The Angler: Royal City Robots Make Art

If you haven’t been to the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, hie thee to the SkyTrain and boot it out to the Royal City. The Gallery, curated by Sarah Joyce and Gordon Duggan, presents some of the most startling and brilliantly conceived exhibitions this side of the Tate Gallery in London Towne. The programming is driven by inventive, wild, and beautifully executed thematic concepts, ranging from bodies (Corpus) to surveillance culture (Witness). Every time I visit I feel slightly giddy, and the new show Trace is no exception to these gleeful feelings. Trace includes four works from six different artists including Patrick Tresset (London/Paris), Arnauld Colcomb and Bertrand Planes (Paris), Gregory Chatonsky (Montreal/Paris), and So Kanno and yang02 (Tokyo/Berlin). To use a hoary old phrase, these artists are world class, and the opportunity to see their work in New Westminster is kind of insanely wonderful. Housed next to the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame in the Anvil Centre, the gallery might not be as visible as some other spaces (the magnificent new Polygon), but the degree of thought, care and exceptional execution is astounding. I know I am frothing at the mouth, but really this is a treasure, and it’s only a gentle breezy trip on the SkyTrain away.

Each of the respective works in Trace is united by the innately human impulse to reinterpret reality. The description for the show states: “…Over time we have developed technologies to make interpretive marks through systems such as drawing media, perspective, printing, code. As we develop deeper understandings of these technologies we increasingly merge with them. This exhibition speaks to the complex relationships developing between makers and technologies and looks at the marks we leave.”

It’s a bit of a strange compulsion, this need for expression that we’ve passed along to multiple forms of technology. But what is reflected is even more startling. In the warp and weft of programming emerges a portrait of humanity, in all its capricious, perverse and trouble-making ways.

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, a young hipster in a watch cap is sitting perfectly still while a bunch of robots all named Paul carefully look and then sketch him from different angles. Patrick Tresset’s work Human Study #1, 5RNP consists of five robots, each mounted on an old-fashioned school desk, programmed to look and draw a portrait of a human model. Tresset has taught the robots to sketch, incorporating his own human quirks into their behaviour.

The resulting drawings are all oddly different, but it is the experience of watching the robots at work that is the most fascinating part of the piece, as they cock their camera eyes, bend and dip, to look and then draw on paper a human face. A young woman, sitting for her portrait, says: “This one seems really judgmental,” pointing at a robot in the middle of the pack. The accused Paul stares flatly back, as if to say, “Come at me, human…” Luckily, there is no human versus technology smack down. As the young woman collects her drawings to document them, before they are displayed on the walls of the gallery, it made me think that people have very curious reactions to robots. I ask Sarah Joyce about the response from different audiences, and she says kids are somewhat blasé, whereas adult folk are still dazzled by the notion of computer sentience.

In another room, a tangle of robots is hard at work, making a wall-sized portrait in CMYK of artists So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi, who are pictured on the opposite wall. The final image will take 63 days to be completed, but at this early juncture it’s a tangle of lines and dots, and occasional splodges of colour where a fight has broken out. As Joyce explains sometimes there is conflict, and as even as she says this, an angry red light comes on, as one mechanical entity yanks hard on the cord of another.

Robots — they fight, they judge, and sometimes they lie. In one of the most fascinating pieces entitled Deep, artist Gregory Chatonsky has lied to a computer. Chatonsky has fed false information about his own work as well as textbook information about how to draw into a computer’s software. This computer infected with human duplicity, in turn lies to another computer, which struggles to contend with the misinformation and replicate the data it is being given. The images, displayed on three screens, sometimes look like brain cells, other times like pubic hair. It is not an exaggeration to say that you can feel the frustration coming off the computer screens. Pity these poor logical entities, forced to contend with the hard-wired human need to mess things up, just to see what happens.

A similar disruptive streak runs through Arnauld Colcomb and Betrand Plane’s work Modulateur-Démodulateur, which consists of a hand-built transmitter and receiver that teleports, via sound data, an image from one wall to another. Watching it at work rasterizing a portrait of Queen Victoria (chosen by the artists in tribute to the history of New Westminster), I was reminded of the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Mike Teavee is transported into television world. Like WonkaVision, things do not always go right. To demonstrate, Sarah Joyce lets out a whoop and Queen Victoria’s cheek suddenly takes on a weird distorted bulge. The fragility of data in transit is easy to mess with, and the resultant Royal portrait begins to resemble a melted wax candle.

So, what are we to take away from this collection of work, other than our need to anthropomorphize wheels, gears and circuits, to imbue them with emotion, intention, soul even. Perhaps just that. The contrary and mischief-making nature of our monkey minds comes floating back to us. In all the portraits hung on the wall, a certain kind of vulnerability comes through, filtered and distorted, but still recognizable. I felt an odd sense of protectiveness, tenderness even, looking at them. In some of the drawings from Human Study #1, 5RNP, the robots lose their tiny minds, and begin drawing weird random patterns and odd abstract shapes. It is these images, in all their questing confusion, that seem most profoundly human.

The exhibition runs until July 1, and you can make a date to sit for a portrait with the computer Pauls here. Just don’t pick a fight with that surly one in the middle, he’ll poke your eyes out.

A bed of documentary

Occasionally, I feel like I have seen a documentary on almost everything in the world. And still they come, barrels of films, tumbling out like a pack of puppies, licky, bitey, snappy, and occasionally cuddlesome. As the senior festival adviser for DOXA Documentary Film Festival, I had a gentle hand in helping to select some of the films in this year’s DOXA program.

There are films to suit every taste and area of interest. Do you like old-time roller-skating? Here you go! How about Finnish punk bands? In amongst such abundance of roly-poly goodness, the immediate question is how to choose. Really, it depends on how you’re feeling, or maybe how you want to feel? In the mood for righteous fury, quiet introspection, or just want to bop along to a world of music, there is a film for that .

If you would like a full-on immersion in fake news and all that it portends, then get your tickets for Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President. The film looks at the U.S. election through the lens of the Russian propaganda machine. There is little in the way of independent media left in the Motherland. Journalists have a way of getting tossed off balconies or randomly slipping off things. The remaining writers and broadcasters have rolled over and let Putin climb on top of them. None are quite as terrifying as Dmitry Kiselyov, the anchor for RT Russia Today, or Margarita Simonyan, complete with major cleavage and a stare that could melt glass. The film is a compendium of news footage, as well as scenes of ordinary Russian folk, singing and drinking and toasting the news of Trump’s election victory. One of the most shocking things captured here is the raw strain of misogyny that runs like a sewer through so much of the coverage. The Russian media’s depiction of Hilary Clinton paints her as a Machiavellian monster, riddled with lesions and filled with evil intent. She is variously accused of murdering her opponents and plotting the downfall of traditional masculinity. The lionization of Donald Trump seems largely prompted by the notion of anyone but a woman. It is a sentiment that is insidiously creeping into U.S. media, if the tizzy over comedian Michelle Wolf’s speech at the White House Correspondent’s dinner is any indication. The temerity of Ms. Wolf speaking truth to big dumb bloated power was like a prick heard round the world. POP! When everyone’s head exploded, but Ms. Wolf stuck to her weapon of choice — hard, sharp, needling truth.

Our New President is a horrifying reminder of what happens when a free and feisty media doesn’t exist any longer. So support your local independent journalists, or you wake up one day to find yourself getting Trumped and Putined in a gang-bang from hell.

Truth is a funny thing. I mean that quite literally. Many of the films in DOXA this year use truth and humour like a double-edged blade, a Swiss army knife to get you through disappointment and grief. A supremely entertaining case study of this is Brent Hodge’s film Freaks and Geeks: The Documentary.

Like a lot of folk, I never watched Freaks and Geeks when it was actually on television. I only came to it much later, after a friend sent me a bunch of links. I powered through every single episode in a heated rush. The show’s failure and subsequent resurrection is a singular reminder that love endures, and truth is reborn — ecclesiastically and ecstatically — when it is shared. Director Hodge reassembles the show’s original cast to talk about the birth, death and re-ascension of the show. As cast and creators talk about their experiences, one of the things that gently bops on you in the nose is that some of the most beloved episodes were based on true stories. In putting together the show, creators Judd Apatow and Paul Feig asked the writers to fill out a detailed questionnaire about their experiences in high school — who they loved, who they hated, most embarrassing moments. These details, plucked whole and squirming, were plopped into the middle of certain episodes, giving the show a tang and sear that only comes from reality. For hardcore fans the words “Parisian Night Suit” will bring on agony and ecstasy in equal measure.

Truth is a pungent thing, you take one sniff and immediately know it for what it is. Which brings me to one very special section in DOXA. Now in its fourth edition, French French is a program dedicated to the work of Alain Cavalier. Cavalier, awarded the Master of the Real at the Visions du rèel Festival, is little known outside of Europe. His career and his work are idiosyncratic, curious, intimate, but more than that, this is a filmmaker, willing to dig deep into the human soul and document what he finds there.

Cavalier captured my heart a few years back with his film Le Paradis. But it was another film about him and his work that was even more intimately revealing. Jean-Pierre’s Limosin’s film Alain Cavalier, 7 chapitres, 5 jours, 2 pièces-cuisine, which roughly translates as 7 Chapters, 5 Days, 2 rooms with a Kitchen, was made as part of Arte’s legendary television series Cinéma, de notre temps. The film documents Cavalier in his apartment over a period of five days, talking about his childhood, his first experiences with cinema, as well his early work with the likes of Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Catherine Deneuve. It is a simple conceit. The camera focuses on his hands, as they touch, trace and fiddle with various objects, and then on his face, thick glasses, flop of hair, and insistent, passionate manner, with words tumbling over each other, stammering and fevered with desire to communicate.

When I first saw this film, every nerve ending snapped to attention, like an electric current had been passed through me. I’m not sure what to call it, except what Simone Weil once described as: “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That is the most exact encapsulation of what Cavalier’s work is about: someone who is paying close pure attention, like a lover, to the details of people — their hands, their faces, the curve of a pregnant woman’s belly, the winged flight of an eyebrow.

The selection of films at DOXA includes some of Cavalier’s original documentary portraits, made more than 30 years ago, but fresh and bright and alive as flowers. The first series of portraits examined the working lives of older women — florist, washroom attendant and seamstress, and the new series Portraits XL trace the lives of different friends of the filmmaker over the course of many years. Collectively, they are complete immersions in the reality of another person.

As Cavalier recounts in his own cinematic portrait, when he gets on the Metro in Paris, he is drawn to looking at human faces, but sometimes he has to shut his eyes to escape the sheer deluge of it all. I think about this every time I get on the SkyTrain, and look at people’s faces, like petals, each one is different, each one unique. Assembled, they make a garden.

DOXA Documentary Film Festival runs until Sunday May 13 at different venues across Vancouver.

Getting bombed

The final event in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Bombhead exhibition ATOMIC Study: Nuclear Sublime, presented in partnership with Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society, is a series of films including Bonnie Devine and Rebecca Garrett’s Rooster Rock — The Story of Serpent River, Pierre Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask), Bruce Conner’s Looking for Mushrooms, Erin Siddall’s The Pen, and Jesse Andrewartha’s new documentary Photography & Radiation, as well as a selection of Andrewartha’s autoradiograms in the lobby of the Cinematheque. The screening takes place Tuesday May 15 at 7 p.m. Do you want even more? You are so greedy!

Music for a Night in May takes place Friday May 4 at 7:30 p.m. at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. Featuring Colin Browne’s poetry set against the music of Alfredo Santa Ana, the show is about the longing for spring after a long dark winter. Consisting of three different compositions that trace a point of origin, both elemental and translated through memory, music and language. It is appropriate not only for this seasonal moment, but hopefully in the bigger, wider picture, as well.

Truth has a way of snagging your attention like a barbed hook that pulls you out of the water into some new atmosphere. The experience, albeit disconcerting, is far from painful. Rather, it opens up an opportunity for joy to rush, like a wave of pure oxygen. Breathe it in.