April 2009
21 posts
The Contact Zone
The second program began with three videos by Kevin Jerome Everson including his 2007 short According to… which consists of three stories of murder, apparently decades old, each told twice and punctuated by scenes of an elderly man collecting his newspaper from his front porch. The stories are represented as news reports, whether or not the incidents described and footage accompanying them are...
Studies 1 Through 12
Of the 12 jury selected shorts that opened the third and traditionally last (though not this year) of Signal + Noise 2009 there were some definitely some audience favourites. Jay Rosenblatt’s I Just Wanted to Be Somebody, a sort of thank you letter to 70s spokes-model turned anti-gay activist Anita Bryant for her unwitting role in helping to mobilize the gay community in Florida’s Dade County and...
Aaron Read →
Chris-a-riffic / BIBLE BELTS →
Search Parties →
The Rub →
Dancing In Our Debt
Riding hard from the West End, I arrived late and tried to catch up to the bank crawl - first stop was RBC on Cambie and Broadway but when I arrived a little after 11pm, inside there was nothing but a shiny new lobby and a security guard standing watch behind glass. With no music to be heard, I rode up to 10th and Cambie to the Vancity on a whim - lo and behold the ATM room was packed and bands...
The Smooth and the Striated
The Pit of Babel: A Speculative Archive program contained work concerned with issues of history, memory and space. Sobhi al-Zobaidi, a Palestinian filmmaker currently conducting doctoral research at Simon Fraser University, was in attendance and had two short works included in the program: red green black and white Indians (2008) and About the Sea (2007). After the screening he spoke about his...
Present by Way of Absence
While the first program of the evening, Pit of Babel, dealt with difference over time, the second program touched on sameness over time – so much so that the passing of time is difficult to measure. The Enduring began with Monique Moumblow’s Six Years in which a woman’s thoughts, articulated in Swedish, appear on screen in English subtitles. She describes bits and pieces of her relationship with...
The Contact Zone
If 70s blaxploitation films have taught us anything, it’s to never get caught between a pimp and his female entourage. Unsurprising is it that such denigratory stereotypes have lingered, even despite the committed effort of black filmmakers – Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, to name just a few – to quell their persistent entrenchment. The Contact Zone extends this struggle over images and its...
Kitchen Radio
Emily Rosamond and Rafael Tsuchida, Kitchen Radio 88.5FM | 2008 | Schedule Online | Pirate Radio Station | Canada (Offsite)
An impromptu, DIY radio station, broadcast within a tiny radius in the Commercial Drive area, and streamed online (http://66.51.134.7:8000/listen.m3u) to a broader geographical audience. The project is a site for social and sonic interaction between Rosamond, Tsuchida,...
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Fly Like Gods, Kill Like Demons
Signal + Noise 2009 began with the well received program Animal Mirror. Artists in attendance were Daniel Menche, Vanessa Renwick and Geoffrey Pugen, all of whom participated in a brief Q&A facilitated by programmer Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk after the screening. In reference to conversations with Shana Moulton (not in attendance) Kazymerchyk identified an issue raised by most of the works in Animal...