What does the future hold for media art?
Ed Video Media Arts Centre is celebrating 40 years as a community resource for filmmakers and artists of all backgrounds and experiences.
What started in 1976 as a non-profit organization, Ed Video remains a fundamental resource for creators in and around the Guelph community. While the centre has seen a great deal of change across the industry—and within the organization itself—there is a steadiness in that change that keeps it going.
“You have to change to stay the same,” said Scott McGovern, Ed Video’s programming director in an interview with The Ontarion. “With every new technology there’s a new crisis that can happen, but with every new technology, there’s a new potential for humans to use it in creative ways.”
As part of Ed Video’s 40th anniversary celebrations, McGovern organized a full-day symposium on Oct. 1, inviting artists and innovators to share their work and their thoughts on the future of media art.
For McGovern, the future of media art lies in how we learn to understand, control, and think critically about a particular medium.
“The Next 40 Years” symposium kicked off with a talk from recent U of G graduate Maya Ben David, whose work and research look at common cartoon archetypes through a critical lens.
Ben David illustrated how cartoons often problematize race and gender by using them as comedic relief, focusing on Pokémon as an example. In particular, Ben David deconstructed the character of Jynx and the role she plays in the Pokémon franchise. Jynx not only portrays a sense of Otherness in her inability to communicate with the main characters in the show, but also embodies the role of the “grotesque female figure,” and has been heavily criticized for her blackface appearance.
“When you render something [or] when you physically draw something, it’s representative of how you view gender and race,” explained Ben David prior to her presentation.
Ben David’s work critically assesses these problematic stereotypes in cartoons and uses online video as a platform to take control over the characters, often exploring themes of anthropomorphism and challenging the idea of gendered species. “Cartoons are being challenged, not by corporate companies, but with fan art,” she explained.
The symposium shifted its focus to a brief glimpse into virtual reality. Each participant received a dismantled Google Cardboard viewer and was tasked to assemble it before jumping into a demo with visual effects artist JunJun Zhu.
Zhu presented her 360 degree animation on the Google Cardboard app, explaining that the one -and-a-half minute video took 42 hours to render in 4K resolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKdLsGPWuyw
Multimedia artist and U of G grad Theo Bakker also presented his current VR project: designing a 3D model of Ed Video’s York Road location so the viewer can virtually walk through the building and re-imagine how the space is used.
Re-imagining how things are done was a common theme throughout the symposium. Video artist Thirza Cuthand spoke about her experience transferring her storytelling skills into a video game format.
Cuthand explained that much of her work deals with very personal experiences from being a First Nations teenage lesbian in the ’90s to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 24.
Cuthand is currently developing a video game to illustrate three different levels of bipolar disorder. The 2D game presents interactive opportunities for players to learn and engage within the art form, offering a humourous take on a deeply personal experience.
“All the mental health videos I’ve done have been kind of serious, so the video game is actually the first time I’ve done something comedic out of it,” explained Cuthand. “It’s important because it helps people feel comfortable with the subject matter when it is presented in a comedic manner and it gets past people’s defenses.”
Progressing into even more technical work, Laura De Decker presented a lecture on the roles theory, science, and computer programming have played in her artwork. De Decker’s work essentially uses ones and zeros to create colourful geometric art pieces made up of nothing but code. In using quantum mechanics and randomness to create art, De Decker pushes the boundaries of opposites.
Following De Decker’s highly technical and informative talk, video remix artist Nick DenBoer entertained the audience with his comedic video mash-ups. DenBoer’s work has garnered the attention of some pretty influential people over the last few years, including the producers of Conan.
Working remotely at his computer at home and seeing several of his remix segments air on late-night TV was a surreal experience for DenBoer. “Realizing that you had the reach of hitting millions of people with a video that you made is wild.”
Speaking on remix culture, DenBoer explained that his work conveys a social commentary, often resulting in political satire or even recasting notorious film villains as giant chickens.
“The end product is the starting point for many artists,” concluded DenBoer. “It’s going to be used again and again.”
The keynote address was delivered by Andrew McLuhan—the grandson of media theorist Marshall McLuhan—who spoke about his work documenting his grandfather’s library and what it was like to grow up as a McLuhan.
In 2009, Andrew was tasked with creating an inventory of his grandfather’s library; a project that would lead to the discovery of thousands of annotations and personal letters from authors tucked inside boxes and boxes of books.
“It was almost like opening a treasure chest,” said McLuhan. “You never knew what you were going to get.”
In one book, he discovered a note written beside Marshall McLuhan’s most famous quote: “The medium is the message.” The handwritten script said that the first use of the phrase was at a 1958 radio broadcaster’s conference in Vancouver to reassure them that TV would not end radio.
Marshall McLuhan’s timeless ideas about the adaptive nature of media tied right back into the theme of Ed Video’s symposium: embracing change.
“Just because something new happens, doesn’t mean that the old thing is obsolete,” said McGovern, explaining how technology eventually comes full circle. “Everything is a tool.”
Photo by Dana Bellamy/The Ontarion.