UTOPIA SUITE DISCO: Opening Reception and Big Disco Party
A presentation of WNDX and PLATFORM
Admission is free and all are welcome!
Writer, filmmaker (Trains of Winnipeg), vernacular philosopher, and visual artist, Clive Holden has fashioned a utopia machine entitled Utopia Suite – a ‘suite’ of short stories and quasi-fictional essays, short films, cinema-based art installations, visual music, photobooklets, and utopian lectures to launch on Friday June 5 at 8 pm at PLATFORM, across the hall from Cinematheque..
Utopia Suite is a multi-year project begun with two launch events in spring, 2006, in Toronto at Images Festival, and in Amsterdam in a co-presentation by the Holland Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
The core conceit at the heart of Utopia Suite is that hope (utopianism) begets movement (cinema) which begets hope, and so on, creating positive cycles. The utopian space created by the project, and the utopian conversation the project foments, are considered to be very much a part of the art of the project. A central area of exploration in Utopia Suite is the relationship between still and moving images, and especially their cultures and conventions. In a time of rapid change with many new lenses and therefore new perspectives, what can each culture learn from the other ?
Clive Holden’s main Utopia Suite project collaborator is Rotterdam-based composer Oscar van Dillen. Their work together focuses on another formal goal of the project: to experiment with cinema as music, to hear moving images as much as see them and to learn more about film’s next phase thru music. This incredibly imaginative film/video installation comments on and challenges the notion of utopia. Come and take the trip!
Utopia Hall of Fame
We want you to remember your lost utopian visions, hope-reviving epiphanies, shelved epic-heroic novel manuscripts, or dusty drawer brilliant blueprints.
And while you’re doing that, you can fill-in our Y.O.U. questionnaire to tell us who you’d have in your Utopia Hall of Fame.
Check this out at you.utopiasuite.com