The 11th annual Signal + Noise Media Art Festival presents a collision of revolutionary Armenian Kino Cinema, remixes of ex-Yugoslav and CBC Television Broadcast ID Music, travelogues from an arctic sea voyage, and science fictional rediscovery of diminishing islands.
The 2011 festival aims to create a space for the anxieties and tensions of this moment–haltered between the past and the future–to fold in on themselves. Video works by the Otolith Group juxtapose the utopic vision for Chandigarh with the dystopia of Mumbai’s slums. Hito Steyerl’s allegory on the contemporary economic crisis, plays the crash of Hollywood airplane hijacking off the burn of the DVD industry and the rise of scrap aluminum sales. Amie Siegel confuses the crosshairs of a militant pursuant with a fashion photographer’s gaze on a band of armed female revolutionaries.
Sound Artists Frederick Brummer, The Experimental Theremin Orchestra, Giorgio Magnanensi and Hank Bull manipulate time’s weight on media obsolescence. Brummer works sculpturally with VIVO’s equipment archive to blur the distinction between audio and visual analogue forms. Through VIVO’s Studio Lab workshops, 15 artists will construct and perform their own theremins. The oscilloscope and its response to distorted waveforms and audio signals takes centre stage in Magnanensi’s ‘theatre for the ears’. Hank Bull and Patrick Ready travel through the seven dimensions of time and space in The Time Dilation Machine to present live narration and musical accompaniment to a collection of Bull’s unedited 8mm and 16mm reels.
As an homage to analogue television broadcasting, Signal + Noise presents two archives that reflect the social impact of regional production. Serbian born Artist Aleksandra Domanović’s anthology of television news-music from the geographic region of ex-Yugoslavia will echo Anu Sahota’s installation of CBC program titles and station IDs from the 1950’s-1980’s. Station ID music from both archives will be remixed and performed by Basketball, Brady Cranfield, Julian Hou and Joshua Stevensen.
The poetic aura of archives are central to Armenian Filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian’s oeuvre, which addresses violence of the twentieth century: its mass migrations, wars and dictatorships, through a lens on the Armenian people. Signal + Noise presents a retrospective of this little-known master of “distance montage”.
Ellie Ga’s five-month residency aboard a research sailboat frozen in the ice near the North Pole informs her autobiographical performance featuring photographic documentation, writing, video, drawing, and slides. The desire to translate one’s experience of travel and exploration is echoed in Nimalan Yoganathan’s sound performance of augmented field recordings from Inukjuak, Nunavik.
Existing somewhere between ethnographic study, documentary and fiction, Ben Rivers’ investigation into the field of island bio-geography, accompanied by a spoken text written with science fiction novelist Mark von Schlegell, imagines hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.
Download Signal+Noise2011 PressRelease
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, incorporated in 1973 as the Satellite Video Exchange Society (SVES), is Vancouver’s oldest media arts access centre. VIVO continues to fulfill its founding vision by directly supporting independent artists, community-based producers and activists to develop and exchange their skills in a supportive environment. Our members gather around the tools and material means of production to invent new understandings, new genres and new friendships. Reflecting both the diversity of contemporary technologies and the symbiotic communities that coalesce around new forms of knowledge and creativity, our programming fosters formal, aesthetic and critical approaches to media arts practice. VIVO builds an audience of makers, organizers and critics through artists in residence, lectures, workshops, performances, exhibitions and curatorial and archival research. As an integral artist run centre in Vancouver, our resources and facilities will continue to inform and influence engagement in all levels of media art investment.
