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The focus of John Greyson's Future Cinema Lab research revolves around the use of fragmented screens to tell fragmented stories. Using a variety of exhibition modes (video billboard, video installation, performance/new media, and short and feature-length high-definition projects), he creates projects which often split, splice and divide up screens into layers of image and text. These then juxtapose fictional and documentary stories and voices to explore a range of urgent contemporary issues, including: AIDS activism, the bombing of the Baghdad film archives, free speech, gay marriage, police entrapment, and anti-G-8 activism.
Select past and current projects:
PRIDE & SHAME
Projection about AIDS Activism created for public video billboard
Date of release: June 25-30, 2007 on Church Street during Pride Week, Toronto
Length: 1 min
Format: High-Definition
Activist video that uses layered visuals and text to document an AIDS Action Now protest against Abbott Phamaceuticals, protesting the high cost of AIDS drugs. Commissioned by Pride Day and Trinity Square Video, Pride & Shame played on various public video billboards during Pride Week in Toronto.
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14.3 SECONDS
Projection about Iraq Film Archives, created for public video billboard
Date of release: Month of July, 2006 at Dundas Square, Toronto
Length: 1 min
Format: High-definition
During the 2003 war, U.S. planes bombed the Iraqi Film Archive. 14.3 seconds of celluloid were salvaged from the wreckage. If you slow them down by 23.8%, they last a minute. Using the duration of one minute to comment on this loss, this video was commissioned by Transmedia/Year Zero One and played on the Dundas Square video billboard in July, 2006.
ORANGE CLOUDS
A cantata with singers with live video mixing, creating a portrait of the monarch migration
Date of release: May 9, 10, 11, 2006 at Innis Town Hall
Length: 60 min
Format: Multi-media performance for singers and musicians, with live video mixing
Collaborators: composer Bongani Ndodana, video artist Geoff Pugen
Orange Clouds infiltrates the genre of the cantata to explore the concept of precedence: why do we care who was the 'first' to do this, the 'first' to do that? Inflammatory, incandescent and luminous, these idiosyncratic songs pay tribute to the migrations of several sub-cultural trail-blazers from South Africa, Mexico, Palestine, United States and Canada, folks who put their 'firstness' on the front burner. In the process, Orange Clouds investigates the question of precedence itself: in this post-millenial moment, why does being 'first' still exert so much cultural capital?
Orange Clouds found its initial inspiration in the metaphor of the annual monarch butterfly migration, where orange swarms depart from Canada and the United States every year for a remote Mexican valley that they have never before been to, never before seen.
In the course of nine songs, this cantata weaves together tales of similar uncharted journeys, connecting quirky stories of bravery and precedence across decades and geography:
• Simon Nkoli, Africa's first black, gay advocate for people with AIDS;
• Portia White, Canada's first opera singer of colour to debut at Carnegie Hall;
• University of Toronto's Fred Urquhart, the first scientist to discover the 'secret' of the monarch migration;
• Edward Said, NOT the first to critique to ideological myth of Columbus' 'first contact'
FIG TREES
A split-screen experimental feature opera about pills, Gertrude Stein, and AIDS Activism.
Date of release: 2009
Length: 30 min
Format: High Definition
Collaborators: composer David Wall
In 2000, South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat went on a treatment strike, refusing to take his pills until they were widely available to all South Africans. This symbolic act became a cause celebre, helping build his group Treatment Action Campaign into a national movement--yet with each passing month, Zackie grew sicker and sicker...
Adapted from a series of seven immersive video installations originally exhibited at Oakville Galleries in 2003, Fig Trees tells the story of Zackie's treatment strike, and the story of the fight for pills on two continents. Sung in the form of a modernist opera that inverts the Gertrude Stein avant-garde classic Four Saints in Three Acts, this split-screen film will explore two decades of AIDS activism in Canada and South Africa. Using compositional techniques of chance, inversion, and polyphany, Fig Trees will find points of political harmony and musical convergence in operatic and documentary sequences that profile the overlapping stories of various activists: Tim McCaskell, Gugu Dlamini, Stephen Lewis, Simon Nkoli... and Zackie himself. Adapted from the installation Fig Trees, presented at the Oakville Art Galleries in 2003, Cutthroat will intercut dramatic scenes, archival footage, documentary interviews and staged opera sequences shot in and around Toronto.
Fig Trees explores the lures and limits of martyrdom, as they relate to both activism and opera. Can we only venerate those heros whose stories end in tragedy? When Treatment Action Campaign wins a victory for treatment access, Zackie ends his pill strike and starts to get better. In saving his own life, has he disqualified himself from operatic sainthood?
With: Van Abrahams, David Wall, Denise Williams, Deb Overes, Ian Funk, Steven McClare, Jennifer Moore, Alexander Chapman
REX VS. SINGH
Split-screen experiemental video features four versions of the same 1915 Vancouver court case
Date of release: August, 2008
Length: 30 min
Format: High Definition
Collaborators: filmmakers Ali Kazimi and Richard Fung
In 1915, two Sikh mill-workers, Dalip Singh and Naina Singh, were entrapped by undercover cops and accused of sodomy. Their trial--held less than a year after the infamous Komagata Maru incident of 1914, in which the ship carrying 376 migrants from British India was turned away--becomes a fascinating case study of Vancouver power relations: how police corruption, racism, homophobia, and a covert "whites-only" immigration policy, conspired to maintain the status quo of this colonial port city.
This split-screen experimental video stages scenes from their trial, told four times: first as a period drama, second as a documentary investigation of the case, third as a musical agit-prop, and fourth, identical to the first, but without actors.
Co-directed with Ali Kazimi (Continuous Journey, Narmada: A Valley Rises) and Richard Fung (Sea in the Blood, Chinese Characters)
14.3 SECONDS
Projected installation about war and cinema history at Images Film Festival/A Space Gallery, Toronto,
Date of release: April, 2008
Length: 8 min
Format: High Definition installation
Collaborators: Editor Jared Raab
An expansion of the original one-minute video billboard project, 14.3 Seconds was presented as a video installation during the Images Film Festival. Its narrative presented the following fiction: "When the Iraq Film Archives were destroyed by bombs during the war, a journalist rescued eight scraps of celluloid from the wreckage, totalling 14.3 seconds. In 2004, ICARP (the Iraq Coalition Archives Restoration Project) announced that it would use these scraps to painstakingly reconstruct what was once considered the greatest collection of Arab Cinema in the world. 14.3 Seconds presents the first six restorations, including Al Mas' Ala Al-Kubra (Mohamed Shukri Jameel, 1983, an epic about the 1920s uprising against British colonial rule, starring Yousef al-Any and Oliver Reed) and Al Ayyam Al-Tawila (Tewfik Saleh, 1980, based on an autobiographical novel by Saddam Hussein).
ROY & SILO'S BIG GAY DIVORCE
Adaptation of immersive 6-screen narrative installation about a penguin marriage and divorce
Date of release: Fall, 2008
Length: 20 min
Format: High Definition
Roy & Silo's Big Gay Divorce is a high-definition split-screen adaptation of two site-specific multi-screen installations: the first was presented in an outdoor wading pool as part of the WADE festival; the second was staged in the showers, locker rooms and pools of an historic indoor swimming pool (the Harrison Baths), as part of Toronto's Nuit Blanche festival. Told as a cautionary, operatic tale in six reversals on twelve screens, it told of Roy and Silo, the world’s most famous gay penguin couple. They met at New York's Central Park Zoo in 1998 and have been inseparable ever since. Happily cohabitating in their nest next to the sardine trough, they’ve raised their daughter Tango from a donated egg and survived the trauma of Roy’s ill-advised fling with Scrappy, a female chinstrap. Roy and Silo seem to have it all: enduring love, a happy daughter, notoriety, plenty of fish. Yet they live in a country that refuses them the rights of marriage or divorce. Until now.
MOTET FOR AMPLIFIED VOICES
Video/performance project featuring the Megaphone Choir
Date of release: Ongoing series of three videos documenting video performances, 2006-8
Length: 5-10 min in length each
Format: High Definition
Collaborators: Megaphone Choir, David Wall, composer
When students were reprimanded for using an "unauthorized amplication device" in Vari Hall, and in one instance, brutally beaten by the police, concerned faculty and students organized a Megaphone Choir, and performed several concerts in this public space, singing polyphanous compositions about free speech.
PACKIN,' POKIN,' & VERPACKUN'...
Series of split-screen videos documenting the security forces at G-8 and FTTA summits.
Date of release: Ongoing series of videos, 2001-10
Length: 5 min in length each
Format: Standard and High Definition
Collaborators: Blah Blah Blah Video Collective
Split-screen videos using a roll-bar technique to archive definitive collections of cop crotches and their hardware, shot at the barricades of various summits, including: Quebec FTTA, 2001; Calgary G-8, 2003; Rostock G-8 2007; and Hamilton 2010.
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