Along the Red River on my Broken TV - Orima Bendisse(Mario Desbiens)

VP is pleased to announce the one-night-only public presentation Along the Red River on my Broken TV by Mario Desbiens, recipient of the 2026 Scott Leroux Fund for Media Arts Exploration.

Mario's proposal for the residency centred on his longstanding interest in analog audio/video and the unique qualities it offers over digital image-making. As he describes it, analog A/V allows an image to be read slowly, frame by frame, in a way that digital cannot replicate; where digital is either there or not, analog can be split, stretched, and scrolled through with a different kind of physical feeling. This fascination with the materiality of the image, how it is shaped by the very equipment that produces it, camera, television, monitor, computer, sits at the core of his practice.

That practice is closely tied to his interest in feedback processes and in anything capable of modifying a video signal, alongside the interrelations of time, speed, and motion. Working under the name Orima Bendisse, Mario has been exploring these ideas by using feedback to generate images and then reshaping them digitally through keyframed motion. He proposed the residency as an opportunity to work directly with the lab's interconnected analog equipment, anticipating that the unpredictability of signal modification would open up new surprises well suited to his approach.

Among his goals for the residency was the chance to revisit old videotapes and explore whether they could be transmuted or reused in new ways, a kind of time travel through his own archive. He was also curious to investigate how analog and digital processes might be mixed and transformed into one another through the lab's range of equipment.

Now seven days into the residency, Mario describes the experience as being like boarding an extraterrestrial spaceship: you know where you leave from, but not where you'll land, or what the ship itself is truly capable of. He says the name suits it well; this has been, quite literally, an adventure.

He arrived with a few ideas already in mind, including a first instinct to merge two older projects from the mid-eighties. After experimenting with that combination, he decided against merging them and chose instead to focus on developing a single project. Since then, he has been learning the lab's modules as he goes, building on what is working and remaining pleased with the results so far. He is hopeful he will be able to bring certain elements to completion before the residency ends, though as with any voyage on this kind of ship, there is no guarantee of exactly when or where he will land.