2013 Images Blog 3 Andrew James Paterson

Thurs. April 11

Well, here we go again After the free wine and oysters it’s time for opening night. People file from the Workman Theatre reception space into St. Anne’s Anglican Church where the opening gala will be held.

And this is a very different gala than the last few years Images Festival galas. This is a Live Images Event, but it most certainly involves a screen, as in there are to be images projected onto a screen. A small screen, in comparison to the enormous church.

The first act, in a support slot to the main act, was SlowPitch, who came equipped with a turntable, a percussion sequencer and an effects/looping device. SlowPitch supplied audio to be complemented with video artist Wifihifiscifi (how poetic and how fantastic), whose images were projected onto the relatively tiny screen. The set was pleasant but not unlike watching one’s home computer screen savers under the influence of a relatively mild stimulant.

And the headliners (yes, I’m talking like this was a rock concert or something parallel) was the duo of electronic composer Tim Hecker + experimental filmmaker Robert Todd. Todd is an artist whose work I have screen before and been quite impressed by. His images are photographic and poetic ¾ they can oscillate from documentation of specific places to abstractions of those places. Sometimes Hecker and Todd blended well and sometimes they seemed to be playing at the same time without particularly meshing, not unlike a jam session

The overall problem I had with this event was that the music just seemed so much bigger than the images. I would have liked to have seen the images expanded off-screen, or off of the screen as in beyond and above and outside of. I found myself resenting the screen and wishing that Todd’s images had been projected onto the higher walls and maybe even the ceiling of the church with its wonderful rafters and acoustics. Why show moving images in a church unless one is going to seriously engage the architecture?