DIM is a monthly evening of contemporary short-form moving images and cinematic collaborations. It creates an accessible, stable space for experimental film, video, new media and cinematic performance art — work that is only shown sporadically in film festivals, underground art spaces or galleries.

This coming Monday night – May 11th – Pacific Cinémathèque’s DIM screening program presents Vancouver-based experimental film and digital media artist Chris Welsby in person to present excerpts and documentation from his films, expanded cinema works, digital media and weather-driven media installations. He will discuss these works in relation to his philosophical, technical, and critical framework.

From the relevant release: “A pioneer of moving images in the gallery, Welsby’s expanded cinema works and installations from the ’70s and ’80s are now gaining renewed attention. His films developed a deep concern for the interconnectedness of social systems and the weather, where landscape is not secondary to the filmmaking process but rather an expression of critical information and ideas.”

We tracked Chris down to ask him a few questions…

What sets this city apart from others? The city is like no other city viewed through the rolling fog bank, hovering between earth ocean and sky. The tolerant, open minded attitude and easy going nature of the people who inhabit this strange and beautiful place with all it’s contradictions; its xenophobia and its social inequalities coupled with an endless capacity to care about the things that really do matter. And CBC radio! For the sake of Vancouver and for the rest of the nation, would the government of this country please stop cutting CBC radio and please stop cutting education and cutting health care and the Arts? Instead let’s see the end of prohibition and it’s cult of violence and social destruction. Just take the distribution of all drugs away from the undeserving and blood-stained hands of the dealers and gangs. It works fine for alcohol and with an steady eye on a new and very lucrative revenue stream and a bit of moral backbone it will work for drugs.

What came first, an interest in film and technology or a preoccupation with the natural world? I was a painter first and painted landscape because we lived in the country and that was what was there. But I learned to sail when I was 10 years old and the ocean and forest was my playground. Later I went to art school in London but retained my love of the land. Film was a departure but the technology is very simple and easy to adapt to my own purposes. However, the landscape comes first and every idea comes from the direct experience of that.

In your work you often alter or force technology to adapt to or reflect the flow of nature. Is it an inability to control nature that fuels your desire to capture it by mechanical means or is it closer to reverence and awe that drives you to portray it with as much detail as possible? How strange you would see it that way. I have no desire to capture and control Nature. My first film was made by attaching a camera to a wind Vane and letting nature do the rest. Since then I have devised ways to let Nature have agency in the making of my film and digital media projects. Wind, tide, changing light, cloud cover the rotation of the planet and tides are my camera crew and editors. For me landscape is not something to be captured and placed in the background to some human drama. I have never really tried to make films that are about nature I have always tried to make films which are, in some way, part of nature. In each new project I attempt to suggest an alternative to the current dominant world view which is based on control over nature, and the Human Exceptionalism of the Pre-Copernican period.

As our natural world becomes increasingly and inexorably tied to our politics, and your work becomes more and more visible, does it worry that your art might be construed as activism? Well, that is a good question. My ideas began as a fairly visceral response to landscape and this was later coupled with a comparatively abstract philosophical position in opposition to Dualism and the reductive sciences. Having studiously avoided relevance for the last thirty years I am now having work exhibited at International symposiums on the environment and climate change. I was even asked to exhibit Trees in Winter at the opening of Senator Al Gore’s environmental crusade at City Hall in San Francisco. However, whilst I am no stranger to political activism, and would be only too pleased to bring about some change of pace in the current rush to species extinction, it does seem likely that too much relevance can be a disadvantage. My fears in this regard were recently justified when I was turned down for a production grant on the grounds that I was ”just trying to get on the environmental bandwagon”! A massive sense of humor failure coupled with a sudden shower of acid rain prevented a suitably caustic response.

Three things about your neighbourhood that make you want to live there: I live on Gabriola Island and on my sail boat in False Creek when I am in town. Prior to moving to the Island I lived in Kits for about 17 years, so perhaps I should comment on that experience. The three things I liked about Kits were: 1) It’s rather unreal and superficial in so many ways, but at the same time its remarkably calm and unpretentious. The residents seem, for the most part, quaintly content to be unashamedly yuppie in a very straight-forward and unabashed sort of way. During the first decade of living there the only person I really managed to befriend was Norman the street musician. I think of it as being the most unfriendly place I have ever lived. However (2), the ocean is stunningly beautiful and wonderful to watch from season to season with the city in the background like the lost towers of Atlantis lit up like so many vertical mirrored tiles in the last moments of a winter sunset or the rainbowed invention of an excited child with a brand new set of colored pencils. 3) After living in London for 17 years I found Kits to be remarkably rural. I liked to be able to get groceries on 4th Avenue or launch a kayak at Kits beach without having to rely on a car.

What’s next? What next indeed! I am currently working with media artist and collaborator Brady Marks on a pixel by pixel imaging system which will take up to 100 years to complete a single ongoing image of Vancouver. The plan is to reverse the history of photography and slow the process of recording an image down to the point where it will register the enormous time scales of the natural world. An array of images will run continuously on refresh rates ranging from five minutes (the slow end human time scale) to 100 years (the fast end of natures time scale). The imaging system which uses a high resolution web cam for input, is neither a movie making system or is it a still photographic system, but is a third hybrid image making technology specifically developed to record long term changes like tides and seasons and yes, even climate change. For want of something more optimistic, the project is currently called “ The Doomsday Clock” and has been jointly commissioned by the University of Technology and MIC Gallery in Auckland, NZ. The system as it stands was commissioned by Lulu Performing Arts, a local arts group based on Gabriola Island. It has already run 24 hours per day for six months and I have now taken a Sabbatical leave from SFU in order to take the prototype to the next stage of development.

Other Interesting People

——————————————————————————–