Author: MK

Cinema is a major component of popular culture, fodder for water cooler conversations everywhere. Despite all this banter around the latest Spiderman sequel, rarely will you hear anyone ask the question: “how, then, can the visually impaired participate more fully in this common culture that is predominantly visual?”, but the people behind the National Broadcast Reading Service of Canada have already answered it. In addition to creating more detailed audio broadcasts of news items, their AudioVision division has been producing what they call “described movies” since 1995. These movies are regular movies in every aspect except for their specially augmented soundtracks. Many scenes in movies may rely entirely on visuals, and in described movies a voiceover accompanies sections where the original audio does not reveal all the details of a scene, to make things clearer for the vision impaired.

This idea of enhancement through additional audio has a wonderful benefit in the case of described movies, as it permits a segment of the population that may not otherwise be able to fully follow a movie to do so. The idea behind creating enhanced movies is a close cousin to the kind of enhancement that foley provides. Foley artists, which have been around since radio plays, create sound effects manually, when recording the real thing doesn’t sound quite “real” enough. Picture someone clapping coconut shells on a piece of wood to make the sound that a horses’ hooves would produce, and you have a slightly clichéd idea of what foley art is like.

Foley effects made radio plays more believeable and real, and permitted some suspension of disbelief. Foley art is still employed in today’s films, to create some of the “real” sounds that we are used to hearing in a cinematic experience. In essence, described movies employ a kind of verbal foley, to make movies more accessible and believeable to the vision impaired.

New projects, like Call of the Wild and [murmur] use voice to tell a story over cellphones and perhaps these projects are, in a sense, another type of verbal foley. They create a scene and illustrate details that we might not see. Though the technology has come a long way, and now site-specific experiences are being delivered on mobile devices, some ideas can still be traced back to radio, and in the case of the cellphone-driven projects I just mentioned, are not really that far from radio at all.

The Master’s programme I’m enrolled in at UQAM is in the Department of Visual and Media Art, which means that the disciplines explored by the students are quite diverse – everything from drawing to robotics. So in the first semester, we had a small show where we could all check each other out and the professors could also get a better idea of what kind of work we did. I don’t remember much of that initial show, but I do remember that there was a lot of video work, and only one painting.

A year later, we had another show together. I had to admit that I knew what some people in the class were up to, but most of the work would be pretty new to me. There was a lot of solid work, and I was really enjoying the show, when I came upon the last piece in my little tour. One painting, but this time with a video next to it and a bag hung on the wall, in a little cluster at the end of the gallery.

I will admit to you all now that I am a pretty jaded gallery-goer. I can do a tour of a show in thirty seconds. With nearly no background in painting, I find I usually browse through paintings especially quickly, choosing to focus energy on work that I would know more about, like video or interactive work.

But at this painting with the accompanying video and object, I stopped and watched for a long time. I savoured that rare feeling that I get when I see something I really like: a sudden welling up of curiosity, as I almost hold my breath, and engage in a sort of transfixion on the piece.

The piece was called “L’histoire d’un vieux sac” (Story of an old bag) and the video was performance documentation of someone {{popup nicflem2.jpg vieux sac 500×331}}crawling through a park in a large canvas bag. It was a simple, beautiful scene, with the park seeming to envelop the slow progress of this erased person as he {{popup nicflem3.jpg vieux sac 500×331}}inched across the screen. The bag itself, covered in grass stains and other marks representing the journey, was hung on the wall, and on the other side of the video, a painting that froze one of the frames of the video for further analysis.

Having enjoyed it so much, I grabbed one of my passing classmates and asked “Who did this piece?” I had no idea. “Nicolas Fleming,” my classmate replied. Now I was really interested. This was the fellow who did the singular painting I remembered from earlier in the year, and at the time, I had thought he’d seemed cool, but what conversations could I ever have with a painter, knowing nothing about painting?

“It’s amazing work,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. I was impressed with the execution of this dimunitive performance, but even more impressed with Nicolas’ acuity at also presenting the bag as art object (bearing the scars of its travels) and the painting as further documentation (an unconventional way of documenting a performative process, and simultaneously referencing a long history of landscape painting). This piece was really resolved, confidently combining dialogues about painting and markmaking with performance.

At first I questioned the wisdom of UQAM at combining visual and media art in the same Master’s programme, but now I saw the wisdom of it, crystallized in one artist’s progression. Someone who was open to challenge himself came in a painter, and was going to come out a performer as well. I don’t want to give the institution too much credit, but I suspect the environment may have at least partially made this transformation possible. And so far, that has been the most enjoyable part of my experience at UQAM: feeling that it’s accepted or even expected that I will challenge myself, which means I might fail, and watching others struggle to incorporate radical changes in their practice, and succeed, as Nicolas did.

…and this just in: Nicolas is taking part in a show called “MOTIF, FIGURE ET ALIBIS” at Centre Amherst, which is at 1000 Amherst, local 104, Montréal, 27 novembre au 23 décembre 2004
Vernissage : samedi 4 décembre, 14h-18h.

I’ve started blogging at networked_performance, highlighting projects like Teletaxi, Call of the Wild, Melt, and The Other Path. I hope to add more detailed commentary to my blogging at networked_performance over the next while. Also over the course of this weekend I will be in Toronto participating in the Geostash project. I co-curated this project with Michael Alstad, and we’ll be following the artists around all weekend as they create “stashes” of materials and instructions for other artists to find and create public art/performances with the contents of these stashes. I’ll be blogging over there too, tracking the progress of the artists as we complete the project. I may reblog highlights here.

I have the honour of being a guest blogger at the networked_performance blog for the next while, so please stop by and check out the wonderful array of projects being highlighted and discussed.
I’m still in Newfoundland, and have just delivered my “Lecture-machine” performance, which went very very well, and will post details soon.
All best from “the Rock”!