Now Available: Multiple Works by Kirk Tougas

Posted January 22nd, 2021 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events

Canyon welcomes Kirk Tougas, noted experimental film artist, director of photography, producer, director, curator, and founder of Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque to the collection.

With over 250 professional credits, Tougas is recognized as one of Canada’s pre-eminent feature documentary cinematographers. Representing many cultural, anthropological, social, and political themes, these films have been broadcast on every major network and have garnered more than 80 festival awards, including Emmy and Peabody awards, and 13 awards and nominations from the Canadian Academy of Cinema.

Creator of numerous experimental films, Tougas has been variously described as a structural or conceptual artist. His experimental and personal films have broadly pursued three themes: the inherent nature of the film medium (and later the digital video medium) and its message; portraiture and self-imaging as a human phenomenon from cave walls to the Selfie; and the poetics of a medium composed of image, sound and time. He is best known for the politics of perception (1973) and the framing of perception (1973), which along with his other works have been distinguished with screenings and installations in many countries, museums, universities, art schools, art galleries, and film festivals.

Canyon is delighted to announce multiple works by Tougas now available for distribution. Recently remastered and restored, the politics of perception and the framing of perception can be rented separately or as a single work. Letters from Vancouver is comprised of these two films that were made at the same time and that share a common interest in the film medium itself. Together these works form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, information and culture, meaning, and representation.

Also available is Tougas’s 2018 work ARTIFACT (circa 2006) which explores digital loss and media archaeology. Tougas asks us to: “Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost.” (KT)

In addition, Tougas’s digital video the medium is the message (2020, 4 min) is also now in distribution at Canyon:

An age of numerology
communication: numbers
digits: representation
algorithums: codecs
compression: bitrot: memory
What message?

The future is the present