Lost Signal Saturdays, Art and Drinks, Toronto.
I had the privilege of hosting my own night at Art and Drinks every Saturday night in November 2011. Art and Drinks was a video art bar: a lounge and observia. Conceived of and curated by John Oswald, it existed for 5 months, from September 2011 through January 2012, in an excellent storefront location at the corner of Dundas and Palmerston in Toronto. It was a welcoming, quiet and comfortable space to drink delicious adult beverages and view tremendous video art. Here I showed much of my single-channel video work alongside small crew of brilliant artists including John Oswald, Michael Snow, David Rokeby, Betina Hoffmann, and Laurel MacDonald.
Lost Signal Saturdays was my creation; each Saturday night in November I featured a different video mixing performance, including Retro-Mix: video mixing a selection of my favourite Structuralist/Materialist filmmakers; Transition Practice: a video mixing performance of practiced video transitions (shown below), Mixing Art and Drinks: a site specific video mix of material captured within the space and projected onto the street-front window, and The Balloons of India: a collaborative live music/video mixing performance with musician Ryan Driver.
Transition Practice, video mixing performance at Art and Drinks, Toronto, 20 min.
Documentation (excerpts): 1 min. 32 sec.
This is a performance of ten video transitions executed ten times each. For several days before the performance I practiced specific sets of transitions using the T-bar of my video mixer (much like a dancer practices dance moves). With two live cameras trained on my hand holding the T-bar, the audience witnessed my performance of the transitions along with the projected mixed output, the content of which was video transitions of my hand performing video transitions.