motion, it’s a film that reiterates the sculptural aspects of dance (which is perhaps another layer to Husain and Smith’s unconventional presentation.)

Similarly, Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event at Gallery TPW is a document of an action in space, or rather, the effect of a space on an action. Dean filmed three days of rehearsals of Merce Cunningham’s company for a planned performance in an old reconverted Ford Factory (designed by the light-loving Albert Kahn, no less) on the waterfront in Richmond, California. Dean’s 16 anamorphic film captures quite a bit of the action, but her static shots are more impassive than either Mangolte’s or de Boer’s, and are more attuned to the poetics of the space rather than the dance itself. Since we’ve been rehearsing alongside the company all along, by the end of the second day, the choreography becomes routine. Late in the film, Dean positions the camera almost directly towards the glare of the sun, rendering the architecture of the space practically invisible and allowing the light to eclipse the dancers. The film is a beautiful and considered portrait of Merce Cunningham and his legacy—marking the second collaboration between him and Dean. Even on the last day of rehearsal, when the camera catches Cunningham sleeping peacefully in his wheelchair, the effect is tender, not malicious.

Make haste to TPW to see this film and give yourself ample time: total running time clocks in at just under 2 hours, but it’s worth sitting through from beginning to end. Craneway Event screens at 12:30 and 3 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, as well as on Thursdays at 7:00 p.m.

Images Blog 7 - 2010 Andrew James Paterson

A recurring motif throughout this 23rd Images Festival is one of cinematic experiences devoid of production and post-production elements usually taken for granted. There have been a few works which strip cinematic apparatus down to bare essentials - moving them in and out of visual and sonic frames according to their necessity if even that. Emily Wardill’s installation at YYZ - Sea Oaks - and her feature film Gamekeepers Without Game are both exercises in provocatively structural reductionism.

Films are generally considered to be synonymous with movies, a word which is colloquial short form for moving pictures. But there are indeed cinematic situations in which there are no pictures to be sequenced or highlighted or montages or whatever the cinematic verb. One of the 23rd Festival’s Live Images programmes specifically addressed the absence of pictures - it was titled No Images. Yes sound, no pictures. Audiences were ushered into a completely black auditorium, after being instructed to not only turn off their cell phones but also to pee if they must before the event as there would be no exiting except for medical emergencies. When everybody was seated, then a succession of audio pieces by five artists (two working in collaboration) commenced. I was rather disappointed in this event. I had expected the withdrawal of pictures to heighten my appreciation as to what pictures could be accompanying the array of sounds on display. But what I heard most often resembled audio-art or even a radio play. Annie McDonnell - the first of the artists in sequenced - recited a dense quasi-academic text about perceptions of sound and perceptions of image over the sounds of various cinematic room tones (on film reels that she found in somebody’s waste). Her text was quite good - I would have rather been reading it or listening to it in either a formal lecture situation or perhaps an essay-film. If the text had not been present, then I could have had fun imagining the films that had been reduced to the room-tones of their various setups and scenes. None of the other artists made me think very much about the cinema, although I appreciated Ryan Driver’s musique concrete. Perhaps drugs might have helped the situation, although I doubt it.

The exercise in visual deprivation was followed by a film essaying the use of silence within cinema and narrative. Todo, en film, el silencio lo ocupaba (All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence), by Mexican filmmaker Nicolas Pereda, was many things. It was structurally a film about the making of a film, a time-honoured but here very useful device. Pereda films a crew in the acts of filming a performance. The performance is by performance artist cum activist Jususa Rodriguez, and it is a theatrical recitation of an epic poem Primo Suerio (First I Dream), by 17th century Mexican writer Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. As Pereda’s film is about the making of the image, it almost (but not completely) resists making its own images. It is also an excellent depiction of not necessarily tensions but certainly differences between performative and poetic impulses and the technicalities of production. What seems like a perfect take to the performer is often a flawed take to crew members - such are the rotes of not only dramatic but even experimental filmmaking. Sor Juana’s poem is epic, but it is also broken down into cinematic stations for the purpose of filming. And sometimes the text is broken off, and tableaux are held for effect. I did find myself reminiscing how Jean-Luc Godard has considered natural light to be God. The first portion of Todo, en film, el silencio lo ocupaba uses the candles of the performer’s original theatrical set as light sources. If natural light is divine, then how about sublime candlelight?

Primo Suerio is a well-known Mexican poem and theatrical and (not to mention cinematic) adaptations must tread very carefully indeed. The documentation of what is oral is a means of preservation, although it is hopefully much more. It can be a means of revisitation, or even re-enactment. Two installations at A Space by Rotterdam-based artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh are concerned with the recovering of lost or deliberately neglected histories by means of theatrical adaptation and script-revisions. The Past is Never Dead consists of two works. Après le reprise, la prise emerges focuses on labour unrest, strikes, and subsequent closure of four Levi’s plants. Van Oldenborgh collaborates with two former Levi’s workers and several women about to graduate from the Royal Technical Atheneum (in Mechelen, Belgium), where the filming is taking place. The women talk at length without script, and then a “script” is assembled. Parallels of course emerge between workers and actors - both are subject to choreography with varying degrees of volition. There is also a tradition in both political theatre and filmmaking in which “real people” are used instead of “actors” because the former already know their lines and their movements. The other work in The Past is Never Dead is Instruction, which addresses the aftermath of the Dutch military intervention in Indonesia following World War II. Van Oldenborgh casts a group of young cadets from the Royal Netherlands Military. What they had previously thought was their history was not actually their history. What has originally been categorized as a “police action” was unfortunately so much more. The script is assembled from various archival and documentary sources, which have been uncovered well after the original events. Intervention uses dramatization from historical material to deal with personal and national responsibilities and the heritage of the nation-state’s colonial past. The Past is Never Dead is low-key in format and performance, and is all the more effective because of this.