"the wooden lightbox: a secret art of seeing" is a hand-processed black and white film created partially with some hand-made emulsion, and presented on a hand-cranked 16mm projector which Alex constructed out of cast off pieces of projectors and rewinds and then encased in wood. Alex will be here to show us how it works.

About Alex:

Alex MacKenzie has been working as a media artist for over 15 years with a focus on various models of expanded cinema and light projection involving the handmade image. He was the founder and curator of the Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, the Blinding Light!! Cinema and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. His live media works are presented at festivals and underground screening spaces throughout Europe and North America, most recently at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Lightcone in Paris, Anti-Matter in Victoria, and at Cinecycle through LIFT/Pleasuredome in Toronto. He will be touring the British Isles in late 2009. Alex received a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours in the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Film Studies), Carleton University, and has worked with a variety of independent film organizations over the past 15 years including Mainfilm, Pacific Cinematheque, Cineworks, and Doxa. He recently completed residencies at Atelier MTK in Grenobles, France and at Struts Gallery/Faucet Media in New Brunswick. Alex is the co-editor of Damp: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art (Anvil Press 2008), interviewed David Rimmer for Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer's Moving Images (Anvil Press 2009) and is currently designing handmade film emulsions and manually-powered projection devices for gallery installation and live performance.

About the film:

the wooden lightbox: a secret art of seeing is an exploration and reconfiguration of cinematic apparatus and emulsion. Using the early development of cinema as a marker for cultural, technological and economic change, these film cycles draw from turn of the century cinematic prototypes and long forgotten ideas surrounding the moving image and its early promise.

At the core of this approach is the use of a homebuilt hand-cranked projector in an expanded cinema format to present a striking array of handmade and processed emulsion. The vast potential of the film frame is drawn out through imagery both archaic and contemporary in shape and form. Hypnosis, panorama, motion studies, expectation, magic, the dreamworld and sleight of eye conspire in this intimate and immersive framework.

the wooden lightbox: a secret art of seeing is performed live with a hand-cranked 16mm projector built and assembled from various relic 16mm projector and rewind parts and framed in a wooden box. Ten "chapters" are presented over the course of 4 reels. Film speed is varied manually by cranking more quickly or more slowly, while direction of the action is controlled by winding forward and backward. An average of 8 frames of 16mm can be cranked for every second of time elapsed. Colour gels are used to tone the black and white images while lens and hand interference are used to distort and/or partially obscure the image. Sound consists of a series of tracks shaped for the specific chapters and acting as guides to the progression of the images. TWL is an ongoing work in progress, an assembly of images entirely handprocessed and contact printed, transforming and developing as new materials are added and deleted.

Why you should come:

Alex will be here, as part of his UK tour.

“...[Mackenzie’s] work often has an otherworldly quality, as if we were seeing images for the first time...his process allows for the re-entry of a sense of wonder, what theorist Walter Benjamin once referred to as the promesse de bonheur, or the utopian promise of technology that can only be reproduced through an artistic reinvestment in the hidden possibilities of a medium. Through his rediscoveries, MacKenzie takes us back to the birth of the moving image...”
-Chris Kennedy, Strategies of the Medium III: In the Dark, Toronto (LIFT/Pleasuredome).