The Interstitial Zone 1997
The video is documentation of The Interstitial Zone, which was a three-screen 16mm installation. It was presented in seven different outdoor locations in Toronto over the course of a week, and indoors as part of an exhibition by Neutral Ground Gallery in Regina.
The project grew out of the experiences of seeing a Bill Viola exhibition at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 16mm film loop installations by Wyn Geleynse and George Bures Miller in Regina, and having the NFB laboratory simultaneously project several thousand feet of rushes from (stories from) The Land of Cain on four projectors.
The film started with an image filmed for (stories from) The Land of Cain – walking through a forest in autumn, with a macro lens on the camera held close to the ground. I really liked the shot but it didn’t make it into Cain, and when I started to think of an installation, it was the starting point.
The goal for The Interstitial Zone was to use film loops to create a three-screen installation. Each loop had one unique shot (earth, sky, water) and one shared shot (a Super 8mm shot by my mother as we drove across the Mackinac Bridge). The loops were each of different lengths, so the cycle of images kept evolving. The Super 8mm shot broken up over three loops,would sync up occasionally.
I had borrowed a 16mm film loop device in Montreal and brought it to Toronto when I moved in 1995. One day, there was a knock on the door and there was George Bures Miller, looking for his film loop device. I commissioned artist Simone Jones to make me three film loop devices for my installation. I think the original design may have been Wyn Geleynse.
In Toronto, I looked for interstitial places to set up the screens, land somewhere between nature and urban decay. A phone hot line announced where the installation would take place that day, though most people who encountered it weren’t looking for it. I hired artist Steve Topping to help me set up the screens, projectors, and generator.
Apart from getting food poisoning from a dodgy schnitzel on the first day, that week of setting up the screens and projectors in different parts of Toronto and chatting with the people who came across them remains among my favourite creative experiences.
I wrote a story for the LIFT newsletter, which is included below:
THE INTERSTITIAL ZONE DIARY
By Mark Wihak
Published in the LIFT newsletter 1997
BATHURST & CARR: I’ve got food poisoning, that dodgy chicken schnitzel. As we’re setting up the projectors I have to race to the line of bushes that border this huge vacant lot and puke. That happens a couple more times before the night ends, but we manage to get the screens up, the projectors in place and the generator humming. I feel weak but exhilarated, the images splashing across the screens as night falls.
A couple who live under plastic at the back of the lot come to ask us what we’re doing, then settle in to watch the show. Passing streetcars give their passengers a fleeting glance. A man who lives in the co-op across the street gives me a book of his poetry. I’m feeling too ill to make much conversation.
The Interstitial Zone was a (roving) film-based installation. It consisted of three 16mm film loops projected on three screens that temporarily occupied various vacant spaces around Toronto. I was looking for new ways to work with film as a medium and to reach an audience outside of the usual circuit of film festivals and broadcasters. I wanted the viewer to be able to lose themselves in the experience. Rather than watching the film from a fixed position as in a traditional film screening, I hoped the spectators would move around the viewing environment, to step back and encompass the three screens, to press forward to the point where the image blurs, to explore the viewing spaces on either side of the translucent screens.
BLOOR & DUFFERIN: We’re in my neighbourhood now, set up in a lot filled with rag weed bordered by the library and an apartment building. The streetlights are bleaching out a portion of the screens, but that doesn’t quite account for the stream of cars and pedestrians that pass by and don’t even glance at this…thing. A neighbourhood of the decidedly uncurious. I forge theories to tie this lack of curiosity in with my neighbourhood’s lack of a decent cafe to hang out in.
The first film-based installation I had seen was by the London, Ontario based artist Wyn Geleynse in a show at Regina’s Dunlop Gallery. Geleynse’s film loops functioned within the context of sculptural pieces, the projected image playing across the surface of a three-dimensional object in a Sisyphean cycle of action. In the fall of 1993 I encountered the work of the American video artist Bill Viola at Montreal’s Musee d’Art Contemporain. The show brought together a number of his works, from video tapes screened on conventional monitors to large installations that placed the spectator at the epicentre of a swirling mass of image and sound. Viola’s work in Montreal and a subsequent viewing of another Viola installation at Toronto’s Ydessa Hendles Gallery along with Gary Hill’s thoroughly intimate video installation, Tall Ships, opened my eyes to the possibilities of creating unique environments for moving images.
Later that year the N.F.B. lab screened the rushes from my film, (stories from) The Land of Cain , some 8000’ , simultaneously using four projectors. My eyes jumped from screen to screen, pulling back to encompass the four, zooming in on a detail, making loose connections, finding visual and thematic threads in the random order of the images. It was a thrilling visual experience. These encounters led to the realisation that the exhibition of images could be as important a creative realm as their production.
GEARY AVENUE: We’ve set up in a patch of land that runs parallel to the railroad tracks north of Dupont. I’ve been writing a script about a young woman who meets God in an electrical transmission field, so tonight we set the central screen beneath the base of one of the hydro electric towers that march across the corridor. A few people from the neighbourhood wander over. The kids are disappointed that the movie we’re showing isn’t The Terminator. A couple of friends stop in to see it, with them is Mort Ransen, director of Margaret’s Museum. That was kind of odd. I crouch in the tall grass watching the loops cycle through as long freight trains pass by.
Some film shot during (stories from) The Land of Cain led me into the specifics of The Interstitial Zone. I’d wandered along the mountain in Montreal with a macro lens strapped onto an Arri-S. I found the resulting footage hypnotic, a blurred unfolding of yellows and greens and browns, with occasional moments of startling clarity as a razor-edged maple leaf passes through the frame. As much as I loved the footage I couldn’t work it into the Cain film, but I began to see it as its own piece, as a cycle repeating. From that shot came the rest of The Interstitial Zone, a growing idea to examine cycles of nature, day following night following day, evaporation and condensation, fallsummerwinterspringfall, and how our western idea of time as a progressive, linear concept was at odds with these natural cycles. The Interstitial Zone would be the point where these two systems meet.
CHERRY STREET: We’re in one of my favourite rambling spots in the city, just to the south of the Canary Restaurant. A full moon rises over the abandoned meat packing plant as we set the projectors rolling and the western sky is full of skyscrapers lit by the last rays of falling sunlight. A fox cuts across the patch of gravel the screens stand in and disappears into the tall grass. Steve tells me about the toxicity of the soil which makes this large parcel of vacant land just east of downtown too expensive to redevelop. A security guard stops by but leaves us alone when we tell him what we’re doing.
The installation evolved into three separate loops. Each loop contained its own unique image and a second image that it shared with the other loops. The three unique images were the shot from the forest floor on Mount Royal, a shot of the St. Laurent flowing underneath a bridge and shots of clouds passing overhead. These three images all consisted of relentless vertical movement, the images plunging down the screens. The fourth, shared image was re-photographed from 8mm film shot by my mother during one of our family’s cross Canada trips. She shot from a car window as it passes over a long bridge across a body of water. At the head and tail of the shot, a blurred human figure appears. The three loops of The Interstitial Zone were each a different length, so the relationships amongst the loops were in constant evolution. The shared shot, a horizontal movement broken up over the three loops, interrupting the vertical flow, would occasionally sync up in a moment of unsustainable closure.
LAKESHORE BLVD & PALACE PIER RD: We’ve found a spot on the motel strip just west of where the Humber River enters Lake Ontario, a crumbling pad of concrete already thick with vegetation. From here we can see (and be seen by?) the QEW, the rail line, Lakeshore Blvd, the high-rise condos just to the east and the lake. Steve arranges the screens in a semi circle. Only one person stops by tonight, Dave Stewart, a high school schoolmate who cycles out to see us, but the location is so beautiful and the arrangement of the screens so satisfying I’m only a little disappointed not more people are around to share it.
The Interstitial Zone was initially devised to be a static installation. It was in that form that it had its first run, occupying the site of a bankrupted jewelry store in downtown Regina with the collaboration of Neutral Ground Gallery. I had planned to present the piece in a similar environment in Toronto but after a fruitless year of searching for a space and a landlord who would agree to rent it to me, I realised that a new strategy was called for.
I was reluctant to consider an open-air installation because of the technical difficulties I thought that might present. Apart from being at the mercy of the weather, there would be the need for things like a generator and a vehicle to transport the installation in. However, faced with no other alternative, I made the decision to present it as an open-air installation and in that instant the piece opened up for me in an unanticipated fashion.
I realised as a mobile, open-air installation The Interstitial Zone could begin to address with greater clarity its themes of the natural and human worlds. The piece could appear in sites in transition from culture to nature, abandoned spaces once occupied by commercial, industrial or residential buildings, now covered in a carpet of wildflowers and rag weed; the natural world reclaiming these sites that humans had (temporarily) vacated.
WELLESLEY ST. & BLEEKER: The pagan tendencies that have begun to filter into this find full flower tonight as we circle the screens around a splendid tree and children come out from the surrounding towers of St. James Town to dance in the light of the projectors. A horde of security guards in training stop to confirm that we’re not on any of the property they’re paid to secure.
Simone Jones constructed the elegant loop devices and I enlisted Steve Topping to help me run the mobile installation. Steve had experience with mobile film loops, having done a series out of the back of a U-Haul trailer that he parked at various spots around town. I created an Interstitial Zone Hotline that could be called to find out the location of that evening’s installation.
The Hotline averaged about ten calls a night. Of the hundreds of people who encountered the installation, perhaps 5% were actively seeking it. The balance came upon it by chance, a fortuitous encounter that is one of the real pleasures of urban living. Most who saw the installation would pause for a few moments, trying to make sense of this apparition in their local vacant lot. A few would approach and ask questions such as “what is it?” and “why are you doing this?”. And some would join us for a while, watching the loops cycle through, quiet murmurs of delight mingling in the night air with the sliding clicks of the crickets and the hum of traffic as the three sections of the horizontal shot (temporarily) synchronised.
QUEEN ST. WEST: A light drizzle begins to fall as we set the projectors running so Steve and I rig little shelters for them out of cardboard and gobo arms that end up looking like something out of Gilligan’s Island. The street is buzzing tonight as two nearby galleries have openings and a constant stream of people churn up the mud in the epicentre of the installation as the rain softly diffuses the projected light playing across the screens.
The Interstitial Zone was presented with the financial assistance of The Ontario Arts Council and the technical assistance of Simone Jones, Marian Wihak, Cara Morton, Bob Andersen, Deirdre Logue, The Factory Theatre, L.I.F.T. and Steve Topping.
