Viision Quest at VIVO

Last night I went down to Video In/Video Out (VIVO) to check out Viision Quest, and well... some of it was good. The evening was divided into three parts shown as a video screening. This night would have been a lot better as a gallery showing where the audience was not forced to sit through some video shorts which would have been a lot better mounted on a wall in the background.

I'll start with the best of the evening which was the closers with a live video DJing performance by Haunted Beard (Ben Jacques) and Jessica Parsons of DNGROUS ADDRESS. (edit: I learned that Jessica was doing all the VJing and Ben was making noises) They were joined by Justin of Arbour Lake Sghool Collective and GR8-2000 (Tom Whalen) whose roles I'm a little uncertain of, but Tom definitely had a keytar. This was easily the best part of the evening. The live performance they put together was heavy on repeated abstract images in which you could occasionally make out children riding unicorns from an old cartoon, a cat running around and a CGI man walking. Their video was accompanied by jammy electro noise music which was pleasant in the style of Black Moth Super Rainbow though not as catchy. Haunted Beard's usual stuff I would describe as grotesque art rejected from a children's picture book/cartoon. DNGROUS ADDRESS work is usually a well-crafted found art video montage that usually is accompanied by DJs. I like both their individual projects though I didn't feel like they added up to the sum of their parts last night, still worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing.

I honestly wish I had not showed up on time even though it was free. When I see video shorts (or anything really) I hope to see things that will make me say, "I wish I'd thought of doing that" and/or "I wish I knew how to do that." What made up this first third of the evening brought neither of those thoughts to mind. The best of this portion of the evening I would have liked to have seen in a gallery setting so I could sip my drink, glance at the piece, say what I liked about it and then move on.

The second portion of the evening had some redeeming qualities. Young Forever Parts 1 and 2 were funny if a little heavy on the absurdism (It did however contain Alphaville's "Forever Young" for which I awarded it bonus points). It closed with an incredibly detailed stop-motion hand-crafted cityscape which was pretty cool, if not necessarily exciting. I believe it was called Wurld (Abridged) should you ever get the chance to see it.

Viision Quest logo lifted from the VIVO website.