Excited to announce that Loop Collective will finally be launching our long-awaited monograph after many years of hard work. This will be presented at a special 20th anniversary screening at Innis Town Hall on February 4, 2016, and will also be accompanied by individual retrospectives of the films and videos of collective members (dates and venue TBA soon). Mark your calendars!

This month I completed a new 4K video installation, Cathedral, now on display for the next year in Vancouver. The work explores the relationship between screens and earlier forms of mediated light, such as stained glass, drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about perception and participation. Merging organic and digital forms through imagery of Cathedral Grove’s Douglas Firs, Cathedral reflects on how natural light and form can offer moments of contemplation amid our screen-saturated world.

A busy month of screenings and events! Alberta screens at Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal, and both Poem and Alberta will be featured at Antimatter [Media Art] Festival in Victoria. I’ll also be presenting recent Loop Collective works with the Iris Film Collective in Vancouver as part of the Collective Unconscious series, followed by an artist talk. Upcoming events include Loop Collective at Independent Visions in Regina with a guest lecture at the University of Regina, and a MAP Talks lecture and screening of Heavenly Bodies in Peterborough. Alberta will also screen at L’Alternativa Festival in Barcelona. More news soon!

livemix02 (2015) — part of an ongoing series of live improvised video mixes exploring real-time image composition and performance.

Excited to share that Alberta (2014) will screen this month at Pleasure Dome’s New Toronto Works 2015 and flEXiff 2015 in Sydney, Australia. Poem (2015) also had its international premiere at EXiS Festival’s EX-NOW 3 program, shown alongside works by Ben Rivers, David Bryant & Karl Lemieux, Hafiz Rancajale, Anton Ginzburg, and IP Yuk-Yiu. Many thanks to Francesco Cazzin for his thoughtful write-up about the film on L’Emergere Del Possibile.

New excerpt from a live videomixing performance.

From June 26 to July 25, the Loop Collective presents a program at TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, co-presented by the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers. Marking the start of a cross-country tour celebrating the collective’s 20th anniversary, the exhibition brings together new and archival works to spark dialogue between film and video, movement and stillness, nature and technology, matter and memory.

This month has been full of exciting projects and milestones: I’ve settled into a new home, completed a series of new videos for a public art commission in downtown Toronto (details coming soon), and begun work on a new 16mm soundtrack collaboration with Carl Brown, titled Blood Sugar. I’m also pushing toward the completion of my PhD comprehensive exams, exploring Heidegger, Freud, and Whitehead. On the exhibition front, Alberta (2014) screened at the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and Montreal Underground Film Festival. I also performed a live video collaboration for a composition by Núria Giménez-Comas and Carla Huhtanen at the 21C Music Festival. Meanwhile, the Loop Collective is preparing a touring exhibition, beginning with a group show at Truck Gallery in Calgary, co-presented by the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers, with more venues to come across Canada and beyond.

For the past year, I’ve been photographing my living room window using an intervalometer, capturing over 150,000 images—more than all my other photographs combined. As we prepare to move from our apartment on Palmerston Blvd. next month, the project will come to a close. I’m hoping the leaves return just in time to complete the full cycle of seasons through this window.

This month marks my first solo exhibition, Imaginary Landscapes: Recent Works by Dan Browne, at Factory Media Center in Hamilton, ON. I’m deeply grateful to the board and to my friend Ty Tekatch for helping make this possible. The show features a selection of my recent works exploring the intersections of cinema, video installation, music, photography, and poetry, followed by a live two-hour performance of memento mori with collaborators Dan Driscoll and Steve Richman—a reimagining of the film as a singular cinematic event.

This year has been especially productive, with several new long-form projects in progress. Since completing Poem, I’ve been developing an extended audio-visual collage created through live image improvisation, and a year-long documentation of my living room window, which will conclude when we move this spring. I’m also working on a follow-up to memento mori, composed of images captured between the conception and birth of my son, Julian—a visual record of time passing through landscapes, light, and life. These works continue to evolve organically; I see myself less as their author than as a vessel through which they take shape.

Images from my new film Poem.

Currently developing several new projects, including a contribution to Graphical Recordings 002, which features Canadian film and video artists reinterpreting Michael Snow’s Poem (1957).

My essay, “Some Notes on the Artistic Process (of Stephen Broomer),” was recently published in The Transformable Moment: The Films of Stephen Broomer (Canadian Film Institute Press). Additionally, memento mori was profiled on PRIZMA, a Hungarian avant-garde cinema site, and my recent photography appeared with an interview on get it on the neg, curated by Nancy Baric.

Sharing a v 1.0 edit, work in progress of a new project.

Excited to announce that the World Premiere of my new film Pastoral (2014) will be at Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, in the Lab #1: Impressions programme, screening on October 10th and 17th! The programme features works by Robert Todd, Vincent Grenier and Alexandre Larose. I will be in attendance for the screening on October 17.

new life baby julian

I’ve recently updated my website with more images and less text, aiming to encourage exploration and visual discovery. There’s still more to come—newer films, older videos, photography, and collage—but it’s a start. Two recent screenings: Routes (2011) was featured in the 90-second film program at the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, and Hand-processing (2010) screened in the Visions program hosted by The Picture Show in Brooklyn, NY.

Excited to share that the Montreal Underground Film Festival will feature Routes (2011) and memento mori (2012) in its 2014 lineup, alongside a range of outstanding Canadian and international filmmakers. Recomposition (2007) was presented with a live score by composer Chris Thornborrow at Synaesthesia III: Film & Music, by FAWN Opera & New Music in collaboration with The Seventh Art. Chris’s interpretation brought powerful new dimensions to the work, and the program as a whole was excellent—special thanks to Patrick Murray, Amanda Smith, and Christopher Heron for their thoughtful curation and engaging Q&A format.

Sharing a few images from the recent installation of FLUX/FALL (2012) at Performative Ecologies, dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton, AB. The opening featured a live guitar improvisation over the work’s drone soundtrack and a performance by Paul Couillard, who offered a series of micro-interventions and an artist talk that evening—an engaging and dynamic context for the installation.

memento mori will screen in Brooklyn on February 28 as part of a program curated by Jonathan Caouette, featuring films that explore the threshold between waking and dreaming. It’s an honour to be included alongside works by Jaimz Asmundson, Solomon Nagler, David Lynch, Peter Tscherkassky, Gaspar Noë, Harmony Korine, and Guy Maddin—an incredible lineup. In the coming months, I’ll also be presenting at several academic conferences, including Performative Ecologies (University of Alberta), Process: In Media Res (Harvard University), Innovation and its Contestants (McGill University), and the Film Studies Association of Canada conference. I’m also co-curating an exhibition, Cross Sections, for the York/Ryerson Communication and Culture conference Intersections 2014: Thinking|Feeling.