BNMI Co-Production Archives 'C'
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Camara
Camara is an experimental documentary inspired by the work of Deraldo Ferreira and his ‘Grupo de Capoeira Camara’ in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Capoeira Angola is expressive movement which combines martial arts, gymnastics, dance, spirituality, history, song, and improvisation. This video examines how Capoeira Angola evolved as a means of survival and freedom for the African citizens who were held as slaves working on sugar and tobacco plantations in Brazil in the 16th century. Camara was awarded first place in the NYC Dance and Film Festival in 1997.
Co-producer: Gretchen Schiller (Montpellier, France), 1996 Format: Video, Length: 22 minutes
Canadian Art Now!
Canadian Art Now! is an introduction, examination, and analysis of the arts in Canada both today and into the 21st century. The series gives voice to Canadian artists, critics, and art consumers of myriad ethnicities, races, and cultures. It includes all artistic disciplines (music, visual arts, creative writing, etc.) as they are expressed both in the fine arts and in popular culture. It serves primarily Canadian audiences but also an international public interested in contemporary culture and Canadian Studies.
Co-producers: Chris Creighton-Kelly and Leuten Rojas (Canada), 1997 Format: Video, Length: 30 minutes each (six in total)
CarnyLand
CarnyLand is a one hour documentary about the nomadic world of the contemporary carnival as seen through the eyes of fellow nomads. The traveling midway is a place of wild contradictions, fast-paced dramas, and seedy characters in a fascinating setting. This video allows the viewer backstage and introduces the public to the closed world of the carnies. CarnyLand takes a good look at the individuals who keep the temporary festival of bright lights and sweeping rides on the road, day in day out, year after year.
Co-producers: Elia Kirby, Elisha Burrows, and Step Caruthers, (Vancouver, Canada), 2003 Format: Video, Length: 56 minutes
Carousel Project: Little Wars
The Carousel Project is based on the history of carousels and their connection to ‘little wars’ in Italy. War games such as jousting tournaments later developed into carousels, where in addition to horses, menagerie animals represented desirable characteristics needed in battle. This project examines the evolution of carousels, which currently exist as rides, and in future may evolve into virtual reality. This multi-media installation includes the use of animation, sculpture, light, digital photography, movement, and original music by composer Dr. Irwin Swack. DVD authoring was completed at The Banff Centre, in co-production with BNMI. Co-producer: Debra Swack (New York City, United States), 2002 Format: DVD
Casting a Shadow
Casting a Shadow is an international project with institutional and artistic components from the United States, Canada, and Japan. This project is a dance experience which uses computer technology to combine the award-winning work of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company (Salt Lake City) with the new media ensemble Bridge Dance Theatre (Los Angeles.) This project is a realistic reconstruction of Native American Anasazi cave and cliff dwellings in the panorama of the American Southwest. The composer Eric Lyon, a research fellow at the International Academy of Multimedia Arts & Sciences (Japan) also teams with aerial painter Spelman Evans Downer (New York City) in the creation of this new media production.
Co-producer: Nathaniel Bobbitt (Oregon, United States), 1997 Format: Dance Installation and Website
Christmas at Wapos Bay
This claymation film, produced in association with the National Film Board, is an exploration of the spirit of the Cree way of life. A northern Christmas on the trap line proves challenging for three Cree children who must learn about true blessings and gifts. In this heart-warming, classic story, the children overcome serious challenges finding food for their upcoming family Christmas gathering. In English or Cree with English subtitles, Christmas at Wapos Bay was screened at the 2002 Sundance Festival, and was awarded the Aboriginal Television Award at the Banff Television Festival in 2002.
Co-producer: Anand Ramayya (Nunavut, Canada), 2002 Format: Video, Length: 48 minutes
Clickstreams
This twelve-part documentary series, co-produced by BNMI and the University of Toronto, offers insights into the qualitative aspects of the mutual influences between technology and culture. This Canadian/Dutch co-production places an emphasis on international cyberspace gurus and techno-savvy artists from Amsterdam to Australia.
Featuring cyber theorist Derrick de Kerckhove of The McLuan Institute, Clickstreams was aired on SPACE: The Imagination Station in January, 1998.
Co-producer: Diana Platts (Toronto, Canada), 1997 Format: Video, Length: 30 minutes each (12 part series)
Code Zebra
CodeZebra is a visual chat and threaded discussion software that enables participants to organize conversation themes and track the emotional dynamics of online conversation.
Originally built to facilitate debates between artists and scientists, CodeZebra is based on a visual aesthetic that draws from zoomorphic imagery and reaction/diffusion forms to include a series of performance events. There are habituation cages, where locked up artists and scientists debate, discuss, and invent over a twenty-four hour period. There are dance performances, where the characters in CodeZebra come alive through text and movement. And finally, there are responsive fabrics; whereby fashion is designed from the emerging patterns and identities.
Co-producer: Sara Diamond (Banff, Canada), 2001-2004 Format: Website, Installation, Responsive Fabric and Wearable Technology
Coming and Going: An Interactive Film Project
As winner of the CanWest Global Scholarship for 2004, Michel Blondeau and partner Paul Quarrington were involved in a pre-production planning and creative brain-storming retreat. They developed Coming and Going: An Interactive Film Project. The goal was to fully understand how Coming and Going might evolve into a short film, an interactive project, and a print format. They left Banff with clarity on paper — in the guise of a concept document — including loose character and story outlines.
Co-producers: Michel Blondeau and Paul Quarrington (Toronto, Canada), 2005 Format: Project Development
Computer Voices/Speaking Machines
This installation for the Walter Phillips Gallery, featuring the work of three new media artists, is a complex investigation of community, space, meaning, and voice. The exhibition featured La Salle des Noeuds III, an audiovisual installation by Jocelyn Robert and Émile Morin that used electrical relays to transmit sounds and images from the internet, and n-Cha(n)t by David Rokeby, a networked community of language-capable artificial agents that make their own associations as punsters, poets, and experts. Co-producers: Jocelyn Robert, Emile Morin (Quebec, Canada) and David Rokeby (Toronto, Canada), 2001 Format: Installation
Compwriting: A Theory for Virtual Typewriters
An interactive website for de-automatized text and thought, “Compwriting” provides for a fundamental area of human evolution: the ability to write. Compwriting tools are linguistic algorithms that re-order letters, words, and even languages, producing neo-meaning, in a process that involves de-scripting and re-scripting methodologies. The objective is to develop an interactive website and populate it with virtual writing machines, the so-called virtual typewriters, that can provide for mathematical operations with textual language. The purported strategy is to generate, and create or recreate words, phrases, and texts introducing neo-meaning and therefore stimulate new thinking.
Co-producer: Artur Matuck (Brazil), 1998 Format: Website
Construction Project
“Construction Project” is a three-phase project beginning with a website that leads to a CD-ROM and culminates in a multimedia installation. For the first phase, Lingua Franca, website visitors must navigate their way through a house under construction. The visitor responds to a series of questions referring to personal experience, reminiscences, memories of homes, houses, and rooms they have lived and grown up in, or spaces, houses, and rooms imagined and from dreams. Random rollovers on inset maps produce both image and sound details.
Narratives emerge only to be interrupted as the physical characteristics of the walls, doorways, windows, and closets shift. The basic structure is unfixed and ever evolving.
Co-producer: Susan Barnet (California, United States), and Jason Sweeney (Australia), 2001 Format: Website
Contagion
“Contagion” is an internet-based educational simulation game. Its goal is to develop, through serious play, the health-regarding knowledge, orientations, and behaviours necessary for promoting individual and community well-being. Highly contagious and potentially life-threatening, three diseases, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile Virus (WNV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) are, at this time, only effectively combated through the consistent, comprehensive, mass-scale efforts of individuals. This educational tool outlines how self-care must become a permanent, habitual behavioural change.
Co-producers: Suzanne de Castell (Galiano Island, Canada) and Jennifer Jenson, (Toronto, Canada), 2005 Format: Online Game
Conversations with Angels
“Conversations with Angels” is a VRML 2.0 and Java-based multi-user web project which consists of 3D worlds where several users are able to navigate via their own work stations. The worlds are interactive; the user is able to trigger sound effects, animations, and video clips by clicking the mouse and using chat programs that represent avatars that inhabit the world. These chat programs and 3D worlds make reference to real experiences and environments shared by real people – representing cultural minorities, sex-obsessed maniacs, mass murderers, redneck fundamentalists, etc. Multi-user capability enables interaction between several simultaneous users via their own avatar representation and chat windows or audio channels.
Co-producers: Andy Best and Merja Puustinen (Finland), 1998 Format: Website
A Cowboy’s Fairytale
This half-hour film provides visibility and voice to the issue of discrimination of gay youth by their peers. The film’s objective is that through greater awareness a dialogue is created amongst youth to discuss not only this issue, but address the tolerance of diversity within their schools (both rural and urban), and their communities as a whole. The hope is that this awareness will lead to lower rates of discrimination and fewer victims. As experienced by the main character, Prince, the film also touches on issues of alienation, sexual identity, and estrangement from one’s own family.
Co-producer: Aaron Langvand (Edmonton, Canada), 2002 Format: Video, Length: 30 minutes
Cruel Courage
A week after witnessing the destruction of New York City on September 11th, 2001, Canadian filmmaker Gray Miles, finds himself in Colombia, a country that has been living in terror for 39 years. In this one-hour documentary the question is raised: what happens to a place where terrorism and fear are woven tightly into the fabric of daily life? As the film progresses it becomes clear there are two basic responses: accept terror, or work to end it. In a country where the cycle of violence ultimately continues, this film is a story of how hope, adaptation, and resilience may be the cruelest kind of courage, enabling Colombians to carry on no matter how terrible the circumstances.
Co-producer: Gray Miles, (Harrington, United States), 2004 Format: Video, Length: 52 minutes
The Cucumber Incident
The Cucumber Incident is a feature length documentary that chronicles a family's struggle for justice after they learn that one of their youngest, a five-year-old girl, is being sexually molested by her stepfather. Increasingly frustrated by the inaction of Children's Services, the child's maternal grandmother, Mary Franks, feels forced to intervene. Mary is joined by her sister-in-law and daughters in an odd and impassioned act of retribution against the molester, an act that ironically results in charges of rape and kidnapping against them. Unintended consequences abound as the family is cast into a dizzying maze of media sensationalism and legal machination.
Co-producer: Bonita Makuch and Melodie Calvert (Los Angeles, United States), 2001 Format: Video, Length: 76 minutes
Cyber Kawachi
This CD-ROM explores the hidden power of the Kawachi suburbs; darkened by the smoke of old factories and distorted by serial high-tech slums, the simple, quiet men and women of Kawachi endure endless hardships. Despite long hours in thankless jobs, the inhabitants of Kawachi meet in cold winter nights on the nearby seashore or mountain-tops to sing against the wind, voluntarily destroying their voices. These cracked and injured voices become symbolic; representing the quarrels, tobacco, alcohol use, and destitution of an undefeated people. This CD-ROM explores ancient discrimination, struggle, and the resilience of the epic singers of Kawachi.
Co-producer: Emmanuelle Loubet (Osaka, Japan), 1997 Format: CD-ROM
CyberPowWow 2K
“CyberPowWow 2K”, is the evolution of the project “CyberPowWow”. In a proactive effort to de-ghettoize themselves, for the first time, the group invited non-Native artists to explore that place, both real and dreamed, where Native meets non-Native. Ten participating artists and writers came together to work both individually and collectively on their digital pieces and to install them in the virtual gallery. Digital artists from Australia, Cherokee poets and software programmers, Cree new media artists, Kwakiul carvers, Mohawk visual artists, performers, and web designers all contributed to both the “CyberPowWow” Palace chat-room and website.
Co-producers: Skawennati Tricia Fragnito (San Francisco, United States), Archer Pechawis (Vancouver, Canada), 2001 Format: Website