Scratch no 30
Series of 31 short loops scratched directly on 16mm black leader, posted on my Facebook account, two to four every week between May and June 2016. A film resulted from the series (Scratch), premiered at Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal. There is also a video installation based on those loops that was first presented at Centre Clark in Montreal in January and February 2017. Those animations were the first step in my return to scratching on film after fifteen years of interruption. This project emerged as a follow up of a frame by frame study I did of the web of flickers in Norman McLaren’s film Blinkity Blank, while a was preparing for the Rolling over Blinkity Blank performance. In the course of this study came the idea of working toward a polyphony of flickers. Those gif’s were the fist steps in this experimental project that will carry on in different forms (gif’s, films, installations, performances). I did not wish to develop this research with a reference to McLaren’s quite decorative graphic style. I rather wished to refer to the much coarser work of Len Lye in Free Radicals and Particles in Space. So the Scratch project is an effort to unite my two early masters.