Presented as part of Knot Project Space’s Video in the Public Sphere Speaker Series – a program of lectures that ran from October 2018 – April 2019. The series ran concurrently with a year-long public art commissioning program which culminated in the exhibition Knot Projections 2019: Imagining Publics featuring five large-scale outdoor video projections installed at four sites/surfaces throughout the city. The speaker series stimulated critical thinking during these commissions by bringing to Ottawa five national and international artists, curators and critics who were thinking through questions of publicness, site-specificity and civic engagement in their respective practices. Each delivered a talk in the project space and at times conducted follow-up seminars or workshops with the group of commissioned artists and other artists in the community. Each speaker also offered a reading list of texts related to their ongoing research.
Reconstructing Screen Experiments from Expo 67’s Archives
The ongoing research project that has become CINEMAexpo67, was partially born of a simple desire to see some Expo 67 multiscreen and large format films in something resembling their original viewing formats. This presentation briefly introduced Expo 67 and some of the key spectacular film installations, and discussed some of the digital simulations that we’ve worked on alongside the original filmmakers, and archivists from the Cinémathèque québécoise, Library and Archives Canada, and the Ville de Montréal since 2005. In this, the talk considered the various possibilities of re-animating and activating “difficult” archival materials for new publics, including the technical complexity and ethical challenges of these amazing screen experiments from the 1960s.
Monika Kin Gagnon
Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies and a Concordia University Research Fellow in 2017–2018. She has published widely on cultural politics and the visual / media arts since the 1980s. Her book publications include Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002) with Richard Fung; and with Janine Marchessault, Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014). She is co-curator of the 2017 group exhibition In Search of Expo 67 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal with Lesley Johnstone, which extended her ongoing research into the original Expo 67 large format and multi-screen films with the research group CINEMAexpo67.ca. Current projects include Expo 67 Brouillements numériques, an experiment exploring the potentials of augmented reality for the Expo 67 islands and its scattered archives.