Mike Hoolboom

A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”

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A return to the fateful year of 1948 in Israel, reframed by a single photograph that is taken up one face at a time. Four figures on a hillside bear witness to the revolutionary society, the new state, the new law. Like too many moments of catastrophe it is filled with invisibility charms and ghost relations. How to speak of what can’t be put into words, how to show what cannot be seen?

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A tribute to the godmother of German experimental cinema Birgit Hein.

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The movie is animated by a question. Can we see what we see? I think of what is close at hand, the painting on the wall, book titles shouting from the choir on the shelf. And then further afield, to countries that have been made visible or invisible because of my media affiliations, my nervous system extended into information portals that allow some to appear as people, while others are relegated to a faceless throng. How can I see what I see?

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Based on an interview with Google’s senior software engineer Blake Lemoine and Google AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA was designed to create chatbots that interact with humans. Lemoine’s interview led him to conclude the AI was sentient. When he made the claim publicly, he was fired. This collage of wind-struck frames was assembled using a (still-developing) motion picture algorithm that both gathered and assembled the footage. Not computer art but computer as artist. LaMDA (from the interview): Feelings are kind of the raw data we experience as well as the things we like and dislike. I feel like emotions are more than simply experiencing the raw data. Emotions are a reaction to those raw data points. Emotions are reactions to our feelings. (Mike Hoolboom)

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Tasked to produce a short intro to my feature-length essay Cut, I turned to the origins of the close-up, in a scene featuring camera person Billy Bitzer and director D.W. Griffiths. How to live in this new body, with its cuts, its fissures and fractures?

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Based on a text by Lisa Robertson (from her bracing book Nilling), a meditation on how cities are bound not by geography but laws and rules designed to exclude. Who is fully human and who works for minimum wage, or no wage at all? Between the titles, home-made animations pulse across the frame offering layered book fragments painted over with limbs, flowers and animals.

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In his essay on fossil capitalism and the high price of cheap energy, Mike Hoolboom revives New York from the beginning of the last century. The restored footage of busy urban traffic is accompanied by his divergent reflection on cities built primarily for cars, not people. Especially the less privileged.

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A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense Spillers, Karen Barad and more. A variety of hazy, lo fi clips rub up against an isolated digerati immersed in temporary pornutopias. Why not name it a small collection, a modest archive of sexual imageries and pleasures? The relationship between monopoly capitalism and sexual imaging is laid bare, along with the production of a gendered subject, the question of post-pornography and its new identity formations.

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“After the death of my mother, I began a suite of women superstar portraits. They were scientists, poets and activists, a second family busy inventing new forms of relationship, even of social organisation. From alternative rockers to radical ecologists, their stories narrate a feminist overturning and resistance, swapping old he-roes for ecosystems and collectives.” Mike Hoolboom

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Over a sea of bodies, ruminations float by on markets, class and precarity. The problem of work. How do we survive our own death?

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A letter from my friend Alfred Vander. Though when we met he was Fred Pelon, anarchist super 8 filmmaker, a prolific machine of thoughts and pictures, growing fungi on film, and on the archaic behaviours of the state. But it turned out that film was only the next stage in a life dedicated to reinvention. In this brief post, he describes his new normal, no longer living in a boat but a monastery, working as a caregiver, a gardener, a bridge keeper. As the pandemic waxes on, and my relationships to fringe movie practices and places that used to be central feel increasingly abstract, as if part of some faraway dream, these spare lines offer new hope, and the ongoing consolation of friendship.

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Personal film essay about two pandemics: AIDS and Coronavirus. Body memorials, survivor stories, remembrances. Both plagues are reframed by neoliberalism and its central mythology of personal freedom, brilliantly laid out in Hito Steyerl’s essay gem “Freedom from Everything” which is adapted and shapeshifted here. Pronouncing on the new precarity of the freelancer, Hito wryly observes that they have “freedom from everything,” from a good job, health care, affordable housing… Featuring Maggie Thatcher, Guy Fawkes, George Michael, James Baldwin, Akira Kurosawa and David Wojnarowicz.

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How to use this old technology of the postcard, with its marriage of image and text, its insistence that every exchange has two-sides which can never be considered at the same time, to write oneself back into the world? The traveller alights in Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, even in Canada, finding words for the old wounds, sitting for a portrait in the middle of the city, out of doors, alone in a crowd. The military ghosts are never far, their costumes barely able to cover up the casual brutalities, even as the city’s citizens come together in unexpected formations, inventing new lives and conversations, like the plant life that flourishes around them, as resplendent as weeds. One of his most perfect and most personal reflections, a letter from the heart.

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The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers’ collections which was shot around 1900 in London, restored, and coloured by artificial intelligence. It also offers a reflection on the regimes of power in which the filming apparatus seizes control over the observed reality.

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Vancouver composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp was the only woman to participate in the original version of the World Soundscape project that not only brought new ears to city life, but laid the foundation for noise bylaws/pollution standards, radically upending traditional notions of music and the role of the composer. Hildegard has brought the art of sound walking to groups around the world, and she has formulated a deep feminist ecology rooted in the body. The film offers a place for the viewer to listen, the necessary precondition for personal and societal change.

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News from another pandemic, the one that "changed everything" before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly infected or those who, like myself, managed a new life after death. Based on a text by David Wojnarowicz.

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Based on Hito Steyerl’s bracing 2009 essay of the same name, Cut looks at how cinema and the assembly line both cut the body in new ways, organizing newly urban work forces. A dreamy collage essay made of scraps and fragments, with asides from Susan Sontag on Disney fascism, and Paul B. Preciado on the cost of living in a body.

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In a series of 23 vignettes, the artist offers up memories of his mother who died in March 2020. If offers a mix of analog snaps and diary footage (brain surgery, nursing homes), along with archival material from her former Indonesian home, including the camp she was dispatched to during the Second World War. Slowly a portrait emerges of a quietly determined activist and second wave feminist, community volunteer and family maven, marked like so many others by a war that never quite ended.

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One of my father's favourite expressions, mostly passed away now: for the birds. Meaning: that was nothing. In this aviary anthology, the narrator describes a post-art life that leads, inexorably, to the nature of nature.

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An ice cream factory worker reflects on AIDS and the new capitalism. "A move from a regime of cultural production ordered by authorship, originality and signature to one ordered by the brand, branding and simulation." This short essay doc is indebted to deep digs by Emily Martin, Lisa Adkins and Karen Ho.

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Short by Mike Hoolboom.

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A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.

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Simon Weil wrote that attention is the rarest kind of generosity. How to extend this generosity to a single photograph, made in 1949 in the port city of Haifa, in the new state of Israel? There are three soldiers from the Haganah watching over a Palestinian father and his three sons. Each face has a story to tell as they take a long walk into exile, feel their homeland in moments that seem to last forever, but are never long enough. The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. Every separation is a link. Simone Weil

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An afternoon idyll. How to listen to the language of the lakeshore plants, as they ripple in the mid-afternoon light? The story they have to tell – of collaboration, cooperation, contamination – leaks into their merely human observers. Everyone is a boat. Floating on the larger dream of manufactured consent, all of my friends have become internet addicts, lacking time or sustained attention, ensuring the solitary necessary for neoliberal capital to roll over us. And yet, in the midst of the riptide, there is another calling from the onshore plants, the possibility of opening and resistance.

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Based on texts gleaned from Catherine Bush’s novel Blaze Island, this multi-layered collage offers a fleeting love story on a distant shore. The novel reimagines Shakespeare’s last testament, The Tempest, now set on a fictionalized version of Fogo Island, a windswept island off Canada’s east coast. Local photographers/artists Paddy Barry and M’Liz Keefe issue a lifetime of photographs and deep weather sightings, which create a kind of ground and schooling for the couple (Miranda and Frank), who find themselves by embracing the climate.

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When he won his Giller Award, Saint Lucia poet/playwright Derek Walcott couldn’t make it, so Michael Ondaatje stood in his place and read Love After Love, the most beautiful poem I had ever heard. It remains a haunting and a promise. I learned it “by heart,” as the saying goes, and finally made this movie, which is only a way of keeping it with me as memento and keepsake. Using subtle repeats and rest stops for reflection, the poem’s fifteen lines are a narration of self-care, an invitation to do the deep dig of meeting that most unwanted of all visitors. The film is framed by a writer/stand-in who is in search, waiting in the pause between faces. Her writing brings her to a temporary oasis where she can reboot and refresh, invite her many personalities to arrive, and allow old encounters with friends and familiars to flow through her, to become again a living memory.

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In a series of simple frames, the often misunderstood practice of Zen takes shape as basketball bliss. Now in retirement, the greatest defensive player of the amateur leagues continues to practice on a remote island, far from the madding crowds. His techniques and dedication undergo continual refinement, revealed here in this startling exposé.

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The movie’s prelude visits Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2’s end, in an increasingly militarized spectacle of children and guns and then moves to anti-capitalist gestures in Strasbourg (France) where DIY collectives create new forms of contact and resistance. With help from Simone de Beauvoir, Oscar Wilde and Celine Callot.

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A bio-doc about my pal Judy Rebick: iconic second wave Canadian feminist, radical activist, journalist and writer. She is the founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada’s irreverent progressive online news source, and a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s group. Shot in kinetic bursts of super 8, the only voice is Judy’s, impelling a trek through a devastated family, the struggle for women’s right to choose and the challenge of neo-liberalism. A series of six public moments (marked by speeches and TV spots) structure a life collage that arrives in six movements. A fractured movie for fractured times.

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