PLEASE NOTE:
Official Program is subject to change. Final details will be
provided
to
registrants with their registration packages. Please visit the Congress
website for regularly updated information. All events take place at
OCAD, 100 McCaul Street just south of Dundas Street West, unless
specified below.
Day
1
–
Wednesday,
April
7
7pm
Keynote Discussion: Yvonne
Rainer with
John Greyson – OCAD Auditorium
Yvonne Rainer’s career in many ways runs parallel with the concerns
that we expect to trace over the course of this four-day Congress.
Trained as a dancer, Rainer moved into filmmaking in the 1970s and then
further branched out into video and most recently back to choreography.
Through these shifts, her work has retained a constant focus on formal
experimentation, the expressive possibilities of the body and an
ongoing engagement with political and feminist thought. In conversation
with filmmaker John Greyson, Rainer will trace her work as it has
developed over the years and reflect on what it means to move through
one medium to another. Open to non-registrants, $10
general, $5 students, Images Festival members
Day
2
–
Thursday,
April
8
9:30am Session 1: The Place of
the Medium– OCAD
This panel explores the artist’s relationship to the status of the
medium in an increasingly interdisciplinary world. Within the last
decade, the proliferation of digital intermediation and a continuing
movement toward the dissolution of the art object have raised the
question of whether the category of “medium specificity” continues to
hold significance. In the age of what Rosalind Krauss has termed the
“post-medium condition,” does the medium still matter? And how can we
talk about medium specificity without resorting to essentialist
qualities of its material support: Celluloid, projected light, bits,
bytes, pixels? Moderator:Henriette Huldisch (Associate
Curator, Media Archive, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art,
Germany) Presenters: Nicky Hamlyn
(filmmaker, Professor, University for the
Creative Arts, UK), Pip Chodorov
(filmmaker, Re:Voir Video, France), Nicole
Gingras (writer/curator, Montreal), Michael Snow
(filmmaker/visual artist, Toronto), Ming-Yuen S. Ma (curator/media
activist, Associate Professor, Pitzer College, USA)
11:30am Session 2: Carrying
History Forward – OCAD
This session examines experimental media as inscriptions of history.
How do art works express, reflect, document or intervene in the
aesthetics, ideas, politics--the critical elements--of an historical
conjuncture? How might they serve to keep histories alive and help
shape public perceptions and memories? What are the pedagogies of
knowing and remembering?
Moderator: Kathy High (visual
media artist, Associate Professor,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA) Presenters: Wafaa Bilal (artist, Assistant
Professor, New York University), Cheryl L’Hirondelle (performance
artist,
Vancouver/Toronto), Dont Rhine
(member, Ultra-red activist sound
collective, USA), David Teh
(Assistant Professor, National University
of Singapore)
1:30 pm Lunch
2:30pm Session 3: Snapshot of
a Diversity of Current Practices – OCAD
Artists presenting elsewhere at the Images Festival will talk about
their work. Discussion will include the process of making, their
relationship to historical moments and the development of new forms.
Presenters will be announced closer to the conference.
4:30pm Field Report: India –
OCAD
India has produced a burst of experimental media in the last decade,
inspired in part by the rise of festivals like Experimenta in Mumbai
and Bangalore. This field report will focus on recent production in
India, as well as contextualizing the scene in which it is made. Presenters:Ayisha
Abraham (artist, Centre for Experimental Media Arts, Srishti
School of
Art, Design and Technology, India), Shai
Heredia (Director, Experimenta
Film Festival, India)
6:30 3D for Experimental
Media Artists (York University, with filmmaker
Ali Kazimi)
Catch the bus up to York University to see the projects being developed
in the Future Cinema Lab, including a new research component on
three-dimensional cinema for experimental artists.
BUS: PICKUP/DROP OFF in front of the Ontario College of Art and Design.
10:45pm OPEN SCREENING /
PARTY –Music Gallery
All Congress registrants are invited to bring a short work to show at
one of two late night screenings at the Music Gallery (197 John Street,
Toronto). MiniDV, DVD, 16mm or Super 8. First
come, first shown ‘til last call. Attendance is open to
non-registrants.
Day
3
–
Friday,
April
9
Room 230
9:30am – Roundtable: The Cinematic Enters the Gallery – OCAD
Moving images have been a mainstay of galleries for half a century.
Discussants with backgrounds in a wide range of interdisciplinary
programming examine questions regarding the increasingly complex world
of the gallery, of presentation formats and settings. Have the lines
between artforms blurred, have audience expectations shifted, how have
these phenomena altered curatorial practice? Do moving images
necessarily imply the cinematic? How easily does expanded cinema manage
to shuttle between the white and the black box or the public space
outside either one of these more traditional venues? How do new media
works further defamiliarize the gallery setting? How have visual
artists working with moving images in film, video or new media altered
the terrain of the 'experimental'? What do these terms mean within the
expanded contemporary playing field?
Moderator: Peggy Gale
(independent curator, Toronto) Andréa Picard
(programmer/curator, TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto), Christopher Eamon (independent
curator, Director, New Art Trust, USA), Peter Ride (curator/researcher,
University of Westminster, UK), Steve
Loft (Executive Director, ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts
Festival,
Toronto)
11:30am Session 4: The
Uncertainty Principle: Political Engagement and
the Documentary in an Expanded Field – OCAD
This session explores the changing face of documentary, as those
strategies and formal structures migrate from the cinema into galleries
and museums. Just as the modes of production change, so do the
particulars of how a film is viewed. Expanding on some of the general
formal concerns addressed in the Cinematic Enters the Gallery
roundtable, this session focuses the discussion on the place
non-fiction practice has within the context of contemporary art. What
changes from the black box of a cinema, to its simulacrum recreated
within the white box of a gallery? Is it the audience? The systems of
power? The modes of address? And how do these changes and differences
effect the conversation and political engagement of these works?
Moderator: Irina Leimbacher
(film programmer, USA)
Presenters: Ursula Biemann
(video artist, Switzerland), Hito
Steyerl
(artist,
Germany), Wendelien van Oldenborgh
(artist, the Netherlands)
1:30 am Lunchtime Show &
Tell – OCAD
An open screen for non-time dependent media (websites, slide
documentation and new media projects).
2:30pm Session 5: Interface :
Experiment : Access – OCAD
What is the interface in the age of the digital? Technology itself has
long been an important locus of experimentation for media artists.
Refiguring and rearticulating the technological experience is often the
by-product, if not the intention, of much electronic media art. It is
an approach that in its most compelling forms subtly rearticulates
questions about the politics of technology away from macro-social
questions of politics and policy towards consideration of the design
and organization of technological artefacts themselves. Nowhere is this
question more relevant then in the problem of interface design and the
taken-for-granted nature of most human-machine interaction. This panel
aims to explore the myriad ways electronic media artists, curators and
scholars seek to question new kinds of interfaces: networked screens,
architectures and urban places; human-machine interactions; new kinds
of multiplicity and objects.
Moderator: David Rokeby
(artist, Toronto) Anne Balsamo (University
of Southern California, USA), Konrad
Becker
(co-founder of
the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0, Austria), Simone Jones (Associate Professor,
Ontario College of Art & Design) Ou
Ning
(designer/curator/writer, China)
4:30pm Soap Box– OCAD
A chance to catch up on what we’ve missed: ideas that were raised but
had no proper airing or thoughts that have been lost in the shuffle.
Open floor!
10:45pm OPEN SCREENING /
PARTY – Music Gallery
Night two of visual treats from participants.
Day
4
–
Saturday,
April
10
9:30am – Session 6: Permanence
in Flux: Archival Practises – OCAD
The archival preservation of experimental film and media has increased
dramatically in the last decade even as archivists juggle the
increasing obsolescence of everything from film stocks to video
monitors to computer software and hardware. Intermedia transfers,
whether from S8mm to 16mm to 35mm, or from chemical and magnetic
originals to digital copies, have created new markets (DVD editions,
mp4 downloads), challenged others (16mm film cooperatives) and
transformed exhibition, distribution, criticism and access. The cost
and specialized knowledge and labour involved in experimental media
preservation accentuates gaps between North American and European
archives and those in the developing world. International digital
standards remain in flux, sometimes pitting the industry vs. the
artist. Do industry-driven changes victimize artists or will
standardization benefit wider distribution and access to experimental
media? How might new channels of communication across media, nations
and institutional frameworks increase both the preservation of
cinematic and media heritage while increasing access and education?
Moderator: Ainsley Walton (Assistant
Conservator,
Contemporary
Art,
National
Gallery
of Canada)
Presenters: Pelle Snickars (Head
of
Research,
Swedish
National
Archive
of Recorded
Sound and Moving Images, National Library of Sweden), Ayisha Abraham
(Centre for Experimental Media Arts, Srishti School of Art, Design and
Technology, India), Jean Gagnon
(curator/art critic,
formerly Executive
Director
of Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology,
Montreal), Ross Lipman
(Film Preservationist, UCLA Film and Television Archive,
USA), Jorge La Ferla (Director
of the Eurolatinoamericano Festival of
Video and Digital Art, Argentina)
11:30 A Conversation:
Institutions and Mythologies in Experimental
Media – OCAD
An undercurrent of the preparations for this Congress, when compared to
the 1989 Experimental Film Congress, has been a sense of the degree by
which aspects of experimental media have become institutionalized. They
have been institutionalized through mythologizing; through economic
support (both through public funding and commercial models); through
academic research; and through preservation and historicization. Even
the current resurgence of new collectives (either modeled after or
replacing historical collectivization) is a support mechanism that
fends off fading away (if not burn-out!). This conversation looks
reflexively at the precarious tension, as well as the obvious benefits,
created by solidifying ephemeral practices through structural supports.
Moderator: Susan Oxtoby (Senior
Film
Curator,
Pacific
Film
Archive) Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Artistic
Director,
Arsenal
Institute
for
Film
and Video Art, Germany), Steve
Anker (Dean of the School of
Film/Video, California Institute of the Arts, USA), Tom Sherman
(artist, Professor, Syracuse University, USA) & Ed Halter
(Director, Light Industry, USA)
1:30 Lunch + Barbara Hammer
Book Launch – OCAD
Barbara Hammer launches her first book with a reading from “Hammer!”, a
memoir tracing her life and practise through its many twists and turns.
Come early for a performance of her piece, Available Space, first
presented in Toronto in 1979!
2:30 Roundtable: The
Conscious Collective - OCAD
This session responds to the renewed interest in artist collectives and
community in a period described by critics as increasingly fractured
and isolated, on the one hand, and increasingly interconnected and
global, on the other. This session includes artists and organizers from
collectives that focus on celluloid film technologies, as well as
artists from collectives whose practice spans a variety of media forms
and discursive practices. What does this phenomenon indicate about the
current status of the artist? Where does the return of the collective
point us?
Moderator: Dot Tuer Daichi Saito (co-founder
Double Negative Collective, Montreal), James
Holcombe
(no.w.here, UK), Benj
Gerdes & Paige Sarlin (16 Beaver,
USA), khaled D. Ramadan (Chamber
of
Public
Secrets,
Denmark)
4:30 Session 7: Raiding the
Archive - OCAD
The term “Raiding the Archive” speaks to the tendency of experimental
film, video and media artists to interrogate and transform the
materials constituting the moving image archive through the deployment
of a diverse arsenal of rhetorical and aesthetic strategies. For this
panel, we have invited artists working with archival materials to
discuss past projects and the direction of their current work. These
artists have taken unorthodox approaches toward the archive,
transforming it from a static storehouse of historical memory into
malleable databanks to be interrogated, reconstituted and even
invented.
Moderator: Vera Frenkel Tamar Guimaraes (visual
artist,
Brazil/Denmark), Sobhi Al-Zobaidi (filmmaker,
Simon
Fraser
University,
Vancouver),
Kevin Jerome Everson
(filmmaker, Professor, University of
Virginia, USA), Barbara Hammer
(filmmaker, USA)
Day
5
–
Sunday,
April
11
1:30pm – Field Report Korea –
OCAD
Seoul is currently experiencing an explosion of experimental media
activity that has begun to receive international notice thanks to
organizations like EX-iS and Space Cell and a large number of new
post-secondary media art programs. This field report will present some
of the work coming out of Seoul, with a special emphasis on the scenes
that have had hands in creating it. Donghyun
Park (Director EX-iS Festival, Korea,
Professor, Myongji University), Hangjun
Lee (filmmaker, Programmer,
EX-iS Festival and Editor, N’avant Magazine, Korea)
2:30pm – Summary Session –
OCAD
One final look at the 2010 Experimental Media Congress, with
preparations for the 2012 Congress in Berlin. Three respondents share
their views on what has been discussed and what questions we can pose
for the future. David Teh (Assistant
Professor, National University of Singapore), Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Artistic
Director, Arsenal Institute for
Film and Video Art, Germany), Bart
Testa (Senior Lecturer, University
of Toronto)
