The Centre for Media and Culture in Education (CMCE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto is pleased to present Terms of Address: A Symposium on the Pedagogy and Politics of Film and Video Programming and Curating, March 7 and 8, 2003, at the University of Toronto.

The two-day international symposium will feature four panels, two specially curated film and video programs, a keynote address (Hamid Naficy), and a panel of respondents. Confirmed participants include: Kay Armatage (Toronto, Toronto International Film Festival), Dana Claxton (IMAGeNative, Simon Fraser), Liz Czach (Rochester, Toronto International Film Festival), Warren Crichlow (York), Margarita de la Vega-Hurtado (Flaherty Film Seminar), Su Ditta (Oakville Galleries), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia), Chris Gehman (Images Festival of Independent Film and Video), Faye Ginsburg (NYU), June Givanni (independent curator, UK), Anne Golden (Groupe Intervention Vidéo), Mark Haslam (Planet in Focus), Kathleen Pirrie-Adams (InterAccess), Laura U. Marks (Carleton), Hamid Naficy (Rice), Mark Nash (University of East London, Documenta 11), Susan Oxtoby (Cinematheque Ontario), Sheila Petty (Regina), Debra Prince (Banff Centre for the Arts), Walid Raad (Cooper Union, artist), B. Ruby Rich (Berkeley), Karyn Sandlos (York), Steve Seid (Pacific Film Archive), Lisa Steele (Toronto, Vtape), Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Kino Arsenal, Berlin Film Festival), Karen Tisch (Hot Docs), Kim Tomczak (Toronto, Vtape), Paul Wong (ON EDGE, artist), and Daniel Yon(York).

This conference is particularly exciting because of its format! Unlike conventional conferences, the Terms of Address Symposium will not include paper presentations at the time of the conference (March 7th and 8th). Rather, all participants are required to access the conference site (with a password we will provide upon registration) and read the presenters' papers ahead of time. Speakers will not be presenting the papers at the symposium, but rather will be moving outwards from them in conversation with the other panelists and the conference audience. Thus, conference speakers will briefly reiterate key points of discussion, and will invite/support detailed discussion to follow, addressing key issues emerging with respect to the papers under the assumption that all participants will have read all or most of the papers prior to March 7th.

For presenters, you will be provided with a login and password with which to access the open conferencing system software, where you will be able to post your papers, and which will provide additional information about the conference, transportation, and accommodations.

For those other than the above-named presenters:

Fees for the symposium (to access on-line papers and to attend conference proceedings) are $115, or $50 for students, independent curators, artists and the unemployed (including GST). Space is extremely limited, so please register quickly by sending a cheque made payable to the University of Toronto, include a note detailing your name, address email address and telephone number to: Terms of Address, c/o Richard Fung, Centre for Media and Culture Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. West Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6. For more information contact Richard Fung, rfung@oise.utoronto.ca. Deadline for registration is Feb. 15, 2003. Once we have received your registration and payment, you will receive a login and password for the conference site.

To register, you may go directly to http://leo.oise.utoronto.ca/cmce/cmce_registration.php.

Participants may login with their username and password at http://cmce.oise.utoronto.ca to post/read conference papers and to view conference details:

At this site, click on the conference entitled Terms of Address: A Symposium on the Pedagogy and Politics of Film and Video Programming and Curating to begin your navigation. To submit a paper or to browse papers, click on the - Registered Participants, Panelists, or Presenters link, then either Submit Paper or Browse Papers on the subsequent page.

SCHEDULE

PANEL 1

Welcome: Richard Fung & Ellen Flanders
Framing: Roger Simon The Conference: The Pedagogy of Film and Video Exhibition

Discussion I. The Form and Formation of Programming and Curating
Both programming and curating film and video involve a process of selection and sequencing. It is generally accepted that in programming the emphasis is on reflecting the state of the field, whereas in curating it is about making an argument. Do you agree? How are these processes similar or different? How do they reflect different institutional locations and agendas? How might different modes of selection, i.e., festival programmers, museum curators, programming committees, collectives, juries, etc., lead to different intentions and consequences for film and video presentation? Do they result in different viewing experiences?

Moderator: Karen Tisch, Hot Docs
Panelists: Laura Marks (Carleton), Liz Czach (Rochester, Toronto International Film Festival), Sheila Petty (U Regina), Mark Nash (University of East London, Documenta11, producer)

Screening Session1.
Curator: Debra Prince (Banff Centre)
Moderator: Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia)

Discussion II. Metaphors and Models of Contemporary Practice
Programming and curation create the conditions for a film and videotape=s reception. Order and juxtaposition are crucial to constructing meaning and producing emotional and aesthetic experiences, and depending on how it is sequenced the same film or tape can elicit different responses. Are there dominant strategies and organizing principles? Are there patterns to the kind of premises used to assemble work? How does the curatorial process re-make individual works into a new audio-visual text? What are curators= and programmers= responsibilities to the individual works? What are the implications?

Moderator: Kay Armatage (UT, TIFF)
Panelists: Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Kino Arsenal, Berlin Film Festival), Anne Golden (Groupe Intervention Video), Chris Gehman (Images), Walid Raad (Cooper Union, artist)

Keynote: Hamid Naficy (Rice)

DAY 2

Discussion III: What is at Stake in Film and Video Presentation?-Histories, Identities, Politics


Festivals and other screenings are important in the production and performance of various kinds of communities sexual, ethnic, artistic and issue based, to name a few. In this purpose driven context, how might film and video presentation not only affirm identities and underwrite their significance but also elicit questions regarding particular identity constructions and the exclusions they may enact? And how might curating and programming strategies open up new possibilities for affiliations and solidarities? How creative can programmers and curators be when audio visual representations of communities are skewed or absent? Indeed, what are the consequences for the relations among history, everyday life and the social realities of shared communal space? What notions of historical memory and cultural memory are instantiated through time based presentations of images, sounds, gestures and narratives? And what is at stake in film and video programming for the development of various forms of historical consciousness?

Moderator: Margarita de la Vega Hurtado
Panelists: Steven Loft (Urban Shaman), Mark Haslam (Planet in Focus), Su Ditta (Oakville Galleries), June Givanni (Independent programmer, London)

Screening Session II
Curator:Karyn Sandlos (York, REHAB, Images)
Moderator: Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak (Toronto, Vtape, artists)

Discussion IV: Context, Space, Audience

Most programmers and curators imagine consequences to viewing their workBin terms of bodily pleasure, aesthetic enrichment, intellectual challenge, and /or political education. But how do curators and programmers imagine audiences? And how might film and video programming and curation negotiate the three-fold structure of intention that defines its relation to individual viewers: that is, the inter-relation of knowledge about the world, insight in regard to one=s own relation to the world, and possibilities of pleasure in the act of viewing? How might these negotiations be informed by the particular media forms and spaces of viewing within which programming takes place: cinemas, museums and galleries, classrooms, community venues, internet, CD-Rom?

Moderator: Dan Yon (York)
Panelists: B. Ruby Rich (Berkeley, programmer/critic), Kathleen Pirrie Adams (InterAccess), Steve Seid (Pacific Film Archive), Paul Wong (On Edge, artist)

Final Discussion
Moderator: Susan Oxtoby (Cinematheque Ontario)
Panelists: Faye Ginsburg (NYU), Warren Crichlow (York)


BIOGRAPHIES AND ABSTRACTS


Panel 1.

Karen Tisch (moderator)

Karen Tisch is currently the Managing Director of Hot Docs, North America=s largest documentary festival. From 1991-96, Karen worked as Programming Director of the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video. Other past positions include Media Arts Officer at the Canada Council for the Arts and Visual/Media Arts Officer at the Toronto Arts Council. As an independent programmer, Karen has initiated film/video programmes for various artist-run centres and cultural institutions, including the National Film Board of Canada and Harbourfront Centre. She has worked as a film critic for CJRT and CKLN radio and has served on juries for various international film festivals including, most recently, a short film festival in Guanajuato, Mexico. Karen is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and the National Ballet School of Canada.

B. Ruby Rich

B. Ruby Rich is an academic, critic, curator and journalist. She has programmed for the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the now-defunct American Film Institute National Video Festival, and the Institute of Contemporary Art (London). She has consulted on film and video selections for the Whitney Biennial, and served as Guest Director for the Telluride Film Festival. She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, and has contributed to the NY Times, The Nation, The Advocate, the SF Bay Guardian, Sight And Sound, the Village Voice and other popular and scholarly journals. She has taught at UC-Berkeley, The New School (NYC), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Halifax College of Art and Design. She also organized Show the Right Thing: A National Conference on Multicultural Film and Video Exhibition, held at NYU in 1988.

Abstract: "Taste, Fashion, and Service: The Ideology of Film Curating"
This presentation will look at the forces that shape the profession of film curating and attempt to map its influences. Particular attention will be paid to its dominant anti-intellectualism, the worship of taste, and the suspicion of any agenda - political, national - that interferes with the magical and utterly unsubstantiated notion of "quality." Examples will be drawn from the author's experience with this year's Toronto International Film Festival as well as from years of participating in the Sundance and Cannes festivals. In addition, I am interested in tracing the reception of Latin American films in contrast, say, to the embrace of Dogme or the Hong Kong and Korean films of recent years.

Sheila Petty

Sheila Petty is Professor of Film and Video at the University of Regina (Canada). She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity and nation in African and African diasporic cinema. She has curated film and television series and exhibitions for galleries across Canada. She is currently completing a book on African diasporic film and has a forthcoming monograph on the TV series, Law and Order. Her current research focuses on interdisciplinary investigations of new media narrative strategies. In particular, she is exploring the intersection of film-based montage theory and computer-based aesthetics. Leader of an interdisciplinary research group and New Media Studio Laboratory spanning Computer Science, Engineering and Fine Arts, she is the recipient of the 2001 University of Regina Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Research and a University of Regina President=s Scholar (2002-2004).

Abstract: ACategorization and Curation Criteria: Contesting the Exhibition Space@
There is a tendency to regard an exhibition space as a blank screen on which film or video is projected in a neutral state. However, exhibition venues, by virtue of the criteria of curation, should be viewed as cultural and political spaces which are contested and must adequately address the questions of canon and category in order to remove barriers to cultural exchange. My presentation will focus on the positive and negative implications of categorization and ask whether such descriptors as Ablack@ or AAfrican@ films ghettoize race and culture by separation from mainstream canons.

Laura Marks

Laura U. Marks is a writer, theorist, and curator of artists' independent media. Author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), she has curated numerous programs, including for Subtle Technologies (Toronto), Available Light (Ottawa), LA Freewaves (Los Angeles), and the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany). She is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Carleton University.

Abstract: 'The Ethical Presenter'
Programming and curating both entail responsibilities to the work and to the audience, though I would say programming has more power, hence more responsibility, because its audiences are larger. A certain restraint is required of the programmer in subordinating his or her personal tastes to the 'objectivity' of the program, though at the same time, a trusted programmer is one who views the field through a personal lens. One ethical problem is allowing marketing to take the place of research. Curating is more like a form of audiovisual argument, in which a theoretical perspective is shaped and redirected by a body of audiovisual works. In this case the curator's responsibility is to make an argument that holds water and does not impose itself on the work, but arises from the work.

Liz Czach

Liz Czach is a Ph.D. candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester where she has also taught in the Film and Media Studies department. She has been a member of programming collectives with Inside/Out Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival (91-93), and Pleasure Dome (90-96). She was a member of the New Works jury for the Images Festival in 1995 and curated a program for the Oh Canada Project! at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1996. Since 1995 she has been a programmer of the Perspective Canada series at the Toronto International Film Festival.


Abstract: 'Film Festivals, Programming and the Building of a National Cinema'
The concept of a national cinema has largely been organized in terms of a canon of great works by extraordinary filmmakers. This development of national cinemas in conjunction with auteur theory has been unproblematically accepted by film studies. Recently, however, the question of canon formation is beginning to be addressed. How is the canon formed? And what exclusionary practices does it necessitate?

One part of defining national cinema and canon formation is facilitated by the critical and public attention garnered at film festivals. This paper examines the role the Toronto International Film Festival plays in forming a national cinema, and how the process of programming a national cinema programme such as the Perspective Canada series either conforms to, or challenges, dominant notions of canon formation and nation building.

Curated screening 1.
Debra Prince (curator)

Debra Prince's varied career has taken her from a background in museums, curating small ethnographic exhibits in southern Manitoba to curating a unique landmark media arts festival, The Iskwew Festival: The Feminine in Indigenous Film and Video in October, 2000 for Urban Shaman Inc.Manitoba's only Aboriginal artist-run centre (which Debra also co-founded in 1996). Co-curated with Debby Keeper and held in Winnipeg, this festival was a celebration of the talent and excellence of Aboriginal women in film and video and featured 45 media arts works by artists such as Alanis Obomsawin, Shirley Cheechoo, Annie Frazier-Henry, Dana Claxton and Thirza Cuthand. Debra currently coordinates the Women in the Directors' Chair Workshop for the Banff New Media Institute at the Banff Centre for the Arts as well as the Interactive Project Lab which is intended to create new Canadian content for convergent and new media.

Monika Kin Gagnon (discussant)

Monika Kin Gagnon is a writer and curator, and Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is the author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art, and her articles have been published in numerous journals and books including Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, and Ghosts in the Machine: Women in Cultural Policy in Canada and Australia. Her curatorial work include Topographies: Aspects of Recent B.C. Art presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Colour Lucida at the Independent Film and Video Alliance. She was the editor of Parallélogramme, director of Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver, and a founding member of the Toronto artists' and writers' collective Public Access.

Panel 2.Kay Armatage (moderator)

Kay Armatage is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies & Women's Studies at the University of Toronto. She has written books and articles about women's cinema and Canadian cinema, and is the editor of Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, and an international programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, a position she has held for nearly twenty years.

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is Curator at the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek e.V./ Kino Arsenal in Berlin, and a programmer at the International Forum of New Cinema at the Berlin Film Festival. She is a co-founder and curator of Qino im Querhaus (cinema for short and experimental films), a co-founder of the Ubung am Phantom, a working group on research and art projects in the context of gender studies and film studies, and a co-founder and member of the Board of Kinothek Asta Nielson, in Frankfurt. She has programmed, lectured and written in a range of venues in Europe.

Abstract: 'Monthly Rewriting of Film History'
Movies have a memory. Therefore it is necessary to keep them alive by showing them rather than just archiving them. On the one hand they are witnesses of a distinct place and time, but on the other we can only watch them in our present/ce in relation to our specific background, knowledge and experience. Thus film history can only be understood as a history of reception. Technologically, it is our aim to get as close to the original as possible. That applies to film, video and digital work. This is important since it is not only the conscious perception that gives access to a film, but also the emotional and haptic process that is involved when you are watching. Through programming you can make audiences aware of the possibility of many different viewpoints: it makes a difference whether you show a film in the context of a retrospective or as part of a series put together under a stylistic, thematic or geographical point of view. Curating films together means not just presenting individual voices but engaging them in dialogue. New films can help to change the viewers' perception, when combining them with film history they become part of it by rewriting it. We understand cinema as both a museum in terms of keeping memory alive and a continuous questioning of everything that has been articulated thus far. Therefore it is paramount to present every film with utmost care, which includes providing the context as well as information on the film and its history. This can be done in written form and/or by introductions and by providing a forum for discussions and interdisciplinary projects.

Chris Gehman

Chris Gehman is an independent filmmaker, film and video programmer and occasional writer on film and video. He is currently the Artistic Director of the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, and previously worked as a programmer and editor at Cinematheque Ontario. He has been active on the boards of directors of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Pleasure Dome. Chris's writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Cinema Scope, Broken Pencil, Take One and other periodicals, and he has contributed to anthologies on the films of Philip Hoffman and John Porter.

Abstract: 'Mental Models'

Programming can offer a model for the thought process -- not only about a particular subject, but also in terms of the structure and movement of thought itself in relation to any external object (including an artwork). Chris Gehman will speak about his ideas on relations among different works in a program, and the way the pattern of presentation can create both a thematic dialogue among the works and a kind of rough externalization of patterns of thought.

Anne Golden

Anne Golden lives in Montreal and has been involved in the curation, distribution and production of independent video and film for over ten years. She was one of the programmers for the Montreal International Festival of Films and Videos by Women for three years and has been curator for Image et Nation Gaie et Lesbienne for the last eight years. Golden has been with Groupe Intervention Video, an artist-run distribution centre for videos directed by women, for seven years.

Abstract: 'Traduire la technologie' (title in progress)

I am more and more seduced by the parralels between curating and translating. The essential conceit of curating is, for the most part, a transparent one. Make choices. Be available to defend the choices in your program, to explain them, to hope that viewers experience the themes and tendencies you have experienced. And the translation of ideas that I, as a curator, hope to convey (or attempt to), can make for some lovely but flawed phrases. One of the common threads in recent programs I have curated is the notion of technology as a performance of emotional states. I would like to concentrate on examples of programs assembled for specific events and/or venues.

Walid Raad

Walid Raad is a media artist and Assistant Professor in the School of Art, Cooper Union. His work includes textual analysis, videos, performances and photography projects. His video works include: Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, 2000; The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, 1996-1999, and Up to the South, 1993. His photography projects and performances include: The Atlas Group: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, 2001, and The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, 2001. His critical essays have been published in Public Culture, Rethinking Marxism and Third Text, and his media works have been shown at numerous festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America, including the Whitney Biennale and Documenta 11. Walid Raad is a founding member of the Arab Image Foundation.

Abstract: 'The Truth Will Be Known When the Last Witness Is Dead'
In this presentation, Raad will examine the curatorial, pedagogical, and critical dimensions of The Atlas Group project as foundation, mission and archive. Proceeding from the notion of the local as a temporal and spatial marker, Raad will unpack the project's various forms as performance, installation, essay and screening. The presentation will also concentrate on the forms of work, conventions of display, and modes of address that have shaped the public forms of The Atlas Group Project.

Keynote Address
Hamid Naficy

Hamid Naficy is Nina J. Cullinan Professor of Art and Art History/Film and Media Studies and Chair of Department of Art and Art History, Rice University, Houston. He has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement; exilic and diasporic cultures, films, and media; and Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Third World cinemas. He has also curated and programmed many film festivals and film series and has served (and is serving) on the editorial and advisory boards of several key international cultural and cinema studies journals. His English language books are An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (edited, Routledge, 1999), The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), Otherness and the Media: the Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (co-edited, Harwood Academic, 1993), and Iran Media Index (Greenwood Press, 1984).

Abstract: 'The Politics and Poetics of Interstitial/International Film Programming'

Although globalization is making the exchange of cultural products commonplace, there is nothing common about such exchanges. Each exchange, each attempt at programming or curating international films, involves complicated personal, ethnic, racial, national, even multinational negotiations that sometimes severely hamper the flow of films across national boundaries. If the international films fall in between such categories as nation or national cinemas, the films that emigre, exile, and diasporic filmmakers make fall in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices in a single country or across several countries. As such, they not only pose an additional promise for cinema but also an additional problem for film programmers and curators. My presentation addresses these fascinating issues, which have enlivened recent film programming and film festivals across the globe.

Panel 3.
Margarita de la Vega-Hurtado (moderator)

Margarita de la Vega-Hurtado, is Acting Executive Director of International Film Seminars, organizers of the Flaherty Film Seminar. She holds a doctorate in American Culture, focused on Film Studies, from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she was Adjunct Professor from 1992-2001 in American Culture, Film and Video Studies, and Latino Studies. She is a programmer, curator and presenter of film programs in Latin American and Latino cinema, independent American cinema, and documentary cinema. She has published and presented papers on Colombian cinema, Latin American and Latino cinema, Louis Malle, Luis Buñuel, documentary and independent cinema.

Steven Loft

Dana Claxton has had to withdraw due to ill health, and Steven Loft from Urban Shaman has kindly agreed to participate on very short notice. Steven's bio and title will appear shortly.

Mark Haslam

Mark Haslam is a documentary maker, journalist and writer. He has Masters degrees in Film (Screenwriting) and Environmental Studies (Ecopsychology), both from York University. For eight years he wrote, directed and produced human affairs, arts, and environmental documentary series at Vision TV. He has sat on the Programming Committee of the Desh Pardesh Festival of South Asian Arts, Culture and Politics, and he is the founder and Executive Director of Planet in Focus (www.planetinfocus.org) - Canada's only environmental film and video festival.

Abstract: 'Vision, Authority, Context: Cornerstones of Curation and Programming'

Publicly funded media arts festivals have a responsibility to offer antidotes to the insidious corporate media images of the dominant ideology, culture, class and race. The curatorial and programming vision of media arts festivals must actively seek out what is missing elsewhere and create juxtapositions that enable the formulation of new social and environmental gestalts. Attention to questions of authority must include who is creating images and of whom, and how subjects participate in their representation. Curators and programmers must treat media artworks as tools, not products, and accordingly involve them in larger contexts and processes of social
evolution.

Su Ditta

Su Ditta has worked in the arts and culture sector for more than 20 years as curator, critic, arts administrator and arts management and cultural policy consultant. Formerly the Executive Director of the Canadian Images Film and Video Festival, Su is probably best known for her work as the Media Arts curator at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and as Head of the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council for the Arts. She is currently Adjunct Curator: Media Arts, at the Oakville Galleries in Oakville, Ontario, and works frequently at the Banff Centre for the Arts in a variety of capacities. As an independent curator she is organizing exhibitions and special projects at museums, artist-run centres and public art galleries across Canada. She lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

Abstract: forthcoming

June Givanni

June Givanni is a London-based independent programmer and consultant/advisor on African and African diaspora cinema. For many years she was in charge of promoting black British cinema at the British Film Institute, and for three years she was the Programmer of Planet Africa at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 1995 she organized the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas, and edited the subsequent book Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image. Until 1997, she was editor of the Black Film Bulletin.

Abstract: 'A Curators Conundrum'

Programming Black British film and video at a time which some regard as its most creative and most prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, was an experience that offered, historical, cultural and economic challenges that were fraught with seeming contradictions. Progamming which required cultural specificity, without exclusivity; programming with the dual requirement to inform and to entertain; programming that was historical and contemporary; programming that showcased new talent and celebrated the more established; and programming that strived for economic viability - hence a wide appeal B but which would not compromise its cultural integrity. Beyond the UK B Africa, Caribbean, North America - similar challenges beckoned and added the diasporic dimension of programming that was both local and international. All of these surfaced as one grappled with the developments and demands of demographic changes, historical events, and technological developments which determine how identity, cultural value and cinematic expression are assessed. In this context the role of the curator was rarely structured or clearly defined and reveals the complexity of the skills and competencies required.

Curated session 2.
Karyn Sandlos (curator)

Karyn Sandlos is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University, a writer and independent filmmaker and curator. Her dissertation entitled "Nothing Personal: Psychoanalytic Dilemmas in First-Person Cinema and Pedagogy" proposes an aesthetic of first-person cinema as a model for thinking about pedagogy from a psychoanalytic perspective. Sandlos is also the co-editor (with Mike Hoolboom) of the quintessential volume of writings on autobiographical independent film and video, Landscape With Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of The Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Co-Curator of REHAB, and a former member of the programming collective for Pleasuredome.

Kim Tomczak (discussant)

Kim Tomczak is a multidisciplinary artist primarily known for his work in performance, photography and video. Since 1983 he has worked in collaboration with Lisa Steele. Their work together has been widely exhibited both in Canada and abroad, and has been honoured with the Bell Canada Award for Excellence in Video Art, and the Toronto Arts Award for Media Arts. Together they are founders of Vtape (see Lisa Steele biography). Among other programming ventures, the pair curated The Distabilized Landscape: Postcolonial Space and Unreal Estate, a touring exhibition for the Edmonton Art Gallery, and they were organizers of Transtech, Toronto's Biennial of Video Art and New Media (in 1999, and 2001). Kim Tomczak was a founding Director of the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, and is currently the President of the Board of the Toronto Arts Council.

Lisa Steele (discussant)


Lisa Steele has worked in video art, performance, photo text works and projections since 1972, from 1983 in collaboration with Kim Tomczak. The pair have exhibited widely both in Canada and abroad and they have received, among many other honours, the Bell Canada Award for Excellence in Video Art and the Toronto Arts Award for Media Arts. They are co founders of Vtape, a media arts centre and distributor of artists' video in Toronto. In 2002, Lisa and Kim organized the Curatorial Incubator, a mentoring project for young artist-curators, and they teach a Curatorial Lab at the University of Toronto, where Lisa is Professor and Associate Chair of the Visual Studies Programme. Lisa sits on the Boards of Directors of the Centre for Aboriginal Media, presenters of imagineNATIVE Media Arts Festival, and the Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film and Video. She is co-editor (with Peggy Gale) of Video Re/view: the (Best) Source Book for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists' Video.

Panel 4.
Daniel Yon (Moderator)

Daniel Yon is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology at York University. He is jointly appointed to the faculty of Education and the Dept of Anthropology. His recent book, Elusive Culture, is an ethnographic study of youth engaged in a passionate quest for identity in what is coined these global times. This work brushes against the grain of ethnographic texts as it refuses to work out -and work out of- a rigid set of binary oppositions and gesturing instead towards the evocative intersection of spacial practices, ambivalence, routedness and subjectivity. He is currently working on a book and a short film engaged with the themes of diaspora, social memory, Britishness and citizenship with special reference to St Helenians in Britain. He is interested in film as ethnography and has published on film and pedagogy.

Mark Nash

Mark Nash is Senior Lecturer in Film History and Theory, School of Art and Theory, University of East London, UK. Recent media arts curatorial projects include Documenta11, in Kassel, Germany, and the media arts component of the travelling exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, currently in PS1 in New York. He was co-writer and producer of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (Isaac Julien, director), and was co-editor of film and video magazine The Independent and Editor of the journal Screen.

Abstract: 'Art and Cinema: Some Critical Reflections'

Over the last thirty odd years, moving image practices and the critical and theoretical debates surrounding them have transformed the space and practice of contemporary art and curatorial practice. The ideological functioning of cinematic spectatorship has, over the past fifty years, shifted to the wider more fragmented and dispersed regime of the visual, encompassing advertising, television, mass circulation magazines and so on. Curatorial and artistic practices which are concerned with deconstructing and reconstructing spectatorship have to find approaches which are not merely architectural. The construction of and problematization of the subject involves a series of discursive relays in which curatorial practice has an essential part to play in opening up the signification of individual works to discursive frameworks that inevitably move beyond the gallery setting.


Kathleen Pirrie-Adams

Kathleen Pirrie-Adams is Program Director of InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, a non-profit artist-run production and presentation centre in Toronto. She also teaches theory courses in Ryerson University's New Media program. Her curatorial collaborations with Deirdre Logue and Amanda Ramos as the Field Office have included WIDE, flow, and Source, three multi-site exhibitions of media art installations presented as part of the Images Festival's annual programming. Other recent projects have included Willy le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig's Appearance Machine, Istvan Kantor's Intercourse, Steve Mann's Prior Art: Art of Record for Personal Safety, and Game Girls, a group show focusing on gender and games. Most recently, Kathleen served as the Commissioner for InterAccess and Alphabet City's collaborative production of Canada's official presentation at the Venice Architecture Biennale: Next Memory City <http://www.interaccess.org>.

Abstract: 'Findings from the Field Office'
A network of invisible threads holds the city together. Some provide infrastructure; some are vectors of power. Others are the policies or local lore that form the city's collective intelligence. The presentation will review the collaborative process of the Field Office, a curatorial collective that develops urban exhibition strategies for new media art. Elaborating on the notion of new media curation as interface design, the paper will explore the distinguishing features of media art, and its potential for creatively transfiguring public space.

Steve Seid

Steve Seid is the Video Curator at the Pacific Film Archive, a department of the University of California, Berkeley. During the past ten years, he has organized over 400 programs of video art, film and new media. These programs typically circulate around cultural, historical and aesthetic ideas with experimental media being the prevalent form showcased. Seid also oversees an on-going video preservation project and conducts annual workshops on visual literacy for high school teachers. He has taught video aesthetics and history courses at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute. His most recent large-scale program, Whose Side Are You On?: The Border, toured Brazil under the sponsorship of Itau Cultural. He is currently preparing a museum retrospective of Ant Farm, the '60s/'70s art collective and creators of Cadillac Ranch and Media Burn.

Abstract: 'From Theater Screen to Gallery Wall: The Drift of Image and Audience'

In recent years, there has been a discernible occupation of the gallery environment by visual artists who in the past might have been called filmmakers. This can been seen in the prevalence of media installations in which a marked characteristic of the work can be best termed cinematic, an experience often reduced to the simple projection of a moving image on a bleached gallery wall. Ironically, this comes at a time when theatrical cinema itself is converging with digital technology, creating additional stress-lines within the history of the moving image. The drift of cinematic space from theater to gallery is not neutral, but drags with it aesthetic and cultural relationships, rife with implications impacting the artist, the audience, and the institution. This lecture will attempt to shed some light in this nomadic black box.

Paul Wong

Paul Wong is an award-winning multimedia artist and curator based in Vancouver. He is a co-founder of the Satellite Video Exchange Society (Video In), an important centre for the production, distribution and presentation of independent video, and is the co-founder and Artistic Director of On Edge, which produces cross-cultural and cross-border collaborations of new art. On Edge has produced many international exchanges with artists and curators, especially in Europe and Asia. It also produced a landmark series of touring shows including New World Asians in 1987, and Yellow Peril: Reconsidered in 1990-1, which were the first touring exhibitions of Asian Canadian media art. Among other awards, Paul is a recipient of the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art. (www.onedgeonline.com )

Abstract: 'On the Edge'

I will talk specifically about ON EDGE, On The Cutting Edge Production Society, an independent non-profit entity that Elspeth Sage and I have used to produce, curate, promote, commission, and co-sponsor local, national and international contemporary art projects. We have produced over fifty projects, including a residency by Hanif Kureishi in Vancouver where he wrote and we published the first short version of Buddha of Suburbia (1986), Yellow Peril, the first touring show of Asian Canadian artists (1988-91), and a presentation of First Nation artist David Neel during the 1999 Venice Biennale. Our attitude from the beginning was to put limited resources towards mounting special projects and not towards operating costs. Our programs target emerging artists, art forms and new audiences. Because we have refused to play by the rules, we remain marginalized by the established systems, not recognised as a gallery, an institution or even as an artist-run centre. This has allowed us independence and flexibility.


Respondents/Wrap-up
Susan Oxtoby

Susan Oxtoby is the Director of Programming at Cinematheque Ontario, one of the leading film institutions in North America, with an active exhibition, publications and touring programme. Over the course of the past seven years, Susan has been responsible for a diverse range of directors' retrospectives, national cinema spotlights, thematic series and special events. In the Fall of 1995, she was instrumental in launching Cinematheque Ontario's on-going series, The Independents, a free weekly forum devoted to alternative film which showcases Canadian and international guest artists on a frequent basis. Susan also programmes Wavelengths, The Toronto International Film Festival's new programme devoted to avant-garde and experimental film. In 2001, Susan was voted onto the Executive Committee of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives).

Warren Crichlow

Warren Crichlow lives in Toronto, Canada and teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Faculty of Education at York University. He is co-editor of Race, Identity and Representation in Education (Routledge, Vol. 1, 1993) and 'Toni Morrison and the Curriculum', a special issue of Cultural Studies (1995). His current research inquires into adolescent learning in art galleries, museums and zoos. He is also writing on the practices of black artists working in literature, visual arts and improvisational music. His article on Stan Douglas' installation project 'Le Detroit' is forthcoming in the journal Cultural Studies//Critical Methodologies (2002).

Faye Ginsburg

Faye Ginsburg is founding Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History, and the David Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Her various research project, from her award-winning studies of abortion activists to a decade of work on indigenous media, are linked by a strong interest in social movements, cultural activism, and the place of media in contemporary cultural worlds. A documentary filmmaker, and author and editor of three booksBmost recently Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (2002)Band numerous articles, she has been a recipient of numerous honors, including MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships; and four awards for her book Contested Lives. In the next year, she will be curating a film exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled First Nations/ First Features.

The physical conference space is wheelchair accessible.

Terms of Address is presented with generous assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Goethe Institute.