Orientations and Identities

Abstract

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the much-loved Images Festival was remarkable in scale: hundreds of media artists from all over the world showed their work at over twenty venues around Toronto as part of North America's largest celebration of moving image culture. This year's theme, Radical Otherness, was certainly an apt (albeit broad) characterization of a festival whose mandate directs the display of work that agitates, expands, and rejects the mainstream practices and pedagogies of moving image culture. Two increasingly relevant themes emerged as central preoccupations across a wide variety of screenings, installations, artist talks, and performances. First, a concern with the spatially influenced nature of identity and culture was foregrounded in works about landscape, the nation-state, and built infrastructure. Second, a related interrogation of the technologically mediated relationships we experience with the aforementioned surroundings was enacted through experimental film and video's long-standing concern with their materialities. The festival's opening night featured John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses (2011), whose examination of contemporary issues in global migration and cultural adaptation was filtered through rich, slow-moving pans of a snow-covered mountainous landscape in Alaska intercut with archival footage of mid-century immigration to the U.K. (tenement neighborhoods, migrant laborers, the arrival of passenger boats, etc.). Accompanied by readings from James Joyce, John Milton, and William Shakespeare, among others, the question arises whether this work unproblematically reasserts the dominance of the Western literary canon or engages with it to question the narrowly defined aesthetics of (Western) cultural history. Ultimately, Akomfrah's methodical and lush landscape film, whose mysterious protagonist always wanders the icy milieu with his back to the camera, highlights the ephemerality of cultural identity. As an unnamed man in the archival footage points out, one thinks a new cultural milieu is strange until one acclimatizes oneself to it, thereby also becoming strange. The kind of haunting spatial disorientation created by Akomfrah's barren landscape is echoed in other works, such as the shorts Depart (2011) by Blake Williams and Wall of Death (2011) by Adam Rosen and John Creson. Depart uses geospatial positioning software to destabilize the illusory mastery of viewership. As a handheld camera wobbles while shooting a lizard, the software leaves a digital trace of the lizard's slightly moving eyeball in the form of a lingering white line. Relinquishing control of the viewer's perception by so overtly prioritizing the camera's movements and traces is a disarming experience for the audience, and the work underscores the ruthless automation of positioning software. Wall of Death shows indiscernible footage of a careening carnival ride at night. Lights flash while thrilled attendees shriek with delight, and yet, much like in Depart, the viewer's destabilized position engenders a disturbing and uncomfortable sense of dizziness. In this context, the delighted shrieks we hear begin to seem ominous, even terrifying. Wall of Death was shot on July 22, 2011, as a response to the horrifying act of mass murder committed that same day in Norway by a racist far-right extremist. How do we understand our own viewing experience-terrified, disoriented, and confused, as a sympathetic reflection of the experience of those who have fallen victim to the unyielding certainty of violently racist acts of cultural warfare? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Johann Lurf's short Kreis Wr. Neustadt (A to A) (2011), the filmmaker circles roundabouts in the rural-industrial landscape of Austria on a Vespa, his camera pointed at each roundabout's center. Like the aforementioned works, the initial feeling here is one of disorientation. Lurf's work, however, transitions into a kind of hypnotic magic trick, as absurd pieces of public art and advertisement begin to appear in the centers of roundabouts. …