Nicolas Boone is (b. 1974) is a visual artist based in Paris. He graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2001. His earlier work used the language of filmmaking to produce ephemeral performances without film stock. Eventually, his meticulously improvised “parades” were recorded and edited into film loops to create a living discourse around the death of cinema. La Transhumance Fantastique (2006) recycles the codes of fantastic and horror cinema while a tracking shot along train rails leads nowhere — or towards a Western, a conquest, an exodus towards utopia, a future determined by someone else. As in all of Boone’s films, the central character is a crowd of extras forming a compact corpus and obeying simple instructions commanded by a megaphone: the shout of the director-dictator, the authority of the absurd, the conductor of non-sense. Boone’s moving mises-en-scène emerge from improvisations in which chaos invites chance and accidents do happen. Transbup (2009) is a more traditional narrative that emerged after a massive anti-ad campaign made up of nine shorts (BUP - La série). Transbup exposes the different faces of the media’s totalitarian invasion of our individual freedom. Boone points fingers at all institutions and their perverse mechanisms. Here, the characters are looking for an escape from a world Boone holds in disgust.
Transbup. 2009, Colour, DV. 50mins, France.
La Transhumance Fantastique. 2006, Colour, DV. 55mins, France.
Programmed in parallel with the exhibition LIQUIDATION and the production of Nothing Happening at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Co-presented with the LIVE International Performance Art Biennale and Swarm Festival of Artist Run Culture. LIQUIDATION and Nothing Happening are produced with the generous support of the Consulat général de France à Vancouver.
image: La Transhumance Fantastique (2006)
DIM Cinema will be taking summer holidays for the months of July and August 2011. Programming will resume on September 19 2011 with a retrospective of French Video Artist Nicolas Boone's oeuvre, co-presented by the French Consulate and VIVO Media Arts Centre.
Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk
Double-8, Super-8 and 16mm films made in the 1970s by Hank Bull, Kate Craig, Patrick Ready, Byron Black and friends. Live accompaniment by Hank Bull and Patrick Ready.
The Time Dilation Machine was a device for travelling through the seven dimensions of time and space, devised by HP (Hank Bull and Patrick Ready) in 1975. Constructed inside an old steamer trunk, it employed mirrors, tinfoil and hanging photo-puppets to trigger teleportation, and was accessed by means of a peephole in one end.
Similar technology, found buried in a cardboard box of 8mm films, takes us back to a time before video when a group of Vancouver pataphysicians made investigations into transmutation and altered consciousness. All that remains of their research today is a collection of filmic fragments.
This collection of Hank Bull’s unedited 8mm and 16mm reels include Spadina Special (1971), Helen and Monica (1972), Swing (1974, with Kate Craig), HP Movie (1975, with Patrick Ready), Rembrandt (and Goya) (1977, with Patrick Ready and Kate Craig), How to Make Good Whisky (1977, with Patrick Ready), and The HP Sedan Bottle (1975, with Patrick Ready, Byron Black and Randy Gledhill).
Hank Bull is an artist born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1949. In 1973 he moved to Vancouver to join the Western Front. There his practice expanded into performance, video, radio and telecommunications art. His work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the New York Museum of Modern Art, and was included in the Venice Biennale 1986, Dokumenta 9 1987, and Ars Electronica 1989. In 1999 he co-founded the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), where he served as executive director until 2010.
Presented in collaboration with the Signal & Noise Media Arts Festival, June 23-27, 2011, at VIVO Media Arts Centre. www.signalandnoise.ca
Sponsored by Tom Lee Music
Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk
Ben Russell in attendance + performance
In 2005, Chicago media artist Ben Russell initiated an inquiry into the alchemy of cinema, trance, travel and psychedelic ethnography. This inquiry has since conjured seven films, collectively known as the Trypps series. The first gestures in Trypps Number One were cameraless and focused on manipulating the essential elements of cinema: light and dark. By Trypps Number Three, Russell was directing the cinematographic apparatus on the collective transcendence of a concert by Rhode Island noise band Lighting Bolt. Immersed in the deep chiaroscuro and soft focus of the throbbing spotlit audience, Russell draws out the deeply corporeal and metaphysical embodiment of this contemporary youth ritual. The adaptation of trance ritual within hybrid culture lead to Trypps #6 (Malobi). Structures of ethnographic spectatorship are negotiated, and the body of the filmmaker folds into the cinematographic process. Trypps #7 (Badlands) fully indulges the semiotics of the moving image. The perception of a woman’s LSD trip in Badlands National Park is suspended between the gullies and horizons of the desert landscape. “Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence” (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago).
Black and White Trypps Number One. 2005, B&W, 16mm, silent. 6mins, USA-Dubai.
Black and White Trypps Number Two. 2006, B&W, 16mm, silent. 9mins, USA.
Black and White Trypps Number Three. 2007, Colour, 35mm, sound. 12mins, USA.
Black and White Trypps Number Four. 2008, B&W, 16mm, sound. 11mins, USA.
Trypps #5 (Dubai). 2008, Colour, 16mm, silent. 3mins, USA-Dubai.
Trypps #6 (Malobi). 2009, Colour, 16mm, sound. 12mins, USA-Suriname.
Trypps #7 (Badlands). 2010, Colour, Super 16mm on HD, sound. 10mins, USA.
Black and White Gods. 2008, B&W, dual 16mm live performance with sound. 20mins, USA.
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