As part of our annual luncheon media arts lecture series at the BC, we are happy to confirm Matt Soar for March 3, 2014. Soar is an intermedia artist, designer, and filmmaker, and associate professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is co-developer of the Korsakow System, an open source software application for interactive, nonlinear storytelling. His most recent Korsakow film, Ceci N’est Pas Embres (2012), a ‘database diary’ reflecting on life in a small French village, was recently selected for RIDM – the Montreal International Documentary Festival. Soar’s eclectic writing has appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Body & Society, and Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design. He has contributed to the forthcoming anthologies Dynamic Fair Dealing (University of Toronto Press) and New Documentary Ecologies (Palgrave). Soar also collects old signs and is an aspiring voiceover artist.
My current research-creation project explores the meanings of commercial film leaders: the ‘hidden’ footage at the beginning of a film reel, littered with all kinds of esoteric markings: logos, lab notes, handwriting and type, color tests, projection cues – often taking up only one or two frames each. Leaders are doubly ‘lost’ due to their routine invisibility from the audience, and their impending obsolescence. Working with a sound artist (Jackie Gallant) and a variety of tools – a lightbox and a macro lens, a DSLR video camera attached to a high-powered microscope, interactive narrative software – Lost Leaders aims to be an extended poetic engagement with the metadata of film; the graphical residue of film processing, printing, and projection.
Matt Soar will be speaking from 11:30am to 12:30pm, in the ATLAS building, room 311.