BNMI Co-production Residency: Liminal Screen

Program Description

The Liminal Screen Co-production Residency at The Banff Centre provides a unique take on video-based residency programs by engaging artists, developers, and researchers in a collective critical inquiry into video as a medium. This residency will focus its inquiry on the transitions between screen and life, as the screen reinforces its central position as an ubiquitous communications portal, data visualization surface and frame on an ever more meditated world.

The process of the residency is open-ended. In the company of peers participants can complete, develop, or experiment with screen-based work. The artists selected for the program will receive technical and programming support as needed. Dedicated studio time is supplemented with a program of group activities including peer critique, thematic screenings and discussion. Residents will also receive studio visits from senior artists, technicians and curators; and access to broader art-based resources of The Banff Centre.

Practitioners from all walks of screen-based practice are encouraged to apply to the program. We are particularly interested in practice that extends its investigation of the screen out into other media or networks (biological, philosophical, social and other systems) and explores the spaces and relationships between screen, mind and hard reality. Participants will receive mentorship and critical feedback on their project from internationally-renowned new media artists and producers Nina Czegledy, Willy LeMaitre and Kate Rich.

Liminal Screen Past Participants and Projects

Mario Marquez: “Mutable Cinema” (Mexico)
“Mutable Cinema” is an interactive installation that allows a player to perform live editing of a movie in front of an audience. The challenge is in deciding what to play on the big screen and what to leave out. As the player explores the audio/visual database he or she generates a linear montage that becomes the narrative viewed by the audience.

Jeremy Bailey: “Video Terraform Dance Party” (Canada)
“Video Terraform Dance Party” is satirical electronic painting/3D sculpture performance software invented by Jeremy Bailey. He performs with the software by demonstrating its functionality and also by telling allegorical stories using the same tools, ending with a “dance party” in which the audience is invited to dance in the final 3D environment created during the demonstration.

Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett: “VisitorsStudio” (UK)
“VisitorsStudio” is a collaborative audio-visual polemic, utilizing open, online moving-image and sound dealing with social themes with a universal resonance. Using material gathered by furtherfield.org artists over recent years, they developed audiovisual material using a range of digital manipulation and processing techniques for use in online performances.

Tina Gonsalves: “Chameleon” (Australia)
“Chameleon” synthesizes novel neuroscientific and affective computing research into a powerful art installation to explore and provoke emotional processes in the viewer by producing meaningful emotionally responsive audiovisual narratives. In real time, it will substantially advance the state-of-the-art, giving important knowledge in human-human communication modeling, computer vision, multimedia indexing and retrieval.

Noel Bégin: “The Sublimatable Organism as a Limnological Feather Vane” (Canada)
“The Sublimitable Organism…” is an immersive video environment sculpted out of succulent camera footage gathered from Banff National Park, titrated through video effects software. The result is a montage of landscapes, creatures and objects that all exercise fantastic abilities.

Natacha Roussel and Michel Panouillot: “Pixy” (France)
“Pixy” is made of a limited number of small electroluminescent squares. Each square corresponds to a video pixel, therefore defining the image's resolution and the aesthetic of the whole. The pixelated moving image is generated as small squares combine, giving a feeling of fragility as it is viewed, and uncertainty about the viewed element&rquo;s ability to make it to the following pixel. Subjects appear, and one pixel after the other, visibly recompose at each step of the image; always playing a game of hide and seek, appearing and disappearing.