02.10
Event - The Wooden Lightbox/Alex MacKenzie

Added by Samuel

THE WOODEN LIGHTBOX: A SECRET ART OF SEEING / ALEX MACKENZIE

Monday, February 15, 2010. 7:30 pm.

Engineering-Visual Arts Building
Black Box, sub-basement room OS3-845
Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine West, at Guy
Montreal

Free admission.

Alex MacKenzie performs The Wooden Lightbox live in an intimate setting with a hand-cranked 16mm projector built from various relic parts and framed in an austere wooden box. The manual operation of the projector, placed in the middle of the audience, invokes a pre-electronic, pre-digital era of moving pictures, when aesthetic astonishment was achieved through stagecraft and mechanical mastery. In the role of travelling projectionist, MacKenzie renews a tradition of itinerant exhibition from a time when the endurance of cinema was not seen as a given, and the shape of the medium’s future was yet undetermined. Through this invocation of the early days of cinema, The Wooden Lightbox confronts our taste for novelty and challenges the amnesia of new media discourses, demonstrating how concepts of mobility, interactivity, and visual wonder have long been central to moving image innovation.

Following the performance, MacKenzie will talk about his practice and take questions from the audience.

Alex MacKenzie is a Vancouver-based media artist working in film, video, light projection, and performance. He was the founder and director of The Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, The Blinding Light!! Cinema, and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He currently works as an independent curator, graphic designer, and writer. His works have been screened internationally.

This event was made possible with the generous collaboration of the Studio Arts & MFA Visiting Artist Program, Mobile Media Lab, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Spectral Media Lab, and Hexagram.

http://lightbox.mobilemediagallery.org

Information: Zoë Constantinides / zoecon@gmail.com