InFlux | Film and Consciousness

InFlux
Journal of Media Art
Film and Consciousness

The Flux Media Art Gallery is dedicated to
presenting innovative art works by local, national and
international media artists. It is a place for the exchange of
ideas surrounding media arts practice.
510 Fort St. (second floor)
Victoria BC, V8W 1E6
www.medianetvictoria.org
fluxmediagallery@gmail.com
Trace Nelson, Installation view of Rotor, Flux Media Art
Gallery, 2017. Photo by Peter Sandmark.

CONTENTS
Waking Dreams
- Catlin Lewis
Interview with Penny McCann
-Peter Sandmark
Dream Cinema
- Andrew Struthers
Interview with Trace Nelson
-Catlin Lewis
Deirdre Logue’s Psychic Conditions of Living
- Peter Sandmark
The Dream Life of Animals: An Interview with Melanie Shatzky and
Brian M. Cassidy
- Catlin Lewis
Addendum - The Secret Bank Account (Part One of Three):
Introducing an Economy of Art
-Petra Muller
On the cover: (Front) Penny McCann, still from Crashing Skies, 2012.
(Back) Melanie Shatzky and Brian M.Cassidy, stills of dream sequences from
Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations on the Dreamlife of Beasts, 2016.
InFlux is a publication of MediaNet (510 Fort St, Victoria BC). All writings
published with permission of the authors. This magazine or its contents may not
be reprinted in whole or part without express permission of the authors and
MediaNet.
© MediaNet 2017

Waking Dreams
They sleep; their eyes no longer see. They are no longer conscious of their
bodies. Instead there are only passing images, a gliding and rustling of
dreams.
Thus spoke art critic Jules Romains, on observing an audience in
1912 watching the films of Georges Melies. From the earliest days
of cinema, people have commented on film’s ability to mirror our
dreams and subconscious states. From the phantasmagorias of early
pioneers of Cinema, like Melies, who created elaborate sets and
costumes, to the filmic explorations of the Dadaists and Surrealists,
to contemporary fantasies by filmmakers like David Lynch, film has
sought to understand our psyches, and to reflect them back to us.
If traditional, representational and linear cinema can seem to replicate
human consciousness, what about non-liner, abstract and
experimental film and media art? The writers and artists in this
issue of InFlux explore these questions through interviews and
essays, sharing with us images from their own dream landscapes.
Catlin Lewis
Editor
Contribute to InFlux!
Send your submissions to fluxmediagallery@gmail.com
Attn: Catlin

Interview with Penny McCann
- Peter Sandmark
Peter Sandmark: Thanks Penny for agreeing to an interview about
your new film and your filmmaking technique. I wanted to frame
the questions a bit, because I am interested in the way experimental
filmmakers use imagery in their films, and in particular I am
interested in film in general as a metaphor for consciousness. While
conventional cinema emulates an ordinary day to day (linear) sort
of consciousness, experimental filmmakers tap into dream or memory
states with how they use or treat imagery. Sometimes I see
films which use images in a conceptual manner for their symbolic
meaning, which can reduce their potential aesthetic value. In some
of your films I have seen a more mysterious interpretation of the
imagery, which leaves them more open ended for the audience. So,
this is the approach I wanted to bring to the questions. Let’s start
with how you select images for your films, and let’s start with your
new film, Gibraltar Point (transformed).
Penny McCann: Gibraltar Point (transformed) was a relatively simple
idea. I filmed it at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island, which I have
been to a few times. I love the place because I am from Kingston,
I was raised on Lake Ontario, and I miss living next to a big,
open body of water. So, when I go there I am very fixated on that
horizon, that landscape. In this case I was there for a Super-8 and
16 mm film residency, and was focusing on another project called
Landlines. I shot a whole bunch of Super-8, but I also had three
rolls of black and white 16 mm film that I wanted to shoot and
hand-process while I was there, because there was a darkroom,
and it can be hard to access a darkroom away from a workshop.
In 2006 I had made a film called Lake Ontario In My Head at Gibraltar
Point, so I was really conscious of the fact that I was duplicating
something [with Gibraltar Point (transformed)]. I thought it could be
an homage to that earlier film, which is the only experimental film
that I had finished on 16 mm. For that reason, I had very mixed
feelings about the footage [of Gibraltar Point (transformed)]. I had

only seen those 3 rolls of black and white 16mm projected at the
end of the workshop, and I was afraid of them. I thought, I don’t
want to deal with this footage, even though I knew I had something.
I needed instead to focus on Landlines.
A year later I finally transferred the 16mm film at FRAME DIS-
CREET [in Toronto], and when the digital images came back I
thought Oh my god… Well okay then, I have a film. It was very
simple from there, because the footage was so perfect I knew to
just let it be. It has a randomness, the alchemical process [of film]
and a lot of solarizing effects, the hand processing, all combining
to be this random trip through consciousness. I simply cut out
bits,… I looked, and thought okay, that whole part didn’t turn out,
or that goes on for too long. So I cut out sections, but other than
that, what is on there is largely what came back to me from the lab.
Experimental film is about punctuation, it’s about duration and moments,
and about how to lead the viewer, because there is no story.
So it’s about how you create a shape, how you give it some sort of
structure. Finding structure is always the key in these works, and
I know to keep the short, sweet, immersive moments. In this case
it was the strength of the visuals that did it. The luminosity of that
film still kills me.
Peter: You talk about solarization and that this is part of the luminescence
of the imagery… You have chosen to do some hand-processing
and some solarization in the processing, and that’s a choice
in the image quality of the film. What’s your interest in that?
Penny: Although I like shooting with a Bolex, and I enjoy Super-8
and celluloid in general, I am not a technical filmmaker like many
experimental filmmakers out there, who are very much into chemistry
and the machinery of chemistry. I am a director, and I sort of
skim above the surface of all of that. In 2000 I made the first of a
sequence of short experimental poetic landscape films, Marshlands,
which was a mix of Super-8 and 16 mm and video. That was my
entry into working with celluloid in an experimental way, because I
had made short dramas prior to that.

Still from Gibraltar Point (transformed), 2017
Marshlands is on 16 mm film shot with a camera that didn’t work
correctly, and the gate kept stuttering, so I just referred to it as my
dream camera. It was like, wow! You can’t duplicate that kind of
effect. It was beautiful, very beautiful. So, I am always looking for
things that evoke this conscious space in the head. How do I get
there? It could be through the dream memory camera, it could
be through optically printing Super-8 , blowing it up to 16 mm, or
through hand-processing. I first discovered hand-processing at Phil
Hoffman’s Film Farm when I was there in 2008, and it is currently
what I am working with. That may change, as I find it can be a bit
over used as a trope. It is a bit difficult to work in as a format.
Peter: Why?
Penny: Because it can look all the same after a while. Just like any
imagery. My work is about creating psychic shifts in the mind, to
trigger memory or changes in consciousness.
Peter: Would you say that the hand-processing and the artefacts
that you see makes the audience conscious that they are looking at
an image?
Penny: No, it is not about that, it’s about sublimnity. I don’t know,
maybe because I am Irish Catholic, but I am always trying to find

the sublime. If you overuse it, you will lose the surprise, the moment.
But for now that is what I am working with.
To go back to the Film Farm, when I first went there I got into
hand-processing and within hand processing, found that there is
a whole bunch of techniques that you can use. I have discovered
that I seem to be the queen of solarization. I mean how would you
know? I am very good with tinting and toning, I really like that, to
create colour and so on, but solarization is my thing. And I love it,
because it is so random and so kooky, it blows up the image and
you don’t know what you are going to get. A lot of filmmakers try
to control the image, by superimposition and things like that, and
I am not interested in controlling the image. I am happy when it
turns out. That’s always a bonus! And I am always surprised when it
turns out, because I am not a technical filmmaker. But the solarizing
adds the element of accidental alchemy to an already accidental
process, of hand-processing. Tinting and toning you can choose the
footage you want to tint and tone, but with solarizing you can’t. Because
it works in the dark.
Peter: We hope people reading this will look at some of your films,
and we have provided the Vimeo link at the end of the article. Let’s
get to the psychic space. Earlier you talked about trying to create
Still from Marshlands, 2000

this psychic space, and that the quality of the image is a part of it.
Can you elaborate a bit on how you create this psychic space for
the viewer?
Penny: With Marshlands, my first piece, I used a multiplicity of formats,
and what I was trying to do was to create a space of memory
and contemplation. I discovered that by going from Super-8
film to video, (and of course editing plays a role), I was creating
psychic shifts within the piece. I am hoping to move [the viewer]
into memory, into nostalgia. I don’t try to control the meaning in
my work, I try to keep it as open ended as possible, allowing the
viewer to enter. That’s a very important thing for me. So, my films
- In particular this body of work - are not content driven. I am just
trying to take the viewer to a place, and let their imaginations free.
So that is my vision for Marshlands and the nine short works that
I have created, leading up to and including Gibraltar Point (transformed).
Peter: Following up on this idea, I am assuming this is why you use
celluloid. These are all film based works, so what does celluloid
bring to this approach?… you mentioned nostalgia…
Penny: Nostalgia does play a role. I keep trying to come back to
that “dream camera” moment that I had, with the camera that now
no longer works at all. I am trying to find this ability to create an
image that is mysterious - that’s a good word for it - and evocative.
It could be nostalgic, it could be a dream state, it could be
immense loss. I don’t know what it could be, it could be a range of
things.
Peter: Would you say the use of film stock, per se, evokes or suggests
the past, because it is something from the past?
Penny: Yes, I thinks that is true, that we are still working with that
assumption. Maybe I need to experiment with video more, right?
But often you can’t get those results without effects. And I am not
interested in effects. I don’t use effects in my work, except I might
slow the film down or reverse it. But that’s not what I am interested
in. So, it’s difficult… Maybe to some degree that is the next

thing I should be experimenting with, to find that same degree of
challenge with what I’ve done before, and maybe celluloid won’t be
the answer… Because 30 years from now our relationships to film
will be quite different.
Peter: You were also talking before about the importance of gesture
in your work, and I wonder if you could talk about how you see
gesture in your films?
Penny: By gesture I mean the gesture of moving the camera, because
I rarely use tripods, and in fact I was looking at works last
night at Antimatter [Film Festival in Victoria], and I was thinking,
they’re using a tripod, whoa what a concept! (Laughs). My work
tends to have the feeling of the human behind the camera, which
I feel is another trigger, another switch, it’s another thing in my
vocabulary. The gesture of the camera tends to be a range of pans in
either direction, and I have learned how to edit with that. If you look
at all of my films together, you see what I mean. Basically it’s always
me as the camera person, and it’s always the same motions. So, it’s
very literally gestural. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it, it is just
the way that I film.
Peter: So, motion as an expression of attention…?
Penny: I think it is about the embodied camera. You can feel the
person behind it…
Peter: It is the viewpoint behind it, it is your eye…
Penny: Yes, yes… or it is the viewer’s eye. That is the more important
thing. Because if there is an open interpretation, the viewer
needs to be the person behind the lens looking, so as the camera
moves, they move with it. So it is that connection.
When I put a camera on a tripod, I feel very conflicted about that,
and maybe I need to do a whole lot of fixed camera things to understand
it. But it doesn’t feel right to me, to be static and to have a
camera on a device. I don’t talk to other filmmakers much, so I don’t
talk about how they do things. Most filmmakers come out of film

school and have a well articulated way of talking about how they
do things, or are technically inclined, and I am not that person. So,
again it comes back to this notion of being a director, it’s about
choice, it’s not about the proper way to do things, or how you are
supposed to film with a Bolex camera.
Canadian media artist Penny McCann’s body of work spans more than
twenty-five years and encompasses both dramatic and experimental
films and videos. Her work has been exhibited extensively at festivals
and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Centre national
d’art contemporain (Grenoble, France), Oberhausen International Short
Film Festival (Oberhausen, Germany), the Owens Art Gallery (Sackville,
New Brunswick), the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa), and the Festival
International du film sur l’art (Montreal).
Watch Penny’s films on VIMEO: www.vimeo.com/pennymccann
(Note: Penny’s latest film, Gibraltar Point (transformed) is not currently
available for viewing).

Above and below: Missie Peters as “Missy” in Down to the Sea on Drugs.

Dream Cinema
-Andrew Struthers
When my film, Down to the Sea on Drugs, screened at the Van City
Theatre this summer, the curator, Curtis Woolchuck, warned the
audience beforehand it belonged to the “What the heck did I just
see?” school of film.
Fair enough, although the technical term is oneiric cinema: films
that mirror the nightly fare of our own dream theatres. Down to the
Sea opens with our hero, Dave, attending a small town talent show.
On stage a woman tosses a screaming child high into the rigging,
plays a flute solo, catches the child, hurls her aloft again, and tootles
some more.
That’s a very unusual talent, which hopefully none of us have seen
demonstrated on stage, yet the audience somehow recognizes it
from their own Dream Cinema. In a later scene the heroine, Missy,
(played by local screen goddess Missie Peters) sings while Dave
plays a xylophone solo on her teeth with a big old church key.
How can such surreal images move the audience to laughter? It’s
hard enough to get them to laugh when they understand the joke.
But somehow the connection is made. This is one of the deepest
mysteries of Dream Cinema, and I think I’ve finally grasped what
gives.
I first entered the cinema of dreams when I saw David Lynch’s
Eraserhead at what is now the Vic Theatre. Later my friends argued
about what the film meant but I sat stunned in a corner thinking
Dreams on screen? I had no idea such a thing was possible. So I set
out to do it myself. Making dream movies became a lifelong dream.
But life had other ideas. Following your dreams is so difficult that
Mitch Hedberg recommended you should just ask them where
they’re going and hitch up with them later, and it worked for me. I

didn’t even have to ask. Life led me on one adventure after another
until, at 37, while living in Tofino Harbour on an old wooden fish
boat, knee deep in the oily bilge, wrestling with a giant monkey
wrench, my filmic dreams showed up unannounced and said, “It’s
Showtime!”
This was in the wee hours of the new millennium, when digital
filmmaking had suddenly made it possible to get something in the
can for a tenth of a shoestring. But the bright clean banality of digital
imagery seemed to strangle dreamtime in its crib. I was utterly
convinced that to capture the dark beauty of Dream Cinema I
needed the sort of Eraserhead look that only film could deliver. So
I set out to raise money.
Then I had the strangest dream.
I was in Rome with Art Clark, the wharfinger in Tofino Harbour.
Art was one of that breed of BC old-boys, now mostly gone along
with the old-growth, who had formed an almost spiritual bond
with their machines. Art once fixed a deep fat fryer with a coat
hanger. If he said a tool would work, I believed it. He had built a
skinny scaffold over top of St. Peters so we could get an aerial
shot of the crowd. It looked rickety as hell, but Art had built it, so
it must be safe. We clambered to the very top. I could see all of
humanity below us. I reached back for the camera and Art handed
me a Super 8 film camera that had a digital camera duct-taped to
it. I asked “Are we shooting on film or video?” Art said, “From up
here, it all looks the same.”
I didn’t get the joke until I woke up. Art? Ha ha, very funny. My
dreams are always making jokes like that at my expense. I thought,
“I’ll show them.”
So I ignored my dream and went to great expense to shoot on
16mm, with a professional crew and all the rest. The results were
horrifying. There was nothing non-banal about what I’d shot. It
took three years of painting houses to pay off the debt.
Around that time Lynch made Mullholland Drive. Near the begin-

ning two men sit in a diner in broad daylight while one tells the
other his dream. The dream takes place in that same diner, and
both men are in it. The dreamer explains, “It looks just like this.
Except for the light.”
IMAGE 4
IMAGE 3
Despite the broad daylight and banal setting it’s one of the most
dreamlike scenes in cinema, in a sense more dreamlike than anything
in Eraserhead. It made me realize Dream Cinema can’t be just
about looks. That Lynch could invoke dreamtime just by cutting
back and forth between two actors suggests there must be something
about the structure of cinema that mimics consciousness
itself, dreaming or waking.
This has turned out to be true. In a recent Aeon essay the psychologist
Jeffrey M Zacks asks Why don’t our brains explode when we
watch movies? (although sometimes they do, Jeff. After Eraserhead
it took me a week to pick up the pieces. But I digress.)

Zacks points out that in all our millions of years of evolution it
never once occurred that our entire field of vision was replaced
instantly with a completely different set of information, as happens
when you cut from, say, a pram going down a flight of steps to the
face of a screaming woman.
I
Yet movie cuts don’t cause any cognitive dissonance. In fact, done
right, they seem to disappear completely. How can that be?
Zacks’ research indicates it’s because we don’t actually perceive
the world in the long Tarkovsky-type shots we imagine we do, but
in the scattershot of images we associate with Eisenstein montage.
This in turn suggests that consciousness is focused not on the

outside world, but on the screen of the visual cortex, in the back of
our heads.
The bizarre end-game of this line of inquiry is that we don’t directly
perceive reality at all. Rather, as with Plato’s Cave or Lacan’s
category of The Real, what we call the world is in fact a sloppily-constructed
movie set.
Ten out of nine cognitive scientists would agree - we don’t see
what’s there, we see a cheap mockup that we’ve hastily edited until
it matches our preconceived notions.
Donald D. Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of
California, Irvine, uses the computer desktop as a metaphor. What
we see are folders, say of vacation photos, but not the photos
themselves. Our consciousness has evolved to focus on the folders
rather than their content because, to quote Southpark, “to show
it all would take too long.” Or as Hoffman puts it, by the time you
process all that info, “The tiger has eaten you.”
So what we call the world is actually just a desktop with a nice
waterfall screensaver and a bunch of folders. In both consciousness
and movie cuts, our mind flicks from folder to folder. Reality is
forever out of reach. In other words, it’s all Dream Cinema, all the
time.
This explains why in the bar fight scene in Down to the Sea, when
the cook changes from my sister to my friend Dan in a single cut,
no one seems to notice.
It also explains what’s going on in America right now, from the
refusal to entertain gun control in the wake of mass shootings to
the failure of the media to call the last election. Left and right live
in conflicting dream worlds, so whether you’re Steve Bannon or
Stephen Colbert, best to avoid smug certainty.
Yet each faction is utterly convinced by what’s playing in their own
Dream Cinema and cannot be convinced otherwise, much like

myself in 2006, still clinging to the idea that celluloid is an essential
ingredient of Dream Cinema.
Lynch meanwhile made Inland Empire, visually reaching the opposite
pole from Eraserhead. Instead of the rich blacks and whites of celluloid
negative, that most stylized and seductive of cinema’s many
tongues, Lynch shot on a crappy little home video camera, the Sony
DCR-VX1000. The results were no less dreamlike. When friends
warned him against his choice of tools he said, “If you just listen to
these things, they talk to you.”
But I’m still not listening. I went to great expense to shoot Down
to the Sea on Drugs on black and white neg using a vintage wind-up
Bolex. The results this time were satisfactory. What made the difference
was not visual quality but syntax, the tacit juxtaposition of
ideas: a mom (as opposed to a dad) tossing a child in the air, and on
stage no less, with superhuman strength, while playing the flute; the
ringing of a chunk of metal on an actresses’ perfect pearly whites.
As in a dream, these juxtapositions are both familiar and shocking.
So the dreamtime quality lies in the cuts, or in what is not shown -
in negative space, where it belongs. This is the essence of cinematic
power, and perhaps of consciousness itself.
Since I first saw Eraserhead, Lynch has gone from unknown auteur
to cultural Thor, smashing our heads in with Dream Cinema content.
Twin Peaks ended its quarter-century hiatus last night, and this
morning the Interweb is a-blog with cinephiles trying to explain
what it all means. It’s fun, but it’s also a golden goose chase. Those
who see (for example) Jung in Lynch’s works are actually glimpsing
deep structures of human consciousness - in this case Lynch’s - and
by analogy, their own.
That’s why it’s impossible to force oneiric cinema into the tuxedo
of reason. The unconscious is a deep ocean. Opposing schools of
thought swim in its depths.
And that’s why after all these years in the city I still see myself not
as a filmmaker, but as a fisherman, wrestling monsters from the
deep up onto the silver screen.

Andrew Struthers is a writer, illustrator, storyteller and filmmaker. A
native of Glasgow, Scotland, he now lives in Victoria, where he runs his
own production studio. Andrew has written for numerous periodicals,
published three books, and made the mega-hit video Spiders on Drugs.
His recent filmic projects include a video for Sarah McLachlan’s song
Monsters, and the multi-part experimental narrative film Down to the
Sea on Drugs.
Watch Andrew’s films: www.youtube.com/user/apeman888

Interview with Trace Nelson
-Catlin Lewis
Catlin Lewis: Hi Trace. Thanks for agreeing to this interview to talk
about your exhibition at Flux Gallery and your new work Rotor. I
wanted to start by asking about the relationship between Rotor
and past work that you have done.
Trace Nelson: The Rotor exhibition at FLUX gallery in July 2017
was an installation that was a continuation of work I have been
doing over the past five years. I like to work with collaging, and
if you look at my previous work, I often collage work together.
The sculptural component of the exhibition was the same kind of
mapping of the space, with bio-morphic forms that were made of a
combination of sculptures using found textiles, and directly painted
drawings on the walls, and then the components of the videos and
the video boxes. In previous exhibitions I had made video viewing
boxes, that were wood constructions, covered in textiles, and wires
in biomorphic sculptural forms.
Catlin: In your Rotor exhibition in the Flux Gallery you had a
triptych of 3 video flat screens on one wall surrounded by biomorphic
sculptural forms and two other videos inside sculptural boxes.
Could you start by talking about the videos in the boxes…why are
they inside the boxes to be viewed through a small hole, and how
did you make those videos?
Trace: I like making the video viewing boxes, because I want the
audience to have a secondary interest with the pieces. The first
encounter the viewer has is with the sculptural forms, which are
standing at eye level. At first, the forms are not so recognizable,
except perhaps as something you might see under a microscope.
But then I want the viewer to look into an inner world, again using
collaging methods and animation, so one would have an interior
vision of the piece. All of the videos - Sous le Ciel (the carousel
video), the textural one, the morphing video - all went into video

Installation view, Rotor, Flux Media Art Gallery, 2017
viewing boxes. Then, from those ideas I wanted to expand out into
the space. The viewer is asked to move around the space, and look
into things, and then look at the installation space as a whole, using
all the walls and the floor, using the space as a sculptural encounter.
Catlin: There seems to be a correlation between the shapes in the
morphing video and the shapes on the walls in Rotor. Could you
talk about the connection?
Trace: About seven years ago I had made various shapes and
objects, and I wanted to animate them in a simple kind of way, so
I used a program called Morpheus, that would take one image or
object and morph it into the next. I liked the in-between areas created
by the morphing software, going from one object or drawing
to the next. That interested me in making more abstract images.
So, if we are talking about the images on the three screens in Rotor,
they are a continuation of the work I had been doing. Last year I
had made a video of the carousels during a trip to Paris. I was just
wandering around enjoying the scenery, being a tourist, my first
encounter with Paris, and then I found all these antique carousels,
and started to capture them with my camera. The thing that came
out of that project was that I discovered the gesture of the camera
movement. I started to just move the camera around while reacting
to the movement of the carousel, and that was the beginning

point of the Rotor ideas.
Once I finished the Sous le Ciel video, which I showed at the Victoria
Film Festival earlier this year, I went on another trip to Europe,
and I was caught by the textures and patterns that I found when
walking through new environments, particularly in Paris, but in
France in general, as I travelled around France a bit on this trip. So,
whenever I saw something that was interesting to me, some sort
of texture or architectural element or patterns of cobblestones,
I would just capture them with my camera. For the Rotor videos,
one of the most important elements for me was a visit to a castle
in Angers France, a medieval castle, a very beautiful and timeless
place, and I started to play with the gestural movements of capturing
this place. Those are the main images in Rotor.
Catlin: We can see bits of the imagery from Sous Le Ciel in the
Rotor triptych. How did you work that imagery into those videos?
Trace: I didn’t have a set idea about what was going to happen with
all that imagery. But when I got back to Victoria, I started working
with Final Cut Pro, using some effects, and started putting the images
together, including the Sous le Ciel imagery, and changing colours,
playing with the movement and the timing. I wanted the videos
to be a kind of rotating loop. They are all three loops of different
durations, so they not only overlapped in the process of the editing,
but also overlapped in relation to each other on the screens in the
gallery.
Catlin: There are many layers of images in your videos. What was
your strategy in editing those pieces?
Trace: I think that comes out of a few things, one was the nature
of the imagery, and that would be the textures and the carousel,
and the other would be the gesture, the hand held filming of the
patterns of the castle, and the rotating movements. I also wanted
to have a work that had recognizable imagery in it, but not in a way
that the viewer would get stuck on it. Part of the editing process
for me - an intuitive process - was to keep anything that was too
long or too recognizable or literal to a real minimum in the flow of

the work.
Catlin: There’s a variety of textures as well in the Rotor triptych.
Can you explain your interest in textures and how you came to
use them in the videos?
Trace: I’d like to go back to the idea about collaging - which is an
important process for me when I am working, and also collecting.
When I first moved to Victoria, I went out for walks and I started
to collect various kinds of textures and patterns in nature. But
I didn’t do anything with that imagery for about 10 years. Then I
decided to do something with it when I had the exhibition called
Microfauna, earlier this year, and the imagery was used in a work
that went into one of the video boxes in that show. That reinforced
my interest in collage and collecting. With the three screens of
video in Rotor I wanted to push it further and play around with different
effects, and keep that continuation. It’s like a seed of something,
that ends up moving into something new. It started with the
nature textures, and then went to the morphing video and then to
the Sous Le Ciel carousel video, and then the collections of textures
in France and the castle in Angers. I always like to find new ways
of keeping the creative practice going. I find that going on a trip is
a great way to see things in a new way and to motivate myself to
work on a project.
Catlin: Can you talk a bit about your working process?
Trace: I am interested in pushing abstraction with what I am doing.
In the past, 10 or 11 years ago, I was working more with objects
that were recognizable, symbolically, we would say “Oh yes, that
is a monkey”, or whatever it was. But then through the morphing
video I discovered something that was very interesting, which was
the idea of playing with an object that has transformed into something
that was more abstract, but still kind of recognizable. It was
the process of understanding how something can move towards
abstraction. There is something that the brain is always looking
for, an understanding in a symbolic way, of what you are seeing.
Through the process of working on experimental video or filmmaking
the image is always transforming. You start with something

that is perhaps slightly recognizable, like a scene or an object or a
pattern or something like that, and then it changes to another form
or image, and your brain doesn’t have time to study it and decide
what it is seeing. So, you are kind of lulled into a state of meditation,
and relax into it and let go, as the imagery keeps moving
towards more and more abstract forms.
Catlin: In your description of the work Rotor, you refer to “the
dreamer.” Could you talk a bit more about the idea of the dreamer
in your work? What techniques do you use to invoke dreams in
these films?
Trace: In my text about Rotor I wrote: “The Dreamer is transported
to a place suspended in time, attempting to hold onto an elusive
moment that moves, changes and colours our memory in rotating
cyclical movements.” The idea of the dreamer refers to the idea
of the flâneur/flâneuse or one who strolls through the scenery idly
enjoying the moment. In the making or gathering of material for
the Rotor work the images collect together to form a dream like
souvenir or lucid dreaming meditation on a travel theme.
Trace Nelson is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Victoria
BC. She has exhibited her work in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, and has
worked as an art educator for the past 15 years, teaching at Concordia
University and the Vancouver Island School of Art. While living in Montreal,
she worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Nelson creates
sculptural objects by disassembling found materials associated with crafting
and hand work. She reassembles and reconfigures furniture items
and household appliances, using video animation and reclaimed textiles
to create new meanings in the form of hybrid objects.
BFA, MFA Concordia University
Trace’s exhibition, Rotor, was held in the Flux Media Art Gallery from
June 29 - July 22
See her work: www.tracenelson.com

Deirdre Logue’s Psychic Conditions of Living
-Peter Sandmark
Still from Deirdre Logue’s Moohead, 1999
The first works I encountered by Deirdre Logue were her short
16 mm experimental films, many made at Philip Hoffman’s Film
Farm in Ontario. These short films seemed to be an extension of
Deirdre’s public persona: quirky, playful, intriguing, suggestive of an
iconoclastic spirit, but resisting easy interpretation. The simple act
of having a basketball bounced off her head plays like a slapstick
vaudeville act (Moohead, 1999), but her place as the self-imposed
victim played out for our vicarious enjoyment placed Deirdre
Logue, in my opinion, as the Harold Lloyd of the Canadian media
arts scene. The films became part of a body of work entitled Enlightened
Nonsense, made between 1998 and 2000.
In 2010, MediaNet and Open Space were fortunate to co-host an
artist talk and screening of Deirdre’s work. At that talk she was her
usual funny self, and I thought that she was like a stand up comedian,
but for the artist run centre crowd! It was during that visit that
Open Space developed the idea for a residency for Deirdre.
I had previously known Deirdre from her work as an advocate and
promoter of media arts in various roles: at the IMAGES Festival in

Toronto, as head of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre,
and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Independent
Media Arts Alliance, where she championed the rights of artists to
free expression and respect.
In her art works, films, videos and installations, she personifies
these principles. Id’s Its, Logue’s installation in Victoria, at the Open
Space Arts Society in 2012, was an uncompromising presentation
of the artist’s intimacy and psychological self-explorations. In the
press release for the exhibition, she stated: “Leaning lightly on
Freud’s somewhat archaic concept of the Id and heavily on performance
for the camera, my new work explores the richness of
our malfunctions, psychic unrest, the power of the abject and our
tendencies toward self-destruction.”
In the installation’s video pieces she brings the viewer close to her,
but still leaves us wondering, who is she?
I thought about Deirdre’s work while reflecting on the theory of
the artist as a self-actualized individual. Dutch artist and theorist,
Hans Abbing, writes in his book Why Are Artists Poor? - The exceptional
Economy of the Arts: “It’s as if artists have injected their individuality
into their artworks. Even though everybody is probably authentic,
it’s only artists who produce public proof of their individuality.”
Abbing’s interest is in revealing why people pay high amounts for
original works of art, and how that affects the art market: “And so
it’s my hypothesis that the general public wants to be like the artist;
they want to be the artist. Because this is impossible, people magically
connect with the artist through his or her artwork. People
believe the artist is ‘in’ the artwork.”
It would seem like Deirdre is in her work, but having known
Deirdre personally, the more I looked at her art in the exhibition
at Open Space, the less I felt that I knew her. She has succeeded
in placing her “person” into the videos, in intimate settings, and
often in extreme close-up, to the extent that the viewer identifies
with her. The viewer may even “experience” what her character is
going through in the video - for example, crawling painfully underneath
a mattress, then struggling to make it out from under its

suffocating weight. But Deirdre does not let us into the personal
thought processes of the situations depicted in the videos. She is a
“mediated self” in her works. Her videos make me think that we
are experiencing things vicariously, as though we were by ourselves.
We project ourselves onto her “character” in the videos, but the
videos are not really self-portraits or auto-biography… per-se…
But there is no question that the Id’s Its exhibition declared that
Deirdre had arrived as a formidable artist on the Canadian scene.
The recent book, Beyond her usual limits: the film and video works
of Deirdre Logue, 1997 to 2017 confirmed this, and provided
recognition for her work’s ability to engage us in the “psychic
conditions of living,” (M. Hyland, page 14). The Velvet Crease piece
was the key work in the exhibition, highlighting that the closer we
get to Deirdre the performer (or her meditated body in the video)
the less we know about her. I would suggest that her work asks us,
more than anything, to look at ourselves, and that she performs so
that we can experience the anxiety and uncomfortableness, indeed
the burden, of existing.
Deirdre Logue lives in Toronto, where she is Development Director of the
media arts centre VTape, and a director of FAG (Feminist Art Gallery)
with her partner, collaborator and artist Allyson Mitchel.
See Deirdre’s work: www. deirdrelogue.com

The Dream Life of Animals: An Interview with
Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy
-Catlin Lewis
I first saw Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy’s poetic film essay,
Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations on the Dreamlife of Beasts at
Victoria’s Antimatter Film Festival in October 2017.
I found the film both alluring and disturbing, with its intimate shots
of animals rendered unconscious on the beds of veterinary hospitals,
cats and rabbits with their legs tied and masks put over their
faces. I had to keep reminding myself, it’s ok, the animals are being
helped. And once the anesthesia kicked in, it was down the rabbit
hole (so to speak) and into a strange and disorienting world of
terror and fascination.
Anyone who has lived with an animal has witnessed evidence of
their seeming dream-lives; twitching paws and whiskers, barks, sighs
or whimpers. But we are left to wonder, what do our companions
dream of?
That animals do dream (or have conscious lives at all) has been the
subject of debate for as long as humans and animals have coexisted.
In fact, animals were not even legally recognized as conscious
beings until the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness in July
2012 (which is ridiculous as far as I am concerned). And yet, even
as far back as Aristotle, people have been aware of animal dreams
and curious about their dream lives. As Aristotle writes in The
History of Animals, “It would appear that not only do men dream,
but horses also, and dogs, and oxen; aye, and sheep, and goats, and
all viviparous quadrupeds; and dogs show their dreaming by barking
in their sleep.”
As we have read in the essays in this journal, experimental film is
particularly apt at mirroring our dream lives. I wrote to Melanie
and Brian to further explore the film, and their thoughts about the
unconscious experiences of animals.

Still from Animals Under Anesthesia, 2016
Catlin Lewis: Hi Melanie and Brian. Thanks for answering some
questions about Animals Under Anesthesia. I wanted to begin by asking
you, how did you first come up with the idea for this film?
Melanie Shatzky/ Brian M. Cassidy: We made a narrative feature film
a few years ago called Francine in which there was a scene of a cat
being anaesthetized. The image was striking - of the animal on its
back with seemingly no will of its own. In this vulnerable position,
the animal was firmly at the mercy of human will. We were deeply
haunted by this image, and it lingered with us. We felt it was an apt
visual representation of humans not only imposing their own will
onto animals, but also of humans projecting their own sentiments
onto animals. And from that, Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations
on the Dreamlife of Beasts was born.
Catlin: Did you have other animals that you considered? and other
types of dreams?
Melanie and Brian: We wanted to focus on household pets, so the
four that we chose seemed like the right balance.
Catlin: How did you decide which attributes to assign to an animal?

Melanie and Brian: Our starting point was a pseudoscientific and
absurdist attempt to psychoanalyze the inner thoughts of animals,
the result of which becomes a nightmarish reflection of our own
human anxieties. The attributes, which were assigned intuitively,
were meant to underscore the dominant themes of each segment,
while discreetly poking fun at the often presumptuous
impulse to anthropomorphize the animal world. When we refer
to “Speculations on the Dreamlife of Beasts”, it might be said that
the beasts we are referring to are humans, and not animals.
Catlin: The pig is the only one not actually under anesthetic. Why?
And why did you decide that his dreams would be about sex and
repression?
Melanie and Brian: The pig was undergoing a therapeutic procedure
to soothe its aching joints. The tank is an unusual contraption
that slowly fills up with water as the pig walks in place. It’s
difficult to talk in concrete terms about the links between this
phenomenon and the images of violence, menace and sexuality
which follow. As with an actual dream, oblique relationships grew
more and more insistent as we were editing.
Catlin: Could you talk a bit about the devices that you use to
visually invoke the sense of subconsciousness or dreams in the
film?
Melanie and Brian: Water is a recurring theme from segment to
segment - from an aquarium to a sink of dirty dishes, a city drain,
ponds, water pooling around the base of a headstone… We felt
this provided a certain life force to the piece while at the same
time permitting a way to signify a shift in consciousness.
Catlin: I find the film both fascinating and disturbing. It is strange
that, although these animals are actually being helped (as patients
in veterinary hospitals), they look as though they are being hurt,
or are even dead. Could you talk a bit about this mixture of empathy
and fear in the film?
Melanie and Brian: Like with most of our work, there is a strong

feeling of dread and discomfort, which inevitably polarizes audiences.
And yet within that dread and discomfort, we try to find moments
of grace and beauty. We are not after facts or answers, but
rather try to find moments of resonance within discord.
Catlin: Do you have pets?
Melanie and Brian: We have a dog, Pixel, a 12 year old black lab/
schnauzer mix who is the most empathetic being we’ve ever encountered,
and with whom we are madly in love.
Still from Animals Under Anesthesia, 2016
Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky are based in Montreal, where
they make work under the name Pigeon Projects. Their films have
screened at the Sundance, Berlin,Rotterdam and other film festivals, as
well as The Museum of Modern Art and other art institutions. Cassidy
and Shatzky also maintain an active photography practice, and in 2015
were invited to guest curate “A Photographer’s Eye: Photography & The
Poetic Documentary”at La Cinémathèque Québécoise.
Their work can be seen here: http://www.pigeonprojects.com/

The Secret Bank Account
(Part One of Three):
Introducing an Economy of Art
-Petra Muller
Filmmakers talk a lot about money, much of the work in experimental
film and video is about the practical business of production
and distribution. There’s the need to find money to produce the
films, the need to finance teams and equipment, and then all the
post-production work of the editing process and sound production,
and then the drama along the way, the cameras stolen from parked
cars, and equipment that needs to be begged and borrowed. Once
that’s all done there’s the work of getting things out to festivals, art
houses, internet channels, and so on. All this focus on production
and distribution also seems to apply just as well to art in general
(photography, ceramics, sculpture, painting, performance). There’s
the efforts in securing and financing materials, for deals on studio
space, for access to specialized equipment and so on, and drama
along the way, and then once that’s all done and the work is made,
well then there’s the task of distribution, of getting the finished
products out to festivals, art galleries, internet channels and so on.

Talk about what is in the films, in the videos, in the photographs,
etc, questions on all the important stuff, the questions of content,
intent and merit are left to critics, curators, funding agencies and
attendee views and buys and clicks, and the occasional artist interview
on cultural programs. It’s a manufacturing model, minus the
factories and mass production. Manufacturing is so old school, so
mid 19C, and we’re living in post-post-everything times. Yet here we
are. Even new technologies haven’t managed to shift things around.
New platforms, same order. Production, distribution, reception (to
borrow a phrase from communication studies).
Here we are, with an economy of art that’s not simply mass culture
nor is it a new born digital everything. Which brings me to a joke,
maybe you’ve heard it. It goes something like this. When in public,
and everyone can hear, it’s the bankers who talk money and the
artists who talk art. In private, at dinner parties, art openings, and
casual beer get-togethers, it’s the bankers who talk art and the artists
who talk money. We laugh when we hear it, for we know it’s true,
especially for the artist part. Let us therefore continue and keep the
conversation going on what’s going on with the current setups of
production, distribution and reception, there’s a lot to talk about.
More on the economy of art in Part 2 of The Secret Bank Account in
the next edition of Flux.
Petra is a photographer and filmmaker who was born in Germany and is
currently based in Montreal. She studied film with David Rimmer while
completing her undergraduate degree at Emily Carr University, and
received a Master’s Degree at Concordia University in 1992. She has
contributed photographs and writing to numerous publications, and has
just completed an artists’ book called What the World Wears (2017).
Her latest project is called the Jezts Set.
See her work here: http://www.petramueller.ca/