signal and noise » Festival

SIGNAL + NOISE 2009 | THURSDAY APRIL 23

6:30-8:30pm

Cyber-spectres of wolves, yeti and unicorns compete for our attention and charm us into becoming them. Post avatar individuals modify their identities in the real, move out to the country to emulate animal attitudes and reframe the semiotics of the hunt. The artists’ tenuous negotiation of faith and skepticism poses the question: are we “polishing an animal mirror to look for ourselves”, or simply another reflection in which to contemplate our narcissism.

Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines #5 | 2005 | 6:32mins | DV | USA
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines #4 | 2007 | 10:53mins | DV | USA
Shana Moulton, Feeling Free with 3D Magic | 2004 | 8:13mins | DV | USA
Fastwurms, Telepathicats | 2003 | 3:30mins | DV |Canada
Takeshi Murata, Monster Movie | 2005 | 3:55mins | BetaSP | USA
Geoffrey Pugen, Utopics | 2008 | 24:33mins | BetaSP | Canada
Vanessa Renwick and Daniel Menche, Hope and Prey | 2006 | 23:00mins | 3 channel video projection and live sound performance | USA

Hope and Prey is co-presented by DIM and the Pacific Cinematheque

program running time: 1:18:00

9:00-11:00pm

Fever Dream

In Ray Bradbury’s 1948 short story Fever Dream, a 13 year-old boy is consumed by a feverish plague of microbes that consume him from the inside out, forming a new being that recovers with super-human powers. The originals living within I-Be Area are afflicted with a similar digital virus that has copied and re-formatted their identities into Second Life avatars, blogging pseudonyms, and Facebook profiles. Mirroring Bradbury’s metaphor for pubescent anxiety, isolation, and identity crisis, Trecartin’s post-modern characters are pitted against one another, competing for fans, selling their personalities, and honing their highly individualized “stylized angst” in an operatic video opus of hallucinatory drag culture on the information superhighway.

program running time: 1:53:00
co-sponsored by UBC Gender Performances Research and Reflection Group and HIM Health Initiative for Men Society

11:00pm

After Party

DJ We
From Baltimore via Bellingham, Tyler Wilcox

SIGNAL + NOISE 2009 | FRIDAY APRIL 24

5:00pm

Self- Storage

An experiment in collective sensory-deprivation and attention as participants check themselves into a self storage unit.

facilitated by Jem Noble
sponsored by Blackout Arts

6:30- 8:00pm

The Pit of Babel: A Speculative Archive

program running time: 1:35:00

8:30-10:00pm

The Enduring

The relentless, disinterested march of time colours all events in fading shades of grey. What endures of our experiences are these holes, present by way of their absence, framed on either side by emotional anticipations and repercussions. Highlighting a tendency to privilege mental realities over physical ones, the films of The Enduring reveal a fragility in the distance that separates memory from its referent.

curated by Cheyanne Turions
program sponsored by Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society

Chelsea Girls

Althea Thauberger, Chelsea Girls | 2008 | 64:00mins | dual 16mm projection | Canada

program running time: 1:40:00mins
program sponsored by Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society

10:30pm/10:50pm

Dancing in Our Debt (Offsite) FREE

Dancing In Our Debt will gather us together to listen and dance to live music from Vancouver’s indie scene in ATM rooms of three major banks. We don’t need money to dance. We don’t need it to hear music. We don’t need it to connect with others. Dancing in Our Debt will feature Search Parties, Chris-a-riffic / BIBLE BELTS, Tally Ho!, Aaron Read, and The Rub. The “bank crawl” will leave from VIVO at 10:30pm sharp. Music will begin at the RBC bank at Cambie and Broadway at 10:50pm. Travel as a pack or meet the pack there. Let us dance in our debt!

curated by Harlan Shore

SIGNAL + NOISE 2009 | SATURDAY APRIL 25

11:00am-12:30pm

Workshop: Extended Technique
facilitated by Sara Gold

A hands-on audio workshop incorporating visual elements which tie together concepts and techniques associated with the physical and neurological perception of sound.

The re-creation of a striking, though inaccurate, 18th Century experiment originally designed to demystify the underlying cause of the Aurora Borealis will be installed at VIVO and utilized by workshop participants to clearly illustrate core concepts regarding the kinetic energy of sound. In this installation of the experiment, a beam of sunlight is passed through a prism and cast into a vapor cloud that is visibly agitated by electronically generated sound waves, emitted from speakers and subwoofers, to be controlled by participants.

Workshop participants will have a chance to interact with the resonant frequency of the building and
suspended objects, experiencing first hand the transfer of kinetic energy through solid medium.
Introductions will be made to particularly engaging peculiarities of how our brains perceive and
interpret sound, through demonstration and discussion, and aspects of electromagnetism will be
explored visually by participants with the interactive play of magnets on a cathode ray tube monitor
which serves to distort the image of the experiment in a way reflective of our own brains perceptual
structures.

1:00-3:00pm

SIGNAL Artist Talk: The Land

Geoffrey Pugen, Vanessa Renwick, Sobhi al-Zobaidi, Alison Pebworth

Staged on unseeded territory, four visual artists will present their conceptual methodologies and aesthetic strategies for working with emotions, politics and dreams pertaining to land, home, belonging, territory, and boundaries. Join us for a discussion about our complicated relationship to the ground beneath us.

moderated by Angela Piccini
sponsored by Population of Noise and CCEC Credit Union

3:30-5:30pm

Kitchen Radio BYOR Picnic

Bring Your Own Radio and picnic lunch to Victoria Park (at Salisbury & Grant off Commercial Dr.), and listen to Radio Play, which will be broadcast from Raphael Tsuchida and Emily Rosamond’s Kitchen Radio station.

6:30pm-8:00pm

Studies, 1 through 12

These 12 jury-selected shorts position video art as a practice of study—that is, a state of focused contemplation, an act of rigorous investigation, and a body of evidence. Robert Hamilton employs time-lapse methods to astutely observe an isolated test group at the Winona Peach Festival. Guli Silberstein examines the phenomena of live streaming online news by deconstructing the anxiety of a war torn family into pixels. Leigh Fisher creates a space within her car for the dutiful pursuit of communing with seagulls in her narrative fragment about haptic visuality and presence in Vancouver. Studies, 1 through 12 highlights the centrality of conceptual frameworks, and methodologies in contemporary media art.

Intermission

program running time: 1:20:00

9:00-10:30pm

The Contact Zone

R Kelly cross-pollinates the baroque with contemporary hip-hop. Michael Bell Smith collapses time using the lyrical presence of Kelly’s narratives. The Radical Software Group collaborates in the manipulation of representation and history, and Kevin Jerome Everson consciously re-distributes the authority of authenticity to the inheritors of cultural memory. They all meet at the boundaries of the Contact Zone- the terrain of non-linear, inter-cultural, and cross-disciplinary exchange, deconstruction and re-mixing. Black America— meets White America— in the hills of Hollywood – on the porches of small town Virginia— up against the fists — and pride of chilvary— crunking with Canadian diaspora—and beat boxing with the echoes of Africa. The complexity of identity and orality in North America is sampled, reincarnated and mis-duplicated by the four turntables of the Contact Zone Crew.

Intermission

program running time: 1:50:00

11:00pm-12:30am

Immortal Noise

Immortal Noise returns us to here and now. Also called “silence” (no such thing!) it seeps through the quietest music, as pregnant gaps, and brings our attention to an intensive probing of its ever-expanding depths. Amped up it brings us an unknown edge to the dulcet tones of a glass orchestra. The lush ambient space is boarded and scraped into a form by its force.

In Brilliant Noise it frames the medium, bringing punctual reminders of the distance between the sun’s surface and ground we may have thought we had escaped from. The noise of NASA’s space studies is not out there, it’s here in our medium of exploration. Reclaiming a shimmering moment in which natural philosophic experimentation and the scientific empirical method was one and the same, Experiments and Observations on different Types of Air recreates an 18 Century false demonstration of the Aurora Borealis.

However the physical facts remain as we witness the formed liquid-gas dynamic suspension: Immortal Noise lives on dancing between multiple poles of fact-fiction, science-art, physical-virtual and past-present. Is the Signal clouded completely in Noise? In the obfuscation of the 3D fluid space folded into image (2D) and sound (1+1D), has it become totally other?

program running time: 1:00:00
co-curated with Brady Marks

SIGNAL + NOISE 2009 | SUNDAY APRIL 26

1:00-3:00

NOISE Artist Talk: The Science of Sound

Jeffrey Allport, Sara Gold, Daniel Menche, Anju Singh. Moderated by Brady Marks

sponsored by Population of Noise

3:00-6:00pm

Day is Done

Mike Kelley, Day is Done | 2005-2006 | 2:49:00mins | BetaSP | USA

Operatic histrionics are revisted in Mike Kelley’s theatrical spectacle Day is Done— a gothic pageant of subversive “folk entertainments” featuring characters such as a Motivational Vampire, Devil Barber, and Satan Emcee. Kelley conducts a fractured feature-length musical about personal and mass cultural trauma, abuse and repressed memory.

program running time: 2:49:00

7:30-9:30pm

Vanessa Renwick and Daniel Menche: The Possibility of Nature, Hope in Pure Sound, and Faith in Magnetism (Offsite)

Following the screening of Hope and Prey, their 3 channel video projection and live sound performance project, Portland artists Vanessa Renwick and Daniel Menche present an intimate artist talk and screening of works that contextualize their collaboration. Vanessa’s interest in place, relationships between bodies, landscapes, and borders collides with Daniel’s dedication to music that expresses the undisciplined purity of emotion that strives for one goal: vehement beauty.

program running time: 2:00:00
curated by Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk and Gabriel Solomon

co-presented with DIM, screening at the Pacific Cinematheque www.dimcinema.ca

SIGNAL + NOISE 2009 | MONDAY APRIL 27

6:00pm

Thought On Film XV: J. M. Coetzee’s He and His Man (offsite)

A monthly reading + discussion group, Thought on Film aims to promote critical thought around film product and practice through community-based discussion. Open to the public, Thought on Film fosters the close reading of texts confronting issues in contemporary, cutting-edge cinematic practice and philosophy.

Provoked by the presentation of Althea Thauberger’s Chelsea Girls, April’s meeting will feature J. M. Coetzed’s 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech He and His Man. Thauberger’s Chelsea Girls is informed by contemporary insights on the legacy of Andy Warhol and his film of the same name, reflecting the psycho-social issues of today. The final product is an exchange of narratives, the distillation of a story passed back and forth from resident to actor, director to camera person, and back again. In Coetzee’s speech, you will find a confusion of author and subject, of quotation and primary text, of master and slave going back to the “golden times” of colonialism, and an examination of the sometimes brutal, sometimes emancipating power dynamics of representation. Thauberger and Coetzee share an interest in confusing traditional or easy conpartmentalizations, each of them proposing re-readings that are derived from, but distinct from, an inherited past.

Experimenting with the form of reading groups and their discussions, this month’s selection will be read out loud by participants. No pre-reading required!

programmed by Cheyanne Turions
presented by and hosted at Cineworks

SIGNAL + NOISE INSTALLATIONS

David Askevold, Fill | 1970 | 8:20min loop | Video Installation | Canada
The screen is filled by laying sheets of aluminum foil on a microphone and wrapped one at a time and then unwrapped. The audio implodes during the wrapping and explodes as the sheets are pulled away from the microphone.

David Askevold, Rubber Band | 1971 | 3:18min loop | Video Installation | Canada
Holding a rubber band between my thumbs and forefingers, I strum it as fast as I can close to the microphone.

David Askevold, Two Hanks | 2003 | 25:30min loop | Video Installation | Canada
This piece is about placing two major recording artists on the same stage together after they have been dead for some time. “Ramblin Man” had a ghost like feeling about it. This was around 1979 when I developed the concept about conjuring the ghost of Hank Williams after I had completed a collaborative piece titled “The Poltergeist” with Mike Kelley. During the year of 2002, when offered a situation to make the piece, I added Hank Snow to the equation, hence the title “Two Hanks”.

Christina Battle, suddenly everything changed | 2009 | 1:30min loop | Video Installation | Canada
Looking back, the clues were clear. But by the time the emergency crew took flight it was too late. Things will never be the same.

Scott Billings, Indefatiguable Bug | 2008 | 10:00min loop | Video Installation | Canada
A video image of a bug trapped in a sink for a duration of one hour. The bug’s movement is ‘accelerated’ by iteratively merging adjacent frames in the video, removing the (Parmenidian) illusion of plurality/change/motion/duration and reconstituting the bug’s path into one single frame, one single holistic moment.

Scott Billings, Smooth Pursuit (60 Hz) | 2008 | 4:30min loop | Video Installation | Canada
Shot with a high-speed shutter the CRT television reveals its hidden refresh rate with visible moving bars of light and dark. The turtle, placed before a dominating screen of static, seems at once propelled by these invisible bars of motion and by an unrelenting determinism to emerge from the water.

Sylvain Daval, Ouvre Boite | 2008 | Ongoing | Light and Sound Installation | France
A closed room installation in which the function of the speakers and the lights are controlled by the opening and closing of the door.

Emily Rosamond and Rafael Tsuchida, Kitchen Radio 88.5FM | 2008 | Schedule Online | Pirate Radio Station | Canada (Offsite)
An impromptu, DIY radio station, broadcast within a tiny radius in the Commercial Drive area, and streamed online to a broader geographical audience. The project is a site for social and sonic interaction between Rosamond, Tsuchida, invited guests, and whoever tunes in. Kitchen Radio is 88.5 FM (between CBC - 88.1 FM and Vancouver Tourism - 89.3 FM).

Stephan Schulz, Drumline | 2007 | Ongoing | Outdoor Sculptural Intervention | Germany
An outdoor, sculptural intervention using a micro-controller and custom made electronics to activate three identical snare drums in tandem with the flow of traffic.

SIGNAL + NOISE AMBIENT ROOMS

Hannah Miami, Helen Reed, and Jen Kovach Mystic Pizza Occult Snack Den | Canada
Vancouver’s newest pizza joint! Enjoy your healthy pizza in a creepy and candle-lit ambiance and make an appointment to have your crust read.

Organelle Design, “_________: An American Landscape” | Canada
Constructed of layers of white stretchy fabric creating a total womb-like atmosphere. Different pieces of found/donated furniture will be placed behind and underneath the taught fabric with the profile of an edge or corner just poking through. A tiny protrusion or cavity will beg for further interaction, requesting that one slip into the fabric to find a sofa, flip what appears to be a light switch, or place a drink down on a coaster.

Alison Pebworth, Beautiful Possibility Field Office | USA
Alison Pebworth will be setting up a field office and soliciting viewers for their input on Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest’s lost and hidden histories. Pebworth is inviting local history buffs, artisans, folklorists, cultural theorists, native guides, and well-rounded know-it-alls to share their experience and expertise in the portrayal of their fair region of North America.