THURSDAY MAY 27
7:00pm, 110min
THE THEATRE AND ITS TROUBLE
A look into the Theater and Its Trouble reveals an excavation of high culture from the rubble of its irrelevance. The decay of imperial decadence is looted and pillaged: the soliloquy of an extinct esthete is remixed into a dance club anthem and the baroque body is resurrected in a second life séance. Effigies of false shadows are sacrificed and a new generation of shadows emerges to brutalize our grandeur and dismantle this masquerade. Regal totems, romantic verses and velvet draperies are reclaimed by western media artists’, as ammunition against the idolatry and opulence of late capitalism. We inhabit an age that will create no more masterpieces.
The ironic wordplay of Mary Reid Kelley twists the tongue of women in wartime, Sydney Vermont channels King Ludwig II of Bavaria through literary Drag and Elodie Pong introduces Marilyn to Marx at the fall of Capital. Kevin Clancy strains the tension of classical composition for piano via typewriter, while Rä di Martino undermines the scripted melodrama and lavish gestures of Opera. Alex Hetherington conducts a post-production mash-up of Sarah Winchester, the sea shanty Shallow Brown, and email scams, in a re-enactment of Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need.
Mary Reid Kelley, Queen’s English | 2008 | 4min | DV | USA
Elodie Pong, After The Empire | 2008 | 14min | HD | Switzerland
Sydney Vermont, Ludwig | 2010 | 12min | DV | Canada
Kevin Clancy, Babel | 2010 | 20min | Sound Performance| USA
Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie the Saddest Sadist | 2009 | 7min | DV | USA
Rä di Martino, August 2008 | 2009 | 5min | DV | Belgium
Intermission | 15min
Alex Hetherington, A Million Lies Once and Only Revealed After Death (Triangle of Need) | 2009 | 33min | 3 Channel DV | UK/US
____
FRIDAY MAY 28
7:00pm, 120min
WHAT REMAINS + TOTAL WAR
War has become our normative reality and crisis the essential tool of Empire. Has the mediated image lived up to its potential for transposing stakes and claims, or for confronting our shared subjection? If not, is exposing its own failure media’s only critical tool left? Faced with a skeptical forecast for technology’s ontology, how are we to respond? How do we acknowledge censorship, revisionism, and erasure?
The entropic barrage of western newscasting is sculpted into a mutant body of noise by Tijmen Hauer. Found news footage and Hollywood detritus are further culled by Gabriela Golder to reveal the hidden dance of crisis and Peter Eramian to materialize the worldwide haunting of the ghosts of 9/11. Wrapped up in the CIA’s own play list, monoculture and war are recomposed by Mitchell Akiyama. The aesthetics of censorship are shared by Yi Xin Tong and Anahita Razmi, and excavated by Francisca Duran in her treatise on the cubist dislocation of Chile’s revolutionary and authoritarian history. Lance Olsen quietly decodes the alien communique masked by Orson Welles infamous broadcast, contrasted by an explosion of nationalist icons in Max Hattler’s animation that asks us “which side are we on”.
+
In his epic and brutal assemblage, Jubal Brown warps the cultural war being waged by the industrial media complex. As higher rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder suggest, the numbing distance of remote killing cuts deeper into our psyche when it no longer reaches our bodies. Total War transforms dislocated and hallucinatory images of combat, mortality and terror into a raving disco infernal that no one escapes untouched.
Tijmen Hauer, Talking Heads | 2009 | 5min | DV | Netherlands
Yi Xin Tong, Youth | 2009 | 5min | DV | Canada
Anahita Razmi, White Wall Tehran | 2007 | 1min | DV | Germany/ Iran
Francisca Duran, Retrato Official | 2009 | 4min | DV | Canada
Peter Eramian, Fantasia | 2008/09 | 6min | DV | Cyprus/ UK
Gabriela Golder, Survival’s Logic | 2008 | 5min | DV | Argentina
Lance Olsen, War of the Well(e)s | 2010 | 20min | Sound Performance | Canada
Peter Eramian, Utopia | 2008/09 | 2min | DV | Cyprus/ UK
Mitchell Akiyama, Torture | 2010 | 3min | Sound Immersion | Canada
Max Hattler, Collision | 2005 | 3min | Animation | UK
Intermission | 30min
8:30pm
Jubal Brown, Total War | 2010 | 50min | DV | Canada
WARNING:contains graphic violence and prolonged stroboscopic editing*
____
SATURDAY MAY 29
7:00pm, 92min
TAPPING THE ELECTROMAGNETIC IMAGINARY
In his 1999 essay “Recording Angels” Erik Davis “re-imagine[s] the scrambled boundaries of subjectivity as it makes its way through the invisible landscapes, both dreadful and sublime, that make up the acoustic space of electronic media.” He coined this interstitial space the electromagnetic imaginary. It is the ambiguous realm between what is human and post-human, what is natural and unnatural, and what are architectures and social relationships. When our voices are dispersed via mediated mechanics they become ghosts of our fragmented selves. Tapping this electromagnetic imaginary becomes an act akin to a séance or meditative prayer in which we attune our attention to voices from the other side of the veil.
Hee Won Navi Lee culls digital transmissions from the living city to reveal its infinite expansion and contraction. Interference and architecture are further explored in Spencer Davis’s sonic entropy and Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s geometric mapping. Heidi Phillips resurrects the aura of the holy relic of found film, while Empress amplifies the intersubjectivity of the material object. Ian William Craig navigates his voice in enfolded time, trapping and unlocking it within magnetic tape and Patrick Ward’s explores cinematographic representations of television and video’s imagined paranormal potential.
Hee Won Navi Lee, Phone Tapping | 2009 | 11mins | DV | France
Spencer Davis, Nervous Operator | 2010 | 15min | Sound Performance | Canada
Félix Dufour-Laperrière, M | 2009 | 8min | DV | Canada
Heidi Phillips, Revival | 2009 | 8min | DV | Canada
Empress, Perpetual Music for Small Motors and Percussion | 2010 | 15min | Sound Performance | Canada
Patrick Ward, Reception | 2004 | 5min | DV | UK
Ian William Craig, Because it Speaks of Nothing Speaking Everywhere | 2010 | 15min | Sound Performance | Canada
10:00pm, 96min
UNPACKING MY RECORDS
Music was once an archive of collective memory and meaning and a medium for transmitting folk history. In the 20th Century it became an object, a commodity and an industry that constructed memory, history and meaning. In the 21st Century music is once again in the process of transfiguration as all that is solid melts into digital air. In an era of digital dissemination, what is our relationship to recorded objects? What meaning do our collections and archives hold? How do we reveal ourselves as we unpack our records? If the object and objective of these pop-culture artifacts moves beyond disseminating sound towards constructing identity, is the only way to respond by deconstructing the record’s material form?
prOphecy Sun & DJ Tapes dig into the pantheon of pop-culture, dress-up and thrifted cassettes to reflect the self in flux. The construction and loss of identity through idolatry is playfully engaged by Pascal Lièvre, whose work pays homage to Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, and Leslie Supnet, who re-animates Jeff Krulik’s legendary documentary. Sade Sade asks how pop-music becomes a means of tracking socio-political histories by orchestrating a symphony of YouTube videos. The otherworldly images and electro-acoustic soundscape of Not Still by Billy Roisz collapses vinyl grooves into a new topography. Brady Cranfield and Josh Rose condense the recorded heritage of African-American diaspora into its formal and physical extreme.
prOphecy sun & DJ Tapes, Quilt of Mirrors | 2010 | 20min | AV Dance Performance | Canada
Leslie Supnet, Fair Trade | 2009 | 5min | DV | Canada
Pascal Lièvre, Don’t Kill Britney | 2008 | 4min | DV | France
Leslie Supnet, The Animated Heavy Metal Parking Lot | 2008 | 2min | DV | Canada
Sade Sade, The Pragues | 2010 | 15min | A/V Performance | Canada
Jubal Brown, Party Tape #63 | Ongoing | 3min | DV | Canada
Billy Roisz, Not Still | 2008 | 10min | DV | Austria
Brady Cranfield & Josh Rose, I IV V I | 2010 | 30min | Sound Performance | Canada
____
SUNDAY MAY 30
7:30pm, 83min
FUTURE TRILOGY (offsite)
Pacific Cinémathèque 1131 Howe St.
Please note that PC ticket and membership prices are in effect for this event
Curated by cheyanne turions
Co-presented with the Pacific Cinémathèque, DIM Cinema and Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society
In November 2005, IKEA announced the opening of a new outlet in Edmonton, London, accompanied by an offer of a significant price reduction on leather sofas. When 6000 people arrived to compete for the discount, a riot ensued, injuring 16 shoppers. The Future Trilogy takes this event as the starting point for a speculative history of a fictional future. The Future for Less imagines the consumer riot as the foundation of a new totalitarian state religion imposing the tenets of modernism on the masses. In Better Future, Wolf-Shaped a rural cult perverts this official creed through pagan rituals of architectural worship performed at Celtic burial sites in Cornwall. The Future is Now stages the triumphant conquest of the industrial wasteland surrounding IKEA Edmonton, London. as a popular uprising, revisiting the original riot as a future reenactment.
AXIS XS is an improvisational vocal-noise performance and digital opera, merging computer animation and shadow artworks to create a surrealist landscape of light and sound. Hall’s vocal improvisations mimic a montage of vocal traditions, topographies and machines to create new abstract narrative forms.
Lief Hall, AXIS XS | 2010 | 20min | AV Performance | Canada
Pil + Galia Kollectiv, The Future for Less | 2006 | 10 min | DV | UK
Pil + Galia Kollectiv, Better Future, Wolf-Shaped | 2008 | 15min | DV | UK
Pil + Galia Kollectiv, The Future is Now | 2009 | 23 min | DV | UK
