BNMI Co-Production Archives 'P'
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Paixao Nacional
In a startling and beautiful video, a young Brazilian man attempts to flee his country by stowing away in the hold of an airplane. As he freezes to death, his dying memories of the sexual hypocrisies of his native land, interwoven with a tourist's impression of Brazil as an oversexed paradise, provide a sombre look at one gay man's life. Directed by critically acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker Karim Ainouz, Paixao Nacional was awarded Best Experimental Video in the Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1994.
Co-producer: Karim Ainouz (Brazil), 1994
Format: Video, Length: 9 minutes
Paulina!
For 40 years Paulina has worked as a maid in wealthy homes in Mexico City. In the 1950s, when she was a child in rural Veracruz, her parents traded her away for land rights. The villagers ostracized her and the town boss raped her. At 15, she took control of her destiny, escaped to Mexico City and began a new life. This film follows Paulina as she returns to her village to confront her past. Documentary scenes are shot in video and narrative scenes are shot in 16mm film to provide clear visual distinction between the two styles. Winner of the 1998 Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Documentary.
Co-producers: Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and Vicki Funari (San Francisco, United States), 1997
Format: Video, Length: 98 minutes
Pensoyungkam/Computeryungkam
“Pensoyungkam/Computeryungkam” is a website engaged in the imaginative challenges in understanding time and Native history through the conveyances of new media. The website was developed by students (grades 5 and 6) with stories from their Hopi history, and reflections on the actions of their ancestors. This first component presents history and time as structured, linear conceptualizations based on the assumption that the past contains the blueprint for the future, anticipating prophetic traditions. The second component of the interface includes the slot machine motif which conceives of time and history as a random connection of people, events, and circumstances which are unpredictable.
Co-producer: Victor Masayesva (Hoteville, United States), 2003
Format: Website
Performance Space Meets Cyberspace
Sonic Design Interactive’s creative director Michael Bussiere directs, narrates, and hosts this series of performance experiments on CANARIE’s CA*net4 network, connecting stages and studios at several universities with The Banff Centre. This series investigates the theatrical works of avantgarde composer John Cage, whose music offers a fitting content source for the exploration of near-instantaneous distributed expression. This content will be featured on Marsville.tv: a prototype broadband research/performance channel. It blends video conferencing, live programming, and the original television stage to propose a new form of spatially distributed, performing art.
Co-producer: Michael Bussiere, (Ottawa, Canada), 2004
Format: Video Conferencing, Live Performance
Permission for Pleasure
Permission for Pleasure is a video and website that explores the strong but contradictory feelings and messages about people drinking. The project does this by creating a permissive environment to hear from people who drink in excess. Once they tell their stories in the documentary, the project creates channels for the audience to share, respond to, and react to their experiences. Through a documentary and related website, the project creates a public space for characters, audience, and experts in the field to conduct a dialogue on the role of drinking in their lives.
Co-producers: Julia Walden, CBC Rough Cuts (Toronto, Canada), 1999
Format: Video and Website
The pINCO Triangle
The pINCO Triangle is a musical documentary about the absurd experience of growing up gay in the archetypal Northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury. Inspired by an actual company-published family magazine, The pINCO Triangle sets out to comb through official histories for signs of underground lesbian and gay lives. The project employs a variety of devices including the filmmakers’ childhood experiences re-enacted using Barbie dolls on a diorama landscape, a science fair experiment, interviews, stock footage, and a mining safety fashion show shot at the base of Sudbury’s bizarre mining monument, the Big Nickel. The musical finale features performances by singer Lorraine Segato and drag performer Bitch Diva.
Co-producers: Patrick Crowe and Ruthe Whiston (Toronto, Canada), 1998
Format: Video, Length: 40 minutes
Pink
This short video acts as a pilot segment for an ongoing fun and educational program. This series designed for children of all ages touches on a variety of subjects, navigated by a zany pink-clad female clown. As the clown explores the world around her through a series of misadventures, children are given advice and life lessons, and are instructed on everything from carpentry to making mistakes.
Co-producers: Anne Carlson, Mary-Ellen Strom and Barbara Tsumagar (New York City, United States), 1994-1995
Format: Video, Length: 17 minutes
Placeholder
A research project which explores a new paradigm for narrative action in virtual environments, this virtual reality piece was produced in conjunction with Interval Research in Palo Alto, California. Placeholder was a two-person fully interactive virtual-reality system, utilizing stereoscopic head-mounted displays, three-dimensional spatialized audio displays, and custom-designed manual input devices to allow two participants to explore and play in three connected virtual environments. The geography of the project takes inspiration from three actual locations in Banff National Park: Middle Springs, the waterfall in Johnston Canyon, and a formation of hoodoos overlooking the Bow River.
Co-producers: Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland (United States), 1995
Format: VR Installation
Plasma
“Plasma” is a wireless responsive wearable video technology project. The artists in this co-production worked to create jewellery that exploits emotiometric feedback to drive real-time generation of video content. This video content is thus displayed to the audience member on the surface of a bracelet. The video content shown through this video bracelet is that of an emotional wound, allowing the viewer to see through the surface of the skin, to the inner emotional, spiritual, and physical body of the wearer.
Co-producers: Tom Donaldson (United Kingdom) and Tina Gonsalves (Australia), 2004
Format: Responsive Wearable Video Technology
Playing with Science Toys
Peer-to-peer technologies, collaborative toys/games, and process-based experiences are developed in order to engage in the exploration of the culture of science and the science of culture. This project streams presentations of science experts to portals around Alberta and provides interviews with science and cultural leaders to be used for real time streaming and archive. This project also gives youth and teachers traditional and experimental learning tools while working with youth in the design process, to test toys and give feedback. The “Science Toys” project culminated in an archive of video assets and tools available for integration into school curriculum.
Co-producer: Alberta Science Research Investment Program (Alberta, Canada), 2003-2004
Format: Interactive Games, Website, and Video
The Plywood Girls
The Plywood Girls is a documentary about women who worked at the Port Alberni plywood mill from its establishment in 1942 until its closure in 1991. Women are interviewed about their experiences as both females and as workers in one branch of the male-dominated forest industry. Former union representatives and mill managers discuss their perceptions of the ‘plywood girls’ from World War II and after. In addition to interviews, the film contains vintage photography, aerial shots of the mill, and footage of its demolition in 1997.
Co-producers Don Gill and Susanne Klausen (Victoria, Canada), 1999
Format: Video, Length: 50 minutes
Pop! Goes the Weasel
Pop! Goes the Weasel is an interactive surveillance installation developed using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to track visitors/participants as they move through a specific space. Identities are blurred as RFID tags are shared; collected data is shifted as visitors repeatedly alter the database. The installation includes video projections of RFID microchips implanted in the artist’s hands, and visible real-time reflections as visitors are tracked around the space. Nancy Nesbit’s work is on the forefront of RFID surveillance and its opposition. Pop! Goes the Weasel is an examination of how intervention, subversion, and avoidance of this RFID surveillance may be seen as a form of social resistance.
Co-producer: Nancy Nesbit (Vancouver, Canada), 2004
Format: Installation
Politics of Participation
During her Fleck Fellowship residency at BNMI, Minna Tarkka developed her research on political aspects of participatory media. The contemporary cultural practices in new media, community and site specific arts, user-centered design, and technology development all share an interest in engaging users and civic groups as active participants. Through a discussion of various user modes – the ‘cybernetic participant’ of interactive media installations, the ‘power user’ of open platforms, the ‘prosumers’ of fan and pirate media, and the ‘empowered citizen’ or community member – Minna’s aim was to arrive at a more refined understanding of participatory practices. The inquiry relates to the current search for new collaborative modes of organization in cultural production and the conduct of politics.
Co-producer: Minna Tarkka (Finland), 2005
Format: Research
Precious
The links between money, meaning, and happiness are amplified in a world where work has become the organizing centre of life. The things we used to count on as moorings, extended family, neighbourhoods, religion, and participation in community affairs, no longer carry the same sway in helping us to decide what matters. In today’s culture of success, we plug ourselves into this equation: ‘money plus success equals happiness’. The problem is that we confuse what money does well with what it does not do at all. This research worked to challenge and subvert marketing experts’ definitions of quality of life in relation to how league tables of the quality of life and city marketing is formulated.
Co-producers: Mike Stubbs and Gina Czarnecki, (Melbourne, Australia), 2004
Format: Process-based Work and Research Leading to an Interactive Installation
The Price of the Pines
In 1994, Money Magazine named Prescott, Arizona the best place in America to retire. Subsequently the population of this small desert community doubled in an unnaturally short period of time. This video diary uses the population growth in the artist’s town of birth as a means of approaching the global human population explosion. This feature-length documentary examines the effects this explosion has on a small, thriving American city dubbed ‘everybody’s hometown’, and the ramifications this type of population growth may have on a global scale.
Co-producer: Kathy Fredericks (Prescott, United States), 1997
Format: Video, Length: 78 minutes
Pussy Files
Pussy Files is a new media artwork, based on the stories, dreams and realities of being female. The subject matter is documentary in nature and explored through the telling of a series of highly personal, intimate narratives by the participants in the project. The subjects who volunteered for the project were chosen for their wide-range in age, body type, background, sexual orientation, life experience, and ethnicity. Each of them is videoed in the nude, but from the neck down, to protect their identities, as they speak intimately about important and life-changing moments in their sexual histories. This project explored both the beauty of the female body with a sense of anonymity, to promote the phenomena of secrets, confession and intimacy through story-telling.
Co-producer: Martha Ladly (Toronto, Canada), 2000-2002
Format: DVD
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