Mike Hoolboom – författare

'The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.' -- Man Ray What if there were movies made the same way as suits, custom fitted, each one tailored for one person? Not broadcast, but narrowcast? Not theatres around the world showing the same globalized pictures, but instead a local circumstance, a movie so particular, so peculiar, it could cure night blindness or vertigo? Welcome to the world of fringe movies, where artists have been busy putting queer shoulders to the wheels, or bending light to talk about First Nations rights (and making it funny at the same time), or demonstrating how a personality can be taken apart and put together again, all in the course of a ten-minute movie which might take years to make. Practical Dreamers takes us to this other side of the media plantation. In it, twenty-seven Canadian artists dish about how they get it done and why it matters. The conversations are personal, up close and jargon free, smart without smarting.The stellar cast includes smartbomb Steve Reinke; visionary Peter Mettler; Middle East specialist Jayce Salloum; queer Asian avatars Richard Fung, Midi Onodera, Ho Tam, and Wayne Yung; footage recyclers Aleesa Cohene and Jubal Brown; overhead projector king Daniel Barrow; First Nations vets Kent Monkman and Shelley Niro; international art presence Paulette Philips; and documentarian Donigan Cumming. These in-depth talks come lavishly illustrated in an oversized volume.

"[Here] exists a kind of nakedness, a peeling away of propriety, a questioning of behavioral and social systems--and yet I find their work refreshingly playful and deeply generous."--Deborah Stratman, University of Illinois at Chicago The literary post-punk short movies of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been tearing up the festival/gallery circuit for the past fifteen years with their blend of bedroom pop, perverse animations, and hopes for fame. In this collection of award-winning scripts, creative writings, and critical missives, scholars, video legends, and animal experts--including Steve Reinke, Sarah Hollenberg, Akira Lippit, and Tom Sherman--weigh in on why these movies matter. Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been collaborating since 1994. Their work has won the top prize at festivals in Ann Arbor and Chicago, and awards in New York, Zurich, and Hamburg. They teach at Syracuse University. Mike Hoolboom is an internationally renowned experimental moviemaker and critic.

Auden flees the small town of Capreol for Toronto, bewildered, HIV positive, and in search of an entirely new personality. He falls in love with orgy maestro Wrik, mainly because the old Auden would never even have talked to him. And through Wrik, he meets Steve Reinke, his new best friend. Steve -- and here's where it gets confusing -- is, in real life as well as in The Steve Machine, a renowned video artist, someone who makes television for one person at a time, small-screen excursions designed to cure arthritis or night blindness. Despite being a virtuoso with video, however, Steve is not so good with love. He falls for a football star, and, with his medium-is-the-message videotapes, is able to slow down the other players so his beau can run past them all at normal speed. Though the team wins, Steve does not, and the jock dumps him. Then there's the chess whiz, followed soon after by hustlers and tattoo artists, and and then Jody, who's got a mouth so big and red that Steve is overcome with lust. Truth is, it's a mouth used to settling scores, only Steve doesn't catch this.Blinded by passion, our fictional Steve contracts HIV, then sets to work building a videotape that will relieve him, and the millions of others afflicted, of their illness. On the way, he stars in a reality TV show, decides to wear only white paper suits, and meets childhood idol Yoko Ono. Auden accompanies Steve in this quest that is at once a plague narrative, a love story, a reflection on media technology, and a joy to read. As an added bonus, this volume has been written both as a regular hold-in-your-hand novel with a beginning, middle, and end (though not necessarily in that order), and as a machine designed to replace the voice of the inner monologue with something (or someone) far more soothing and satisfying. Like the videotapes of Steve Reinke, the book itself is a machine. The Steve Machine.