Hello Stranger (again) - Recent Screenings featuring Madillah

Hi all,

Hello Stranger, a video featuring my feral creature familiar Madillah, is finally going to be making his on screen Vancouver debut in Moving Arts 2016, a short programme of silent moving images curated as part of  "As the Crow Flies", the 20th Anniversary exhibition of the Eastside Culture Crawl.

Hello Stranger has screened in places as far flung as India, Portugal, Bulgaria, the U.K. and Berlin and I'm excited that after loping globally for the last few years, Madillah will be able to do some local lurking! The exhibition opens tonight, October 21st from 6-9 pm @ the Arts Factory, 281 Industrial Avenue and continues at this location until November 6th. The Moving Arts programme will also be on view November 17-20 @ the Charles Clarke Gallery, 1345 Clark Drive. For more info on times etc. please follow the link http://culturecrawl.ca/events/movingart2016 .

If you're curious about the video, here's a short synopsis:

Hello Stranger features Madillah, a transcultural symbol, an obscurely iconic other, who haunts the interstices of the virtual and actual and the borderlands of urban spaces everywhere. Emanating from somewhere far behind the digital façade and set against the backdrop of an indefinable city, his image appears first on one side of a chain link fence and then on the other, facing away from us and then gesturing towards an unseen viewer. Is he seeking acceptance, bestowing recognition or asking for our help? 

Questions immediately arise about the nature of this character: what is his cultural background or species, where is his actual location? A hybrid refugee, folklore oddity, homeless human or an alien enemy? His guise and gestures are an unknown commodity, reflecting our uncertainties about the veracity or viability of cultural authenticity in the face of an increasingly manufactured ‘global’ citizenship. Is he something to be feared or pitied or, is he perhaps, someone who can be trusted to understand our deeper, stranger motivations?

In an age of dispersal and dissimulation, where geopolitical conflict, climate emergencies and the scrutiny of ever present security camera can script anyone as a potential threat to an increasingly fragile status quo, perhaps Madillah’s greeting is a signal to the outsider that may exist inside us all; a confirmation of our presence, an affirmation of our ‘likeness’.

His image reaching across the confines of the mediated landscape, asks us to do the same: to find a way to identify with the people who exist beyond the borders of our physical space or psychic comfort zones, to reach out and become engaged in the on-going and real time experience of acknowledging difference and finding connection in the world we share with others.

Hello Stranger.

Actually, it'll probably take longer to read the above than to catch the video, which clocks in at only 1 minute. The piece was originally designed to be displayed looped on monitors in the Sophia underground subway system. But oddly enough, it seems to work nicely in a variety of settings. If you're able to have a look, please let me know what you think!

And if you're curious to know more about the origins and/or various manifestations of Madillah, feel free to search for his back story in the pages of this blog, just look for the Madillah tag or label.

Hope the Autumn is being kind to you all x Scot

New work, transforming work and travelling work.

This spring has been busy! Here's a quick update to let you know about some of the projects and screenings that'll happen over the next couple of months.

First up, my video Sink or Swim continues to travel as part of the One Minute Volume 7 series curated by Kerry Baldry. It'll be playing next @ the Steve Biko Centre in South Africa as part of the Ginsberg Film Festival, April 17th -21st, then back to the UK for a screening on May 2nd presented by Film Material Soup @ Rogue Artists Studios, Manchester. Then there's a longer run @ the Chester Film Co-op from May 15th - June 11th, including evening window projections onto the street. Here's a few links for more info:
http://www.sbf.org.za/Main_Site/steve-biko-centre www.facebook.com/chesterfilmcoop  http://filmmaterialsoup.wordpress.com http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk

Next up, I'm very pleased to to have been asked to participate in the next Fuse, which happens @ the Vancouver Art Gallery on April 25th. The evening will be curated by the always enigmatic and aesthetically invigorating Veda Hille, so you know there'll be some interesting work infiltrating the gallery. The night's theme is Terrible Beauty, and I'll be creating a site-specific text installation for the event called Malefactor.  Here's my 'official' statement for the piece:

An admonition or an appeal; to witness or acquiesce? Malefactor is a text-based installation, a participatory narrative featuring 32 free standing, ‘human sized’ letters created specifically for Fuse. An avowal, or a plaint; to render or implicate? Over the course of the evening, as each character is revealed, words will take shape, ideas cohere, and assumptions blur. Symbols, a crowd  assembles in the rotunda and a pre-determined phrase will slowly become defined. It’s not what you think. Or say. It’s what you do. Privilege, accountability, proximity; the way we treat each other. Wonder and disbelief; the way we treat the earth. A terrible truth, a beautiful lie. Dissemble, defend or deny? A confession, an oath. A message, just for you, from me. You know who you are - My Name Is Scot

It's a new series of works, that I've been wanting to make for a while, so if you get a chance to come by for a look please let me know what you think! I'm not going to reveal Malefactor's actual cryptic phrase yet, but the above is a mock-up for a similar piece called Infrastructure.

I'm also thrilled to have been asked to create a new artist book for a series being assembled by the incredible Jo Cook of Perro Verlag  www.perroverlag.com/‎. The series explore notions of the paranormal and my contribution is tentatively titled - Invitation to Disappear. Not sure when the books will be out in the world, but I'll keep you posted.

And lastly, I'm excited to announce that be heading to Bulgaria this summer for a two month stay at the Sofia Art Residency to work on a project called Public Address with the brilliant writer, text based artist and wily collaborator, Leannej.

There will be an official announcement and press release in a few weeks, but here's the basics - The Sofia Art Residency is an wonderful new space masterminded by the brilliant Biliana Velkova (sofiaartresidency.wordpress.com) and while there, Leannej and I will be working with Bulgarian translators, actors and writers to adapt and re-stage elements of our performance Human Identification at a Distance, which we presented last summer as part of Live 2013 Performance Art Biennale. 


The project will lead to an exhibition of projections at the Red House Centre for Culture and Debate, curated by Yana Kostova (http://www.redhouse-sofia.org). We'll also be working with our Bulgarian collaborators to create and publish a series of artist books, which we will be bringing back with us to show in Vancouver this fall @ the Vancouver Art Book Fair through Project Space Gallery. 



Photos Credit: Juergen Fritz, 2103

Lot's to do before I head off in May for Sofia, but it'd be nice to see you before I go and if you get a chance to catch any of the above, as always, I'd love to hear you feedback. x Scot

Sink or Swim - U.K. Screenings

If you're passing through the U.K. on your winter travels please drop by the Furtherfield Gallery in London on January 25th, Bloc Projects in Sheffield, February 14-16, or the Plymouth Arts Centre in early March for a look at my latest video contribution to the One Minute Volume 7 series curated by Kerry Baldry.

Sink or Swim is from a series of videos called Hunt & Gather, which examines the real and imagined behaviours of human and animal populations as they both struggle to survive in an increasingly challenging and competitive global environment. In the video, the ominous pulse of medical technology monitors the laboured breathing of an obscure biomass, suggesting the symptomatic effects of rapid climate change on an increasingly compromised planet. Sink or Swim wonders what the prognosis is for human survival, if we continue to ignore the conditions that link the fate of our species with the fate of others.

The video came about on one of my walks when I found a dried up ditch filled with stranded fish. It had been an unnaturally wet spring followed closely by an unexpected heat wave and schools of the tiny Stickleback had been left high and dry. I had nothing with me but a hat, so I scooped up as many living fish as I could and ran back and forth to the nearest canal, about a 1/4 mile away, until I'd saved all that I could. This happened a few years ago before 'extreme weather' situations became seemingly commonplace.

Sink or swim: to fail or succeed, to survive or become extinct. 

For more info please visit:  http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/one-minute-volume-7  
or http://www.blocprojects.co.uk

If you have a chance to catch the video sometime, let me know what you think, I'd love to hear from you. xs

 

DIY video works @ The Liu Institute for Global Issues

Hi all, 

the opening reception for DIY happens this Wednesday, October 16th, from 4-6 pm @ the Liu Institute fro Gl0bal Issues which is located @ 6476 NW Marine Drive @ The University of British Columbia. 

The show will be up until December 13th, 2013. If you get a chance to make it out for a look, I'd love to hear what you think! Hope to see you @ the opening or sometime soon x Scot

Here's a little more info about the show -

DIY- a statement

Part manifesto and part how-to manual, DIY is a series of linked video works that combine old fashioned recipes, the latest cultural theories, guerilla gardening tactics, situationist performance antics, wiki-wisdom and homespun logic to promote global biodiversity and local food sovereignty.

The videos follow a black clad, ski-mask wearing figure called ‘The Activist’, as she sows seeds, picks vegetables, digs holes, performs a series of backyard interventions, and most importantly, preserves food for the coming winter. Titles including Digger, Chopper, Selfish Gene Theory, playfully explore the mystique of food production, the perceived militancy of  guerilla gardening and the inevitable bonds between culture and nature.

In Terminator, the ‘Activist’, in a symbolic act of resistance against the forces of ‘terminator’ seed technology, deposits a land mine of heirloom seeds, helping to turn an ordinary city lot into a potential urban sanctuary. Over –Extension Theory finds her sawing and sorting firewood and considering needs and wants in the real world and the symbolic world. In Time is Ripe  and The Process, she cans peaches and tomatoes and wonders about the relationships between global logistics, food processing and genetic well being. In The Race to the Bottom, ‘Green-washing’, Game theory, and Memetic theory are played out in the middle of a GMO cornfield and In The Great Divide, The Activist ponders social inequality, the politics of poverty and the responsibilities of the individual.

Locally, the last few years has witnessed a proliferation of urban farm markets, community gardens, and an inspiring increase in the number of individual consumers who are rejecting their role in the corporate food chain. Downturns in the global economy and climate change fears have prompted many consumers to become more aware of where their food comes from and what it actually takes to keep the supply lines open. Of course, for many people on the planet, the contingencies and consequences of a tenuous food chain are nothing new.  

But ‘Big Food’ isn’t letting go of its market share willingly; the household cupboard of the West is still contested ground and the kitchen table of ‘Developing Nations’ is a potential battlefield. Chemical companies continue to pump out toxic cleaning agents alongside their new “green” line of products, “factory farms” may be going organic, but they still practice destructive monoculture on a mass scale, and Agri-business giants continue to develop strains of GMO and non- reproducing seeds (all the while, trying to make it illegal for individuals to propagate and maintain heritage seed banks).

Throughout history, populations have been managed or manipulated via the control of the food supply.  In a post 9-11 environment where ‘do it yourself’ activism is often equated with threatening behaviour,  it’s not too hard to imagine that individuals attempting to thwart state authorized food production practices might be labeled as eco-terrorists. In fact, Agri-Business giant Monsanto has been implicated in the burning of crops and the attempt to dictate farming practices in  a number of countries where it considers itself to have propriety rights over the methods of food production.

DIY imagines a multi-national, corporate driven, ‘green’ war which classifies guerilla gardening as an act of terrorism, drives home canning underground, calling it a threat to the stability of the fair market economy, spins backyard composting into a public bio-hazard, or claims that seed saving is bio- terrorism. While open warfare against Food Sovereignty hasn’t been declared yet, a good gardener always plans ahead. As the ‘Preppers’ (modern day hipster survivalists) like to say, “Resistance is Fertile!”

DIY is both a meditation on cultural and corporeal survival and a crash course in sustainable living, giving you everything you need to start disentangling yourself from the corporate food chain and learning how to grow, sow and share in the place where you live.

New Work in Vancouver this September.

Hello all,

busy getting ready for three presentations of my work in Vancouver this September: a performance for LIVE 2013 International Performance Art Biennale, a collection of video works at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at U.BC. and a reading @ Word Festival. Looking forward to showing in the city and getting some feedback from you! Here's a little info about what to expect.

First up, the performance, a collaboration with Leannej called Human Identification at a Distance.

Human Identification at a Distance is an exercise in sousveillance or inverse surveillance, an attempt to subvert the self monitoring that conditions our public expectations and cloaks our private emotions. The goal of the performance is obliquely confrontational, covertly confessional;  two figures, co-opt the gestural guises and costumed coding of ‘Authority’ and ‘Activist’, setting out from opposing points, marching through the crowd, broadcasting individual monologues, probing, measuring, interrogating, exploring the  constructions and consequences of separation and connection. Their movements ultimately define a shared space and the figures converge, their individual voices blurred in an antiphonic chorus of recognition and misidentification.

While the namesake program developed by the U.S. Information Awareness Office (IAO), 'Human Identification at a Distance' employs biometric systems in order to: “… identify humans as unique individuals (not necessarily by name)…at any time of the day or night … possibly alone, disguised or in groups…”, with this performance, and the ensuing dialogue, Leannej & I hope to support the unguarded expression of personal traits and private thoughts and promote unprejudiced public encounters that occur beyond, or in spite of, the bounds of CCTV culture. 

Many thanks to Randy Gledhill of LIVE 2013 for inviting us to participate. The Performance happens September 21st @ Victory Square, 150 W Hastings (South West Corner) @ 2:30 PM sharp. For more info: livebiennale.ca

Next up is DIY, a collection of video works @ the Liu Institute. 

Part manifesto and part how-to manual, DIY is a series of linked video works that combine old fashioned recipes, the latest cultural theories, guerilla gardening tactics, situationist performance antics, wiki-wisdom and homespun logic to promote global biodiversity and local food sovereignty. Both a meditation on cultural and corporeal survival and a crash course in sustainable living, DIY gives you everything you need to start disentangling yourself from the corporate food chain and learning how to grow, sow and share in the place where you live.

One or two of these videos have been in online festivals, but most of these pieces have never been screened in the real world. Individual pieces are linked together into a programme of about 50 minutes and with titles like Selfish Gene Theory, Chopper, and The Race To The Bottom, I'm hoping there will be something that speaks to you! 

The Liu Institute for Global Issues is located @ 6476 NW Marine Drive @ The University of British Columbia. The opening reception happens Wednesday, October 16th, 4-7 PM. The show will be up until December 21st and regular hours are Monday - Friday, 8 - 5PM. For more info: liu.institute@ubc.ca

And finally, I've been invited to read from V6A: Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for the Word Festival ( formerly Word on the Street), which will be happening outside the main VPL branch @ Georgia and Robson.  I'll be reading a piece called Skid Row: Establishing Footage, which is composed entirely of language culled from Film Production notices posted in the DTES. Its from a series I call Shoot Me!, which explores the often uncomfortable narrative overlaps between what's being scripted and what's being played out for real in the neighbourhood. Look for me on Sunday, September 29th in the C.U.P.E. Poetry Tent, sometime around 11 AM.

If you're able to make it out to any of these events, I'd love to hear what you think.  At any rate, hope to see you soon.

The Process - video premiere

Hey All, The Process, another video from the Acts of Domestic Terror series is being screened this Friday, November 9th @ VIVO Media arts centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver. I'm very happy to be included in the program of In Media Res, curated by The Automatic Message, especially as this will be the very first public screening of the video.  It all starts @ 8:30 PM and goes til 1 AM, not sure what time my piece will be on, but if you can make it down it'd be great to see you and I'd love to hear what you think.

Terminator- new video screenings

' Food is Power, we use it to change behaviour '. That's the opening line from Terminator, a short new video piece that's going to be making it's debut this September, at screenings in the UK, as part of One Minute Volume 6, curated by Kerry Baldry.

On the 27th it'll be at the Horse Hospital in London  in the autumn programme of the London Underground Film Sessions http://www.thehorsehospital.com/now/london-underground-film-sessions-autumn/and on the 30th, it will be screened (via pedal powered cinema) in Alexandra Park in Manchester, as part of an event called One Day Wonder(ment). On October 25th, Aid & Abet in Cambridge will screen it as part of an event called Dark Hours/ Fixed Space and then on November 24th, it will be appearing @ The Museum of Club Culture in Hull.

The video is part of a longer series called Acts of Domestic Terror, which explores issues surrounding food sovereignty, radical gardening and DIY politics. In Terminator, a mysterious figure called 'The Activist' performs a number of Situationist inspired back yard interventions designed to provoke resistance against 'Terminator Seed Technology' and promote the global battle to maintain biodiversity.

I'm very excited that the piece is going to be premiering in the UK with it's long history of horticountercultural politics and I'm busy working on completing the rest of the series, which I hope to show more of soon! If you're in the neighbourhood for either screening and have a chance to have a look, I'd love to hear what you think.

Art, Activism and the Murdered and Missing Women

Tuesday, February 7th, I'll be co-presenting the video Calculating 63 with Leannej @ SFU Burnaby Campus and talking about the Evergreen project. Carol Martin of the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre will also be there and there will be a discussion about art and activism and recent events in the DTES. Please come by if you can and if not, I hope to see you the following Tuesday @ the February 14th Women's Memorial March.

New Video Work

... a lone, masked figure takes a stand in a disrupted landscape... defining her place, creating the space to inhabit her own body, looking for ways to construct new meaning. Fighting for the right to stand alone, the hope to be included, the freedom to say no, the freedom to say yes, over here, out there, anywhere, everywhere; Independence...

From the synopsis for my latest video, Independence, now playing at festivals this month in Beirut, Riga and Budapest and also viewable online as part of CologneOFF Vll- http://coff.newmediafest.org/ If you have a few moments please have a look and let me know what you think, wherever you are.

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.

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.

face book

Lurk: a preview

In July 2007, 250 years after the birth of Captain George Vancouver in King’s Lynn, England, four contemporary artists from his namesake city in Canada were featured in an exhibition called Vancouver insight, hosted by the King’s Lynn Art’s Centre.
One week before the opening of the exhibition a strange creature appeared on the quay.

The beast was rumoured to be a legendary feral human, unearthed during excavations in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, once the poorest postal code in Canada and now the sight of a controversial re-development scheme.Transported through time and space, to the shores that the explorer had set sail from, the creature was presumed to be searching for answers to Vancouver’s past or perhaps, clues to it’s future.

For a little over a week the creature was witnessed haunting the quay, loping down side streets and lurching through crowds in King’s Lynn’s busy pedestrian malls. Just as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone.

A mythical beast trying to make sense of history, place, time and being. His name was Madillah.

Lurk is a quicktime preview of the full length video that documents Madillah as he moves throughout the town and into a few unexpected places. Be on the lookout for more.

Lurk

running fence

portal

4-shore

the crossing

voiceover