BNMI Co-Production Archives 'B'

Baby, It’s You

Baby, It’s You, a one-hour documentary produced and directed by Anne Makepeace, chronicles a year in the life of the filmmaker, her husband, and their baby-boomer siblings as they strive to create new families of their own. While Anne and her husband navigate the Kafkaesque world of fertility procedures in hopes of conceiving their first child, one brother searches for multiple wives in hopes of becoming a polygamist, and a sister and her gay lover adjust to parenting their newborn baby girl. Baby It’s You was a hit at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.

Co-producer: Anne Makepeace (Santa Barbara, United States), 1997 Format: Video, Length: 57 minutes

Banana Splitz

“Banana Splitz” is a turn of the millennium work that weaves segments of the artist’s thirty-year banana art and research practice, with the tragic, yet comic hundred-year rise of the banana. Banana history parallels that of many multinational corporations in western diet, pop culture, politics, and economics. In the format of a television quiz-show, with the artist as host, the work is a multimedia performance that satirizes both the game show and the competitive, profit-motivated values of a dominant and materialistic culture. ”Banana Splitz” gives audiences an opportunity to enjoy an alternate value system through participation in a creative art event.

Co-producer: Anna Banana (Roberts Creek, Canada), 2001 Format: Performance

Bar Code Hotel

Bar Code Hotel is an interactive environment accessible to a number of participants simultaneously. Guests find themselves on an observation deck, surrounded by bar codes within reach of one of five wands – lightweight laser pens which transmit information instantaneously into the computer system. By covering an entire room with printed bar code symbols, an interface is created in which every surface becomes part of a responsive membrane that can be used to control and respond to a projected real-time computer-generated three-dimensional world. This humorous work plays off popular icons and slapstick-programmed behaviours to build a shared world of language games.

Co-producer: Perry Hoberman (New York City, United States), 1995 Format: VR Installation

Beating the Bounds

This VRML-based website explores the relationship of the body to disease, whereby players piece together body pieces and behaviours in a celebration of living. Project designer Marcia Lyons is an experimental media-maker interested in developing a synthesis between traditional media and digital processes, and is the head of Digital Media Fine Arts at Cornell University and director of their media art space. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and NEA awards and she has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe.

Co-producer: Marcia Lyons (Rome, Italy), 1996 Format: Website

Bed Box Theatre

Dream-like imagery, including birds, toys, furniture, and domestic architecture all surface in a project exploring the complex social structure of adoption. The female cuckoo bird is a major symbol of adoptive kinship, labelled a parasitic creature for laying her eggs in other birds’ nests for them to raise as their own. Through small interactive animations, the piece explores themes such as genealogical bewilderment, the performative identity of the adoptee, and the politics of interactivity. This website draws on the mythology of illegitimacy and adoption as seen through art, folklore, and literature.

Co-producer: Julie Lapalme (Halifax, Canada), 1998 Format: Website

The Bench

A park bench is the setting for a week in the lives of Angela and Darin. This short film is a glimpse into two characters’ lives, and what can be developed between two individuals in one particular location. Through the magic of editing, a simple timeline is pursued in mere moments, as viewers watch their story unfold in seven days, each day 30 seconds in length. The Bench was screened at the 1997 Local Heroes Festival.

Co-producer: Gregory Mackenzie (Calgary, Canada), 1996 Format: Video, Length: 4.5 minutes

Big Diva

It is the end of the twentieth Century. The new millennium faces a world still held in the grips of Patriarchal domination. Big Diva and the Golden Apple, a dance video by Cornelius Fisher-Credo and Garine Torossian, evokes a new reality; a man facing his history and heritage attempts to redefine his mythology. What he discovers is a cathartic journey of his own creation. As characters cross the boundaries of gender definition by playing out female archetypes, the millennial dance Big Diva explores the tension in this new reality, whereby man must redefine his own desire.

Co-producers: Cornelius Fischer-Credo (Vancouver, Canada) and Garine Torossian (Toronto, Canada), 1996 Format: Video, Length: 50 minutes

Billy’s Vision

Billy's Vision is an innovative exhibition by artist/curator Andrew Hunter that utilizes drawing, painting, and installation. Essentially a fictional narrative that merges art, curatorial practice, popular culture, music, and literature, this exhibition tells the tale of a mysterious drifter who first appeared in the 1930s near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Known only as Billy to the few people who had contact with him, he was distinguished by his unusual physical appearance, style of dress, and his abilities as a visionary. With Billy's Vision, Hunter has sought to complete his grandfather's research, to bring the unique story of this ‘strange fellow’ to public attention.

Co-producer: Andrew Hunter (Dundas, Ontario, Canada), 2001 Format: Installation

Black on White

This comic drama follows an unsuspecting white racist male who, due to unforeseen circumstances, turns black. His race, outlook, and future are permanently altered when an atavistic gene reacts to excessive levels of UV light streaming through the depleted ozone layer. Within two years, the remaining population of Canada follows suit. A fascinating exploration of race and popular acceptance, this video explores how public consciousness adapts as it accommodates the new racial reality.

Co-producer: Peter Karuna (Toronto, Canada), 1994 Format: Video, Length: 27 minutes

Brandon

A multimedia project, completed in association with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Brandon is a web narrative based on the story of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon of Falls City, Nebraska. This website explores the events surrounding the sexual assault and murder by two local men upon learning that Brandon was anatomically female but living as a man. A yearlong online event, this website followed the trial of both perpetrators, provided a space to debate facts and issues of the case, and a link to the ever-changing contexts of memory, legalities, and gender laws. This project was funded by an Interactive Media Fellowship form the Rockefeller Foundation, in association with the Whitney Museum in New York.

Co-producer: Shu Lea Cheang (New York City, United States), 1998 Format: Website

Building Heaven, Remembering Earth: Confessions of a Fallen Architect

This project is an architectural journey composed of a series of video letters in which an incomplete alphabet is discovered in Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. In this multimedia production, one may journey to the other-worldly Linharaj Temple in Bhubaneswar, to the immaculate whores of Amsterdam, or to Renzo Piano’s New Metropolis. Participants may explore the structure of a zygote, the shape of water, even travel to a cloud between Heaven and Earth. A poetic reading of some of the world’s most evocative architectural sites, this is a journey of actualization to the centre of myth.

Co-producer: Oliver Hockenhull/Luminous Eye Productions (Vancouver, Canada), 1999 Format: 3D Projection, Installation, Website, Video, Length: 104 minutes

Bystander

Blast Theory is a performance and interactive media group from the U.K., renowned for their edgy works such as Desert Rain and Kidnap, which examine mediation, war, violence, and law. In Desert Rain, the audience undertakes a quest to find individuals who were somehow involved in the Gulf War, eventually collaborating to rescue them and then learning about the ways that war changed these lives. In Kidnap, two volunteers were kidnapped by the artists and their experiences streamed live over the internet. The Banff Centre provided space and resources for research and development of Blast Theory's next major project Bystander. Co-producer: Blast Theory (London, United Kingdom), 2002 Format: Pre-production