serial consign

[francis theberge / trame004 (screen capture)]

For the past few months I've been communicating with the energetic Francis Theberge, who has been acting as an ambassador of sorts for the TIND video/art collective. I was introduced to Francis through his contribution to the last issue of Vague Terrain and I am quite indebted to Carrie Gates for tuning me in to his experimental video. TIND stands for thisisnotdesign, and the five member outfit have been active with a variety of multimedia installation and VJ-related projects over the last decade in Montreal. I've been having a lot of fun working through Francis' archives and thought it would be worthwhile to share links to a few of his projects and the work of TIND.

The above video is the fifth installment of Francis' trame series of experimental shorts. Each of these works is a rapid-fire inventory of glitch effects, treatments and composites. These pieces all clock in at around 60 seconds and feel much more like thematic case studies than demo reels. The shorts each explore similar base footage (love those ghostly female forms), and then process said imagery with a minor arsenal of digital and analog tools, including a video glitcher by Karl Klomp. Francis' dedication to error-aesthetics is quite apparent and range of techniques he employs is commendable. He recently consolidated this research into circuit bending, video feedback and camera mods into glitchism: hacking artistique, a workshop that he presented at this years edition of the Mapping Festival in Geneva.

You can view the rest of the trame series on the thisisnotdesign youtube channel or higher resolution FLV's of the first two shorts in Francis' aforementioned Vague Terrain submission.

Last week I mentioned that I would be DJing at the launch event for FITC Toronto on Saturday April the 19th. FITC is a roving interactive and new media conference that hosts events in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Amsterdam, Winnipeg and Toronto, which serves as home base for the festival. FITC has been around for almost a decade and routinely features engaging rosters of speakers that include designers like Joshua Davis, Zachary Lieberman and Mario Klingemann discussing their work in Flash, Processing and in an increasingly broad range of platforms. Over the last few years as the idea of the "integrated audio visual performance" has propagated, more involved installation and performance type events have been featured in the FITC program. This year, DJ and production designer extraordinaire Tom Kuo will be using the launch event to premiere Superspace, an AV collaboration with VJ Markus Heckmann. [see previous post which mentions Markus's Wüstenarchitekten project].

The goal of Kuo and Heckmann's Superspace project is to increase the amount of interaction between DJ and VJ. Given that live video sometimes gets relegated to wallpaper status, I'm curious to see the methodology the pair have developed for this project. I'm quite familiar with the work of both these artists and am looking forward to seeing what they've cooked up. Over the past several years, Tom has done a lot for Toronto nightlife and raised the bar for production design and live video (most notably with his involvement in the Peter Mettler live cinema event at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006). I'm excited to see how these high standards will translate into a project explicitly bent on building bridges between VJ and DJ culture.

The FITC kickoff party will take place at the Burroughes Building at 639 Queen Street West this coming Saturday from 9pm to 2am. If you're on on the prowl for some stimulation next weekend, look no further. I'll definitely make a point of checking out their setup and following up with a post in the near future. Taking place earlier that evening, Pixel Gallery will be hosting a free talk by Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab at 6pm at their Kensington Market location.