my name is scot: 2009

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Wild Goose

The Wild Goose is up and running as part of CologneOFF V, an on-line film festival initiated in Cologne. Please visit the festival and have a look, there's a lot of excellent work. My piece was completed earlier this year and it seems to be striking a cord out there; It was also included in the Videoholica International Video Art Festival in Varna, Bulgaria this August.

Here's the full length synopsis:

The Wild Goose is from a series of works called Hunt & Gather, which examine the real and imagined behaviours of human and animal populations as they both struggle to survive in an increasingly challenging and competitive global environment. Diminishing resources, disappearing eco systems, and the pandemic spread of disease between species is further straining the already fragile relationship between creatures sharing the planet. Despite the recent wave of “Eco –Awareness”, the covert battle for the last remaining scraps of habitat, food, and water is becoming increasingly violent and desperate. As our fate becomes more obviously entwined with the fate of other species, can we be sure that ‘we’ will be the ultimate survivors? The Wild Goose posits a reversal of the hierarchy which has placed humans at the top of the food chain. Humans will now reap what they have sown; peaceful co-existence can no longer be taken for granted. Sides must be taken, the lines have been drawn, and like it or not, the hunter has now become the hunted.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

A recent video (see below), another project and a new blog

"face book" is a silent, one minute video that was shown on monitors in the Toronto Subway system, this past September, as part of the Toronto Urban Film Festival. Here's the synopsis that ran alongside it :

On the fringes of the digital city are places where your status doesn’t get updated daily, your profile usually gets determined for you by others and the only photos of you that get posted are when you go missing. This film is for everyone who falls between the cracks of our social networking systems.

The video is a bit of a thumbnail sketch from a longer video called - Calculating 63 , which is a collaboration between myself and Leannej. Calculating 63 was created in response to the mainstream media’s handling of the disappearance of over 60 women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Both videos examine the links between poverty, exploitation and violence. It was while collecting the footage for both pieces that I developed the notions for my newest project.

Evergreen is a series of 26 site specific installations that I've just started working on and I've created a new blogsite to go with it - evergreen26.blogspot.com. The blog will be a sort of working diary of the project and once I start installing the pieces (sometime in late autumn), I'll use it to map out their locations. I'm gonna be pretty busy with Evergreen for the next couple of months, so please visit me at the evergreen site for updates and more info.