Category: Programming 2008

(in)visible cities included live performances by an array of internationally renowned artists including: Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Vancouver), Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (Winnipeg), FASTWÜRMS (Creemore, ON), Jessica Thompson (Toronto), and Nhan Duc Nguyen (Vancouver). Cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph (Winnipeg) will act as (in)visible cities’ rapporteur/blogger, providing insightful commentary as festival events unfold.

Staging the Gap is a miniature model of a concert stage with silently animated lights and smoke. The work explores the relationship of fact and fiction in a technologically mediated world. Hengeveld critically
reflects on the mechanisms used to deliver popular culture by focusing on how visual effects – stage lights, pyrotechnics, and dry ice – are used at concerts to shape our understanding of what we hear. Ignoring society’s desire for the spectacle of performance, the stage created by the artist remains empty while a precisely orchestrated light show plays out.

Psychiatrist and cultural theorist Randolph uses psychoanalytic methods and concepts, themselves amenable to productive misuse, to reveal the ways in which technological devices and/or their depictions are open to creative and critical interpretation. Johnson projects digital slides in a manner reminiscent of corporate culture and middle management to support his thesis that technology has ruined art, while Randolph uses a technology associated with yesterday’s middle-school science teachers and art historians – the conventional slide projector – to comment on mass media culture. Through a hilarious presentation based on classical scholarship, Johnson took his audience back to scenes of Lascaux, urging artists to abandon “all this technological nonsense” and to “go back to crushing berries and burning sticks.”

Video Pool Media Arts Centre proudly celebrated 25 years of
support to Manitoban artists through the commission of six projects by seven artists who have made dynamic contributions to Video Pool’s history and to media arts in Canada.

Winnipeg, MB (January
23, 2008) – We can always trust artists to challenge assumptions and to seek creative alternatives to conventional practices. In the case of film and video, this is also true. This screening featured
experimental techniques for moving image creation and manipulation including: machinima (film and video made using avatars and/or video
game environments), computer-based image manipulation, well-established filmmaking techniques such as hand processing, optical printing, and scratch animation, as well as work employing modified cameras or found footage.

At Video Pool, we love art, and we love parties, and we were thrilled to continue our tradition of bringing international Art’s Birthday celebrations to Winnipeg!