BNMI Co-Production Archives 'G'

Scab/Costra

Costra is an experimental documentary by Mexican filmmaker Roberto Lopez that gives a refreshing outlook on the war currently occurring in Mexico. The 2000 presidential elections are the spark that kindles the mayhem in this film, which examines ”the blood that flows in the consciousness of those who oppose the Zapatista movement”. This personal documentary about a Zapatista crusade on the city of Oaxaca, structured around the federal elections, explores the fascination with iconic figure Subcomandate Marcos, and the illusion that a camera gives anyone the capacity to participate in revolution.

Co-producer: Roberto Lopez (Mexico) and FONCA, 2001
Format: Video, Length: 52 minutes

Scars

This project concentrates on boundaries beginning with skin, the membrane which defines and separates the body from the outside world, and broadens to incorporate more complex surfaces where abstract concepts such as purity and corruption abrade. This multimedia project, which includes an experimental video, documents individual real-world stories, while also crafting a fictional history for the processes which establish and define human identity. This is attempted by utilizing a free combination of these stories, with imaginative additions to these experiences.

Co-producer: Bruce Sheridan (New Zealand), 1997
Format: Video, Book of Text and Photographs and Interactive CD-ROM

Scrap Arts

The Scrap Arts Music experience is one of rhythm, installation, music, and movement. Scrap Arts Music is a living, breathing, moving musical sculpture featuring percussionists Gregory Kozak, Scott Bishop, Rahim Gaidhar, Sarka Kocicka, and Malcolm Shoolbraid. The film interpretation of the Scrap Arts Music composition “PLASMATRON” is visually structured to reflect the architecture of the original composition. It will take the viewer inside the “PLASMATRON” experience: small when the music rests, large when the music roars, symmetrical when the players move in sync, and obtuse as eclectic instruments break out of rhythms into chaos.

Co-producer: Simon Dekker, Gregory Kozak (Calgary, Canada), 2001
Format: Video, Length: 4 minutes

Sea-Changes: A Meta-Biography

“Sea-Changes” is a collaborative biography project for practicing visual artists in their late 50s and older. The collaborating artists contributed autobiographical materials to a common database. Each artist then constructed an autobiography from these materials, using anything in the database but excluding the artist’s own contributions. The artists are free to develop their own approaches to creating their biographies, inventing, adding, and subtracting images, texts, and documents. One of the implications of the project is that there will be inevitable overlapping: different artists will be using the same materials from the database. Each individual meta-biography will then act as one aspect of the larger metabiography of all the participating artists.

Co-producer: Myron Turner (Winnipeg, Canada), 1997
Format: Website

The Secret

“The Secret” is a multi-player communal gaming environment, all about spying on your neighbour. The objective: find out the deepest darkest thing your fellow player is trying to hide, and use this information to your advantage. In this online role-playing scenario, players create imaginary identities in a complex community, where information is traded and amassed, where knowledge is power, and where conversation is both circumspect and intriguing. A player could lose everything once their flaw is revealed, and all can be gained by treachery and deceit. After all, there is nothing so tantalizing as a secret, especially if it belongs to someone else.

Co-producers: Douglas Cooper (Los Angeles, United States) and Dysmedia, 1998-2000
Format: Online game

The Secret Project

The Secret Project is a 60-minute dance-theatre production with five performers. The thematic organization of the piece around the notion of the ‘secret’ arose out of work with interactive technologies. In such work, odd corporeal confusions arose between whether one moves in space or utters text. This team was interested in what these technologies conjure as secret, and how these secrets might bleed into such a performative tool. Such secrets are corporeal, cultural, wrought from pleasures and repressions. This shifting sense of the secret oriented the thinking in this work – whereby the utterance of text can control movement, and movement can control the utterance of text.

Co-producers: Jools Gilson-Ellis and Richard Povall, (Ireland), 1998
Format: Dance, Theatre Production

See Banff!

An interactive Stereoscopic Kinetoscope installation, this project bears a strong resemblance to a turn-of-the-century kinetoscope: a self-contained unit about the size of a podium with a single-user viewer on top and a crank on the side, as well as a selector for choosing one of the silent views. The moving images in this project vary from walking tours around the Banff area, to aerial footage of this majestic geographical area. This project allows viewers to explore word famous areas in the park without leaving the gallery space.

Co-producer: Michael Naimark (United States), 1995
Format: Kinetoscope Installation

Seed of Sarah

Seed of Sarah is a half-hour impressionistic nonfiction film based upon Judith Magyar Isaacson’s highly acclaimed Holocaust memoir of the same name. In her book, Judith Isaacson writes hauntingly from the perspective of a young girl growing up in Hungary in the late 1930s and 40s. The film is loosely based on a musical treatment of the book, a chamber opera by American composer Mark Polishook. In his adaptation of the memoir, Polishook captures the direct and urgent tone of Issacson’s literary voice by highlighting an important aspect of her story: her palpable fear of rape during the Holocaust.

Co-producers: Andrea Weiss and Greta Schiller (United Kingdom), 1998
Format: Video, Length: 27 minutes

Self-Government PSAs

Through the voices of Aboriginal directors, writers, and artists, this accessible series of Public Service Announcements uses story-telling, humour, and powerful visual and sound images to offer Canadian and international audiences insights into issues of profound value. This series of shorts, developed through a working partnership between the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance and The Banff Centre, was established within the principles and practice of Self-Government in Art.

Co-producers: Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance, 1994
Format: 6 PSAs, Length: 30 seconds each

Sensing the City

A study of ‘ambulant research methodology’, while in Banff, Simon Pope studied art practices that utilize ambulant methodologies, such as walking. This study also emphasizes the ways in which actions, like walking, allow new knowledge about our environment to be articulated and disseminated. This research also informed the research for Ambulant Science: a minor science of the city, an exhibition commissioned for a European City of Culture bid by Cardiff, Wales.

Co-producer: Simon Pope, (Cardiff, United Kingdom), 2003
Format: Research

Shelter

Shelter is a one-hour documentary developed for both television broadcast and subsequent internet web-based application examining and
celebrating the human spirit found in the self-invention of the idea that is ‘home’. The project examines the idea of what home means to six Canadians who are as diverse and unique as Canada. It explores our ideas about how we express ourselves and where we live and looks at six individuals for their differences and similarities. It explores the idea that everyone has some place that is special, whether that place is an object or an idea.

Co-producers: Kristina McLaughlin, Kevin McMahon, Michael McMahon, CBC Rough Cuts (Toronto, Canada), 1999
Format: Video, and Website

Shifting Ground

Shifting Ground is a dance installation that traverses physical territories and orchestrates gestural, cultural, and geographic imagery. Dancers of separate geographic countries share their culturally inhabited dance and movement knowledge. The website (translated in Agni, Chinese, English, Finnish, and French), serves three purposes: to introduce and reveal the research and production of the dance video installation, to establish a floating homeland or sense of community for the participants involved, and finally, to link specific cultural sites which will be integrated in the presentation of the installation environment.

Co-producer: Gretchen Schiller (Montpellier, France), 1998
Format: Dance Installation, and Website

Silent Tears

Silent Tears is the true account of one Cree family’s efforts to overcome the harsh realities which arise during a difficult winter on the trap-line. The story is narrated through the eyes of nine-year-old Anne as she is immersed in a scenario of suffering and healing. As Anne tries to help her family survive through a tough winter with a sick father, she discovers an appreciation for the mystical forces which arise from the natural world, and is transformed by this dangerous point in her personal history.

Co-producer: Shirley Cheechoo (West Bay, Canada), 1997
Format: Video, Length: 28 minutes

Singing Our Stories

This rich, multi-textured film is part musical performance, part dramatized storytelling, and part personal journey with historical archive. Singing Our Stories is an exhilarating visual and musical odyssey through contemporary Native North American heritage as seen through the eyes of the First Nations women who bring their unique but complementary strengths to this creative collaboration. As well as English, a strong Aboriginal language component is effectively incorporated into the production. Many of the women speak, as well as sing, in their distinct traditional languages. Subtitles in a combination of Cree and English support this important perspective of the film.

Co-producers: Annie Frazier-Henry (Gibson, Canada) and Omni Productions (Vancouver, Canada), 1998
Format: Video, Length: 49 minutes

Six String Nation

“Six String Nation” is a multi-voiced story of the musical soul of Canada told through the strings of a single and singular guitar. While simple and elegant in concept, it is complex and multifaceted in execution. The guitar is comprised of pieces of wood, bone, steel, shell and stone from every province and territory of Canada. Each of these pieces has its own story to tell, which is revealed as the project moves along. Upon completion, the guitar is passed from musician to musician, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, in the creation of 13 episodes for television. This project will also engage radio, web interactivity, and portable kiosks that will span the country.

Co-producer: Jowi Taylor, (Toronto, Ontario), 2003-2004
Format: Television, Radio, Interactive Website, DVD, and Kiosk

Skies

The installation Skies provides viewers with the experience of cooperation: between themselves and with nature. Viewers encounter a video image of a night sky projected onto a floor; when viewers walk directly onto the image, black paths appear under their feet and the night sky transforms into a day sky. As viewers explore the imagery further, additional paths and imagery appear. When multiple viewers walk simultaneously onto the imagery and discover more of the hidden paths, water and land imagery are presented. The installation is designed to provide increasingly beautiful imagery as more paths are discovered. In order to experience all imagery and sound within the installation, the viewers, possibly strangers, must cooperate with each other.

Co-producer: Don Ritter (New York City, United States), 1998
Format: Interactive Video and Sound Installation, 10x10m

Skunk Cabbage

In 1986, amid political and socio-economic turmoil on a global scale, filmmaker Bryan Koenfsky learns his deep-seeded family secret: his family used to be Jewish. This information had never been talked about in the family. For Bryan, this was a minor epiphany that changed his world. He learned that his father's family had immigrated from the Ukraine and settled in Chicago where intense anti-Semitism caused the family to practice their religious beliefs in secret. This video takes a wry look at the complex relationship between information and knowledge as seen through this film maker's own diaristic consideration of family stories, family secrets, and family history.

Co-producer: Bryan Konefsky (United States), 1998
Format: Video, Length: 22 minutes

Smell Bytes

Smell Bytes addresses a body of complex issues from hacking/sniffing as both method and metaphor, data-veillance and the invasion of the body and privacy, to the relationships between sensuality and the imagination, art and science, biotech fantasies and economies. In Jenny Marketou’s project, the artist quite literally vanishes from the work, while her creation, Chris.053, an intelligent agent created as ‘bot’ software takes on a life of his own. Chris.053 is programmed to be driven by its insatiable olfactory desire. The project will allow the viewer to log on the computer to view Chris.053, and lurk through the pre-selected chat rooms.

Co-producer: Jenny Marketou (New York City, United States), 1998
Format: Website

Soft Accidents

Soft Accidents is a sound-driven hypertext poetry series that resonates between quantum physics and indigenous knowledge systems from Australia. Three structural forms, the double helix, the spiral, and the labyrinth intertwine the ontology between space/time knowledge systems, histories of ideas, and human consciousness. Francesca Da Rimini incorporates Bohm’s visualization of elementary particles collapsing inward from the whole of space and then expanding outwards. Theory will be interpreted in light of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, and traced in sound, animation and non-linear stories. Soft Accidents was co-produced with University of Nottingham’s computer science department.

Co-producer: Francesca Da Rimini (Adelaide, Australia), 2000
Format: Installation

Soft Accidents/ Seven Beauties and the Warroom

This project explores narrative cycles of destruction and renewal of matter on micro and macro-levels. Soft Accidents/ Seven Beauties and the Warroom is informed by research in quantum physics, military technologies, and local (South Australia - the Uranium State) Indigenous and environmental concerns about protection of country and culture. This collaborative project will manifest as a search engine harvester and poetry generator, and series of digital video animations and downloadable soundscapes.

Co-producer: Francesca Da Rimini (Adelaide, Australia), 2003
Format: Video shorts

Somalia Yellow Vignettes

During his travels as a war artist in Somalia with the Canadian Forces, Allan MacKay’s time was spent primarily in the operating environment of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. The timing of his assignment coincided with the events that led to the Somalia Inquiry, the torture and death of a Somali teenager, and the attempted suicide of Master Cp. Clayton Matchee. MacKay’s startling and intense video serves as a backdrop to this dance piece staged by Calgary’s acclaimed alternative theatre group One Yellow Rabbit. Somalia Yellow Vignettes won a 1998 Rosie Award for Best Experimental Video from the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Association and a 1999 Silver Apple Award from the National Educational Media Network in Oakland California.

Co-producers: One Yellow Rabbit (Calgary, Canada) and Allan Harding MacKay (Toronto, Canada), 1997
Format: Video, Length: 29 minutes

Spectropia

As the second project in a trilogy of fictions on the unconscious of consumer economies, Spectropia is a feature film with and interactive component. Spectropia is a supernatural thriller about the infinite deferrals of desire. It opens in a future reminiscent of the late18th century, but strangely inverted. The characters include Spectropia, a girl archaeologist in the future, and cohorts the Duck, a garbage collecting computer animation based on Vaucanson’s 18th century mechanical automaton, and the ghost of Marie Antoinette. Spectropia obsessively collects the past through an examination of discarded objects, which lead her to William, a young man who lived in 1930s New York. William has a problem, and together they travel into the past in an attempt to set things right.

Co-producer: Toni Dove (New York, United States), 2001
Format: New Media Installation and Video

SPIN, Zat Media

The program “Spin”, by Zat Media, is the first authoring tool for internet applications that enables development of both server and client-side applications by non-programmers. The tool utilizes the JavaBeans architecture along with its own proprietary authoring technology to make the development process easier for non-programmers. This process in initiated by creating an environment for drag and drop application assembly online. This project has now experienced mass distribution, and is now considered on the forefront of website design technology.

Co-producers: Zat, WM Leler & Co., 2001
Format: Software

The Split-Brain Human Computer User Interface

This project demonstrates the split-brain user interface prototype developed for the artwork of Anita und Clarence in der Holle, titled An Opera for Split-brains in Modular Parts. Based on documentary footage from the 1991 Senate hearings, this interface uses VR binoculars to deliver to the left eye and ear (the right hemisphere) the testimonial of Anita Hill making accusations of sexual harassment, while simultaneously delivering to the right eye and ear (the left hemisphere) the denials of those charges by then Supreme Court Judge nominee Clarence Thomas. The “he said/she said” testimony aggravates cognitive dissonance, forcing each hemisphere to choose sides in this political drama.

Co-producer: Greg Garvey (Montreal, Canada), 1999
Format: VR interface

SteamingMedia

Steamingmedia.org is a collaboration between Tapio Makela and David Rokeby, of Translocal Inc. At the core of the work, two saunas and two pools are connected across both geographical distance and cultural, social distance. The saunas incorporate blurred, steam-like video, sound and data streams, and interactive media archiving to allow the participants to share and discuss their experience of the pool and sauna across space and time. The pools incorporate interactive systems in which swimming movements are transformed into soundscapes shared between remotely connected pools.

Co-producers: Tapio Makela (Helsinki, Finland) and David Rokeby (Toronto, Canada), 2002
Format: Interactive Installation

Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen

A 90-minute musical special inspired by the songs of American popular composer Harold Arlen (1905-1986), this video features performances by some of the most original and imaginative recording artists in the world today. Contemporary musicians from every conceivable genre – jazz, pop, rock, blues, rap, and classical – accentuate the timeless quality of Arlen’s beautiful, enduring music. The project parallels Arlen’s life story with the progression of American culture through the first half of the twentieth century, and includes archival footage of Arlen performing several of his own greatest songs as well as home movies of his wife and muse, Anya.

Co-producers: Larry Weinstein and David Mortin (Toronto, Canada), 2001
Format: Pre-production

The StoryBones Game

“The StoryBones Game” employs a Java based interface to translate a traditional Inuit game into an interactive web environment. In the original game, players arrange a collection of animal bones to represent the characters of a story they were telling. In the online adaptation, players collage together silhouettes derived from original drawings by Myra Kukiiyaut, an Inuit elder. Commentary associated with the visual elements of the game encourages players to contemplate the social context of the artist’s work as well as greater contemporary cultural issues.

Co-producer: Tom Leonhardt (Toronto, Canada), 1999
Format: Website

Strategies for Self Defence

Adopting the same persona as in her evocative video KADDISH, and with a limited number of strategic props, Turner acts as a principle character and main resource for specific psychological defence mechanisms. This film acts as an emotionally taut treatment using the body as the mode of expression and conceptualization. Its lighting is vibrant and intense. The audio tracks are comprised of poetry written by Turner to form a manipulated soundscape, full of discordantly beautiful violin melody.

Co-producer: Susan Turner (Winnipeg, Canada), 1997
Format: Video, Length: 8 minutes

Subtract the Sky

“Subtract the Sky” is a public artwork piece conceived as a collaborative, web-based authoring environment for the production of maps. “Subtract the Sky” extends the beyond the normal context of public art by allowing individuals and communities to evolve an aesthetically, intellectually, and politically expressive, and collaborative environment online. It is a site for making cartographers of communities and individuals by providing them with a map generation system and communication network which aims to re-map the lines of dominance that organize both the social-body and the bio-body.

Co-producers: Sharon Daniel and Mark Bartlett (San Francisco, United States), 1999
Format: Website