Blocks Recording Club’s “Projected Lights” DVD

Issued as a limited edition of 200, the DVD is curated by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas, who’s done a bunch of work coordinating and curating Toronto projection artists in the past and has been involved in the Free Drawings series of events and newspapers at XPACE, as well as with Wavelength at Sneaky Dee’s. I have a total soft spot for all sorts of projection-based performance work, especially when it’s set to or based on music, so a lot of the pieces I’d seen before either in person or through its documentation. That said, seeing totally clean versions of things like Steph Comilang and Jamie Shannon’s music video for Final Fantasy’s “This Lamb Sells Condos” (which I’ve played into the ground on youtube) was still a total pleasure, as was having such a neat and concise history of recent projection performances in Toronto in one place.

But, as is the case whenever you’re trying to compile documentation of often ephemeral and fleeting live events, there’s a huge disparity between the quality of the videos on the disc, and between their live performance and the video documentation’s ability to successfully convey the original presentation. The DVD opens, for instance, with grainy and background-noise heavy footage of Steph Comilang’s first ever projection performance. Although I love Comilang’s delicate and incredibly whimsical projection pieces, they are most magical when you’re standing right in front of her overhead projector and their subtle gradations of light and darkness don’t translate well onto video.

This lack of successful translation is then made all the more apparent when Comilang’s piece is followed by an incredibly slick and carefully-edited video of Shary Boyle animating Dolly Parton’s song “Me and Little Andy.” While Comilang’s projection was stifled with background chatter, Boyle’s is eerily quiet, as though she’s performing the live drawing to an empty room.

Other pieces, like the video of the Singing Saws, General Chaos and Skateboarders Sandy Plotnikov, Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman performing at the Projection Expo, make the original event look like it was chaotic and a lot of fun, but without any background context leave the DVD viewer wondering what exactly is going on.

There are a couple of gems on the disc, though, that translate well to video and that I would never have seen without Projected Lights‘ existence. Jamie Shannon’s Mr. Wooka puppet show, for instance, is a surreal projection/muppet extravaganza that highlights the dark underside we all knew was lurking beneath Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock. Meanwhile, Jordan Somers’ performance, where he burns and melts sections of a found super8 film by slowing down the projection speed so the bulb overheats the celluloid along to Sandro Perri‘s beautiful live music, is gorgeous and not-to-be-missed.