"The eye stops at the screen.

It is sheer fantasy to suppose that the mind can be equally obliging.”

–Sidney Peterson

In this workshop, the variously dimensioned spaces in the trajectory between the spectator and projected image, through lamplight, will be rediscovered as boundaries where work can be made. What is typically misunderstood as a conduit for narrative pathways will become the subject of a new relationship between the eye and the mechanical counterparts of cinema. Beginning with simple protocinematic devices like the phenakistascope, we will re-examine the limits from which stroboscopic experience yield a moving image.

After having re-invented the wheel, participants will cross the threshold leading to the 16mm projector. Beginning with the two dimensional emulsive film frame, participants will shift the line of light contained in the projector housing to experiment with how it behaves in the dimensions of the room. Meanwhile, the optical soundtrack will be offered as another path of entry into the dimensional space of a theatre.

The workshop, then, will explore the roots of cinematic experience as well as a theatrical enfilade for deliberate obstructions. Like the polar explorer whose destination lies where a directing compass indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike, these seminars will offer an imaginary wilderness in which to lose one’s own bearing in contingent tracts of intermittent light and concomitant sound. Stress will be given to the immediacy of possibility. Technological prerequisites will be de-emphasized in favour of physiological experience.

WORKING THE ROOM
12 + 13 December 2009, 10am-5pm
Cineworks Studio [1131 Howe, back lane entrance]
Cost is $75 for members / $125 for non-members

Registration: Please contact Leanne at info(at)cineworks.ca or 604.685.3841.

Registration Deadline: 09 December

Instructor: Since 1996, BRUCE MCCLURE has worked almost exclusively with specially adapted 16mm projectors modified and adorned to exploit their sound and light capabilities, creating physiological impacts on theater audiences.  His projector performances have been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Image Forum, and the Performa Biennial.