Imagine yourself as a teenager, hanging out in your mom’s basement amongst ratty sofas, wood panelling, and the smell of laundry detergent. You are in the prime of your girl-free, geek-lovin’ youth, and you are about to enjoy four hours of video games and Star Wars pissing contests with your three as-equally-enthused buddies. Do you remember that flush in your cheek when Princess Leia jumps around in a bikini? Do you remember the burn in your mouth from too many salt-and-vinegar chips? How about the sore throat after singing falsetto along with Iron Maiden while standing on the couch for too long?
Dude, you have just relived Toronto-based Tasman Richardson’s world of the “basement boy,” to which he has dedicated his video art masterpiece, “Basement Boy Hardcore”.
Self-described as “a semi-autobiographical self-marginalizing identity based investigation of North American geek culture cross-pollinated with breakbeat hardcore,” this dvd is a hypnotic collection of short videos that explore different icons in western geekdom. These icons include things like Star Wars, Black Sabbath, ninjas, and the well-loved shoot ‘em up videogames from our youth. What makes this video collection so amazing is Richardson’s unique editing technique – by treating the audio and visual elements of video as an organic whole, he manages to compose driving hardcore beats as he cuts and pastes each frame together. The result is a frenetic, startling audio/visual experience created out of familiar images from our hormonal youth.
I learned more about Richardson and his work after talking to him between his trips abroad:
ST: What is your training?
TR: I majored in New Media for four years at OCAD and graduated in 1996.
ST: Tell me more about your crazy-ass editing-for-sound technique. How did you develop it? What are the ups and downs that you’ve experience in using this type of editing style?
TR: The technique is a progression from the literary cutups of Bryan Gysin and William Buroughs but it’s also influenced by more recent works by Coldcut. I was working on these old AB roll decks which are just tape rolling back and forth, so you can imagine how impossible it was to be precise with cuts this fast or small (1/30 of a second). It was all just cut and paste or pause and record if you know what I mean, but then along came digital non-linear editing in the form of a very crappy early incarnation called “Perception” for PC and before you knew it I had churned out five new videos, all of them in the style that I’d been wanting to express. After all this time, it’s still those first five that are the clearest primitive break way from standard practice.
The technique is not so much about editing for sound as it is editing for symbolism and immediacy on all levels. I mean, yes, I listen to a clip and think ‘that sounds good’ but it needs to look good and if I freeze frame, it needs to have a strong composition. Each clip needs to visualize AND auralize something significant. Then when they all play together you get harmonies of information instead of noise.
ST: Tell me more about your collective, www.famefame.com. How did you guys get involved with each other? What are the benefits/drawbacks?
TR: FAMEFAME was born out of an earlier collective called JAWA. That’s a whole story in itself but I’ll cut it short. Jubal Brown and myself were already collaborating and I felt the need to take all my work in different mediums and place it under a banner… some kind of seal of approval or quality and that was FAMEFAME. It wasn’t officially founded until Josh Avery and Elenore Chesnutt started producing work that was complimentary to this goal. Then we drafted the manifesto, got our tattoos of loyalty and started the work.
Since then, we have a new member, Alana Didur. FAMEFAME is complex because in some ways it’s a parody of many recognizable institutions, a record label, an artist collective, a curatorial body, an events promoter, a design house, etc. We work with everything from vinyl records to kinetic sculpture, although our main concern lately has been video in the JAWA style or
the updated FAMEFAME style.
ST: What do you think of the Toronto arts scene? I am particularly interested in your thoughts, as you have had so much international exposure and can view the local scene with a more objective eye.
TR: This scene is very important because many cities don’t have anything like it. The artist-run side of things is very much in balance with the commercial. People may scoff at that but if you go to Paris of Tokyo you’ll feel crushed by the ridiculous demands of commercial venues and the impossible submissions process for getting noticed. There’s a lot of creative, underground sort of venue work being done in these places to counteract the commercial imbalance but that’s something we don’t have here, not to the same extreme. I didn’t appreciate that until recently but I’m really proud of it when I go anywhere outside of Canada. I’ve turned into this crazy nationalist canadiana pusher.
The biggest problem with Toronto now is that we have it so good and we don’t know it so instead of keeping the artist run culture sharp and raising standards, there’s a tendency, especially in video, to dumb it down as some kind of accessibility thing for the public. That’s bullshit and it’s sad because when you lower the standard it’s harder to raise it again later. It’s not bi-directional, you can’t just give it a try and see. Once you start showing kid-friendly anti-intellectual, 40 year old identity base work you’re going to introduce an audience that naturally loves it because they’re just getting to know it for the first time. It’s our responsibility to bring the audience into the present, or even the future of the medium, not wow them with nostalgic concepts.
It seems like Toronto will always have these two type of screenings as a result: the public surface art which is simplified, and the clique powered aficionado types that are so well versed in a medium that the average person has no hope of fitting in. We need to break that and find a way to introduce mature, complex themes in a easy to enjoy format. That’s what FAMEFAME is trying to do, and I hope we succeed.
You can find more about Tasman Richardson’s work at www.famefame.com. You can also order a copy of “Basement Boy Hardcore” from their online shop.
