jessica thompson

Invisible Cities: Freestyle Soundhack

(in)visible cities included live performances by an array of internationally renowned artists including: Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Vancouver), Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (Winnipeg), FASTWÜRMS (Creemore, ON), Jessica Thompson (Toronto), and Nhan Duc Nguyen (Vancouver). Cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph (Winnipeg) will act as (in)visible cities’ rapporteur/blogger, providing insightful commentary as festival events unfold.
Robert Hengeveld's exhibition Staging the Gap

Staging the Gap: Robert Hengeveld

Staging the Gap is a miniature model of a concert stage with silently animated lights and smoke. The work explores the relationship of fact and fiction in a technologically mediated world. Hengeveld critically
reflects on the mechanisms used to deliver popular culture by focusing on how visual effects – stage lights, pyrotechnics, and dry ice – are used at concerts to shape our understanding of what we hear. Ignoring society’s desire for the spectacle of performance, the stage created by the artist remains empty while a precisely orchestrated light show plays out.

Jeanne Randolph & Glen Johnson

Psychiatrist and cultural theorist Randolph uses psychoanalytic methods and concepts, themselves amenable to productive misuse, to reveal the ways in which technological devices and/or their depictions are open to creative and critical interpretation. Johnson projects digital slides in a manner reminiscent of corporate culture and middle management to support his thesis that technology has ruined art, while Randolph uses a technology associated with yesterday’s middle-school science teachers and art historians – the conventional slide projector – to comment on mass media culture. Through a hilarious presentation based on classical scholarship, Johnson took his audience back to scenes of Lascaux, urging artists to abandon “all this technological nonsense” and to “go back to crushing berries and burning sticks.”
camera-free film and video

Camera-Free Film and Video

Winnipeg, MB (January
23, 2008) – We can always trust artists to challenge assumptions and to seek creative alternatives to conventional practices. In the case of film and video, this is also true. This screening featured
experimental techniques for moving image creation and manipulation including: machinima (film and video made using avatars and/or video
game environments), computer-based image manipulation, well-established filmmaking techniques such as hand processing, optical printing, and scratch animation, as well as work employing modified cameras or found footage.