BNMI Co-Production Archives 'F'

Face a Face

Catherine Ikam has been developing 3D figures with realistic human faces since 1992. Her compelling virtual portraits are based on lifelike synthetic characters that follow the audience through the room, create soundscapes from their positions and engage the audience members in an erotic and romantic gaze. With this work, the artist is attempting to create the illusion of an emotional encounter with a personality. The point of this exercise is to explore interactivity, presence, and absence, and the question of which patterns of behaviour artificial personalities have to be endowed with in order to create the illusion that they possess autonomy, intentionality, and the capacity to act of their own free will.

Co-producer: Catherine Ikam (France), 2001
Format: Virtual Reality and Sculpture

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

The impulse for this project grows out of a desire to generate new forms of live performance. Faster than a Speeding Bullet is envisioned as a series of modular, site-specific installations, each station referencing a chosen natural habitat. During the 14-day workshop/laboratory at The Banff Centre, the team began a dialogue between ecological models and art practices. As a result of this process, the group generated exercises, case studies, computer models, image collages and text, creating the framework from which the piece was be built. Faster Than A Speeding Bullet ultimately created one of its thematic ‘action-stations’ based on one specific ecosystem, the desert.

Co-producer: Grisha Coleman (Los Angeles, United States), 2002-2003.
Format: Pre-production and Production, Interactive Performance

Fast Trip, Long Drop

In the spring of 1988, at just twenty-three years old, video-maker/activist Gregg Bordowitz tested positive for the HIV-antibody. This life-altering event led to his rejection of drinking and drugs, and gave him the grounds to ‘come out’ to his parents as a gay man. This imaginative, autobiographical documentary began as an inquiry into these events and the cultural climate surrounding them. The cumulative impact of this and other tragic events challenged his sense of identity, the way he understood his own diagnosis, and the relationships between illness and history. Awards for Fast Trip, Long Drop include Best Narrative at the 1994 Atlanta Film and Video Festival.

Co-producer: Gregg Bordowitz (New York City, United States), 1993
Format: Video, Length: 54 minutes

F for Fontcuberta

Working with artist Fontcuberta on the creation of a new piece of documentary art, the participants of this project reviewed all projects the Catalan artist had created throughout his career, without unveiling the fictional implant on which they are based. Their goal was to create an imposture: a play between falsehood and reality where the identity of Fontcuberta is reconstructed to embellish the artistic journey. The documentary reveals Fontcuberta’s denouncement of a cultural system which he believes conceals the truth.

Co-producers: Daniele Villa, Luciano Barcaroli, Carlo Hintermann, and Gerardo Panichi, (Rome, Italy), 2004
Format: Video, Length: 52 minutes

Fit to be Tied

This program explores rural and urban life in the home during the depression of the 1930’s from the perspectives of housewives and domestic workers. Traces of past social movements, beliefs, and memories have disappeared in the changing architecture of daily life, and in the changing values of the present. The video uses layered sound, interviews, radio clips, and a rich range of historical footage to evoke feelings of constraint and movement. Fit to be Tied underlines the ways that women survived great hardship, finding ways to heal themselves and their communities through social activism, faith, and community. This video was part of the “Healing the Spirit” series on WTN.

Co-producer: Sara Diamond (Banff, Canada), 1995
Format: Video, Length: 24 minutes

The Former Mrs. Butterfly: (A Dialogue on Voice)

This hour-long documentary explores the pioneering vocal work of Richard Armstrong. His work, which has spanned continents and decades, explores the link between the human voice and the psyche. Instead of merely interviewing Mr. Armstrong and talking about the connection between voice and self, we see his work in motion. The documentary focuses on the work done by Mr. Armstrong and the other actor/vocalists in preparation for the filming of a short dramatic film entitled Opening Night. Both the documentary and the fictional film explore the central question “what does it mean to express oneself authentically through the voice?”

Co-producer: Julie Trimmingham (Montreal, Canada), 2002
Format: Video, Length: 36 minutes

Four Wheel Drift (glisten)

In this project, Julie Andreyev works to adapt interactive, audio/visual and wireless technologies to create a performance-based project, set to explore the city as a mobile tableau. Designed to function in a hybrid form, Four Wheel Drift (glisten) uses a fleet of three cars fitted with sensors, software, light emitting diodes, and wireless technologies, all working with the car’s mechanics to create a light and sound spectacle. Four Wheel Drift (glisten) combines live music and light effects in two simultaneous site-responsive spaces: the urban streets, and a club or gallery space located within a host city. By using the car as a platform for experimentation, a rethinking of the artist’s studio space occurs, as does the involvement of art in non-traditional spaces.

Co-producer: Julie Andreyev (Vancouver, Canada) 2005
Format: Performance, and Interactive Installation

foxscape

As a CanWest Global Fellow for 2005, Judith Doyle, in co-production with the Banff New Media Institute, worked to develop a new media prototype: a cinematic navigable model of a house and grounds. This virtual landscape incorporated thousands of photographs and video elements, three dimensional animation, and game engine software. Tranquil and unsettling, “foxscape” feels simple to be in, but reveals itself as dense with possibilities and forks. At times moving rapidly, at others, in motionless suspension, the aesthetic of this interactive media is photographic and spare. A unique virtual architecture, “foxscape” is both elegiac and spectral in tone.

Co-producers: Judith Doyle and Daniel Schwartz (Toronto, Canada), 2005
Format: Interactive Media

Freud’s Couch

This interactive video installation is part of a larger body of work by contemporary Australian artist Lyndal Jones titled The Darwin Translations. This particular multimedia exploration of Freud’s work investigates role-playing and psychoanalysis. This video installation consists of a narrative in slow-motion, featuring a couch with a Persian rug draped over it, and a man - in varying states of dress - getting up, nestling into it, or removing his spectacles, as a narrator cites a list of truths and half-truths in voice-over. The combination of psychological confession and manipulation of part of the narrator creates an air of moody uncertainty.

Co-producer: Lyndal Jones (Australia), 1994
Format: Video Installation

Frontierland/Frontieralandia

This video examines the multiple points of cultural contact between the United States and Mexico. From the Santa Barbara fiestas and South Carolina's kitschy ‘South of the Border’ tourist complex, to a Mexican Beatles cover band and Chicano rap, this film reveals the borderlands as a laboratory of hybridity that continues to ignite the popular imagination of each nation. Working at the boundaries of experimental film and documentary travelogue, this film weaves together found footage, interviews, performance art, and music video, producing a masterful commentary that is at once poetic, disturbing, and hilarious.

Co-producers: ITV, Ruben Ortiz-Torres (Mexico) and Jesse Lerner (Los Angeles, United States), 1995
Format: Video, Length: 48 minutes