From FVNMA faculty member, Melika Bass:
I wanted to reach out to you all in hopes of connecting some Art and Tech students to a screening event FVNMA is hosting this coming Wed. 2/7 at 4:30 pm, with controversial Quebecois moving image maker Dominic Gagnon. Gagnon works with online material in provocative and profound ways.
Solo Screening: DOMINIC GAGNON
This Wednesday, Feb. 7 only
4:30-6:45pm
Maclean Room 1408
Free and open to SAIC community
The Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation welcomes Montreal-based artist and filmmaker Dominic Gagnon for a 1-day visit to SAIC. Please join us for a special screening of 2 of Gagnon’s recent award-winning, provocative films, followed by a Q & A.
Program: 96 minutes, plus discussion
HOAX_CANULAR
“Gagnon’s film expands the boundaries of traditional documentary and lends new meaning to online sharing: we never know when the parody ends and things get serious.” – IFF Rotterdam, 2014
GRAND PRIX
Best Canadian Feature
Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM)
Official Selection
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Official Selection
Visions du Reél Film Festival
How do you survive the end of the world? The young people in this tragicomic, contemporary found-footage film discuss their plans and expectations in a series of online video monologues. Some believe they can survive, others embrace the end. The material of Hoax_canular comes mostly from 70 hours of videos recorded simultaneously on a single night – the night before “the great apocalypse.” Located somewhere between documentary, ethnography, and performance collage, this is vibrant portrait of a generation born in the digital age, and a profound reflection on the appropriation of angst and fear stoked by contemporary media.
Dominic Gagnon, 91 mins, 2013, Canada
BIG KISS GOODNIGHT (unofficial trailer)
An innervating, aggressive cine-jolt built from appropriated online material, starring the voice of Joetalk100, featured in Gagnon’s 2012 feature “Big Kiss Goodnight.”
Dominic Gagnon, 5 mins., 2012, Canada
BIOGRAPHY
Dominic Gagnon (Montreal, Canada) is a filmmaker, installation and performance artist who works with non-orthodox images taken from a deep dive into the infinite archive of the Internet. He considers cinema as a technique for measuring the immeasurable, or as a discipline of chaos. Since the 1990s, Gagnon has made public presentations of moving images, invented machines, performed sound works, and created performances in galleries, festivals and biennials around the world. Utilizing both video and film, Gagnon’s works are exposés of obsession, identity and culture that question the specificity of cinema, and challenge the institutional and cultural modalities of the production and consumption of images. To carry out his projects, Gagnon has conducted research about the decline of economies, terror, violence, identity crisis, the international adoption systems, information disorder, homelessness, Sado-Masochism and fetishism in popular culture, and the family in the era of mega-entertainment.
Recently, Gagnon has produced dark, mythological collage videos, made with fragments of webcam broadcasts that were removed from several platforms for their controversial or explicit content. A specialist in collage film, Gagnon often uses found footage as source material for astute commentaries on apocalypse culture.
In 2011, Gagnon was selected for a residency at Impakt in Utrecht, and in 2013, his film Hoax_canular won the prize for Best Canadian Film at the Montréal International Documentary Festival. Gagnon was recently a featured filmmaker at the 2017 Flaherty Seminar, where he presented a retrospective of his films and installations for discussion, including his provocative and controversial 2015 film Of the North.
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This event is free and open to the SAIC community, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Department of Radio, TV, Film at Northwestern University.