21.6.13
INCITE #4: Exhibition Guide
12:09 PM
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Publications on alternative media have been few and far between, a scarcity eased considerably by the depth and quality of those few dedicated to such an undertaking. With just three issues, INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media has already proven an invaluable addition to this effort. The journal is currently seeking to raise funds for the publication of INCITE #4: Exhibition Guide, focusing on alternative media exhibition practices. Brett Kashmere, editor and publisher, took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about the journal's origin and the upcoming issue.
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JACOB WALTMAN: Could
you tell me a little bit about INCITE's founding, how things
initially came together?
BRETT KASHMERE: INCITE
was founded in 2008, shortly after I immigrated from Montreal to the
U.S. Starting a journal about experimental film was a long-time goal
of mine, at least going back to the late-90s, but I never had the
time, or really the skills or contacts, to act on it prior. Finishing
an MA in Film Studies (in 2004) helped prepare me for the editorial
responsibilities of managing a journal. And touring with my film,
Valery’s Ankle
(in 2006-07)
introduced me to a larger network of programmers, writers, and
film/videomakers on both sides of the border. I think that’s a
unique aspect of INCITE. We have an even mix of Canadian and American
contributors. It’s truly cross-national.
There
were additional catalyzing forces. One was a small, not-for-profit,
grassroots cooperative in upstate New York called Syracuse
Experimental, dedicated to the growth and preservation of
alternative, first person cinema and media, which I helped form.
Publishing a journal was one of the core objectives set forth in our
manifesto, “There’s
More To Filmmaking Than Making Films.”
That notion, which I adapted or maybe straight cribbed from something
Jonas Mekas once wrote, has been a guiding principle for me. So I was
happy to also include Jonas’
manifesto in
the first issue of INCITE, MANIFEST.
A
second catalyst was reading Scott MacDonald’s interview with P.
Adams Sitney, published 2005, in which Sitney questions why no one
from the generation of experimental filmmakers born in the 1970s and
80s were starting their own journals and writing about each other’s
work, as our predecessors did in the 60s and 70s. Hearing Sitney say
that probably sharpened my resolve and signalled that the time was
right.
A
third factor was that I started a teaching job at Oberlin College in
2008. In addition to my salary, I also received a (very modest)
research grant, which I put towards some of the material costs of the
journal’s first issue, as well as to hiring student assistants. It
wasn’t very much money, but I stretched it as far as I could.
WALTMAN: INCITE's
online accessibility is very generous, but you maintain a presence in
print as well. Could you talk about balancing the two, and the
importance of continuing to produce print?
KASHMERE: Information
should be free. Design and printing costs money. To resolve that
contradiction we make the content available for free online, and we
also produce a nice hard copy version. The sales of the print issue
doesn’t recoup the production costs, unfortunately, so we sometimes
delay putting each new issue online. I
love publishing, and I love printed matter, so the idea that there
would be a tangible, physical iteration was always the linchpin for
me. There aren’t many printed journals devoted to experimental
media anymore, either in depth or as a curiosity. For me, publishing
INCITE is a way of giving back to something that I love, and
for the most part I relish the process. It
can be tedious and frustrating putting each issue into print, though.
That’s one reason that we started the online interview series, Back
and Forth:
to stay active between the annual issues. We’re hoping to add some
additional online sections over the next year or so, such as an
Annotated Artists’ “Work Bench” series and a reprint series,
which contextualizes important or undervalued texts that are
difficult to find. We’re currently preparing a new version of Tom
Gunning’s “Towards a Minor Cinema,” for instance, with an intro
by Ekrem Serdar.
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(Other Cinema, San Francisco)
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WALTMAN: On
a related note, for those of us unfamiliar with the more practical
details of putting together a publication, speak briefly about some
of the challenges that go into putting a journal like this together
(and perhaps the necessity of something like an Indiegogo campaign to
aid in the process).
KASHMERE: Producing
an issue of INCITE is a costly and time-consuming effort. The first
couple of issues were published mostly out of my own pocket, with the
money that I made from my teaching job. I did the first issue largely
by myself – the editing, proofreading, layout, design, glued the
binding, made trips to the post office etc – and Leslie Topness
created the letter-pressed covers and helped guide me through the
workflow. I didn’t know anything about different bindings, or paper
stocks, offset printing, proofing, etc at the time. Being at Oberlin
eventually allowed me to recruit assistants into the process, and
some of those people are still part of the team. Eliza Koch, for
instance, designed issues #2 and #3 and is now working on #4. She’s
a fantastic talent, and has helped step up our aesthetic. Peter
Nowogrodzki created the first version of the website back in 2008 and
is now spearheading issue #5, BLOCKBUSTER.
Dave Burnham has become a contributing editor and is currently
managing the Indiegogo campaign. A number of other students have
helped out along the way, assisting on specific issues and general
tasks and projects. And, over the past couple of years, people such
as Walter Forsberg (who co-edited INCITE #4 with me) and Christina
Battle have joined the team, which makes the whole endeavor more fun
and more collaborative, and less isolated.
EXHIBITION
GUIDE, the
issue we’re working on right now, and fundraising for, has about 50
contributors and approximately 75,000 words worth of writing, which
will likely translate into 250 pages or more. It’s going to cost
about $7000 to print, at minimum. That’s for a perfect-bound
edition with approximately 50 color illustrations, printed on high
quality paper. We’re trying to raise $8000 through our Indiegogo
campaign to
cover those printing costs, a small honorarium for the designer, and
shipping all of the rewards after Indiegogo and PayPal take their cut
(around $600). That doesn’t come close
to covering all of our expenses, or our time, but it will help a lot.
We’re
not a high circulation, glossy magazine. We don’t receive any
outside funding. We don’t publish ads. We’re a completely
independent, volunteer-run, niche publication, serving a small but
dedicated audience. Each issue allows us to grow that audience a
little bigger, and to expand our reach and readership. We’re now
collected by about 20 university libraries in Canada and the United
States, as well as by the Museum of Modern Art Library and the New
York Public Library, among others. The next step is to get the
journal into a few stores, to increase its street visibility. But
that’s a whole different kind of challenge. We still need to do the
cost-benefit analysis on that.
WALTMAN: English-language
magazines focusing primarily on experimental media have been few and
far between (Experimental
Cinema Magazine
early on, Film
Culture,
Millennium
Film Journal,
etc.). How do you see INCITE communicating with/expanding
on/diverging from these publications?
KASHMERE: I
think there are significant similarities, and significant
differences. I’m not familiar with Experimental
Cinema Magazine,
but Film Culture
and Millennium
Film Journal are
big influences -- I collect both, and look at them often. I feel like
INCITE is part of that tradition. One thing I always enjoyed about
Film Culture was
all of the writing by filmmakers, in the form of manifestos, letters,
interviews. And Millennium
Film Journal publishes
incredible scholarly articles among many other types of writing,
artist pages, polemics, etc. My goal for INCITE has been to land
somewhere between a zine and an academic journal, to embody the
spirit and rigor of each.
One
way that we differ is that each new issue of INCITE is distinct from
the previous one: the type of binding or the dimensions may change,
for example. And each issue typically includes an insert – a DVD, a
poster, etc. There is no uniform style or standard font. The form and
design usually derive from the content. The BLOCKBUSTER issue, which
Peter is developing with Ian Page (our first with guest editors),
will take the journal in a slightly more conceptual-literary
direction, I believe. That’s a nice thing about being totally
independent: it allows us the flexibility to experiment with
different ideas about what a film journal in the 21st century should
be or can be. If making INCITE ever became
a process of plugging content into a template, where every issue
looked exactly the same, like October,
which I also love, then it wouldn’t be worth it for me. We fill a
different kind of role.
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(Masstransiscope by Bill Brand)
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WALTMAN: In
your introduction to INCITE's first issue
Manifest
(Fall 2008-Spring 2009), you wrote of the journal's intention to
address the waning critical attention on more recent developments and
accomplishments in experimental media. Four years on and several
issues in, how has INCITE responded to this challenge?
I
don’t know if we’ve done as good a job as we could in that
regard. I would like to be publishing more critical essays and
reviews that focus on the work of emerging and emergent media
artists. There is still an overall lack of good critical writing
about the current scene and new voices. On the other hand, we have
provided a platform for younger film and videomakers to articulate
their ideas, including Ben Russell, Evan Meaney, Clint Enns, Double
Negative Collective, Julie Perini, Jaimz Asmundson, Jesse McLean,
Jacob Ciocci and many others. And we’ve published interviews with a
lot of up and coming / ascendant artists since our inception, such as
Michael Robinson, Aleesa Cohene, Oliver Laric, Karl Lemieux, Jon
Rafman, and Sabrina Ratté,
as well as established practitioners like Taka Iimura, Deborah
Stratman, Craig Baldwin, Jennifer Montgomery, and so on. However, the
majority of our critical and scholarly articles have been about the
work of an earlier generation: Bruce Conner, Lillian Schwartz, Paolo
Gioli, etc. Dave Barber’s piece on the Winnipeg “landfill
surrealist” Mike Maryniuk, who probably isn’t known nearly as
well as he should be, is an example of the kind of text that I would
like to publish more of going forward. Thomas Beard’s essay on
Shana Moulton’s video-cycle, 'Whispering
Pines' is
another.
WALTMAN: Amos
Vogel appears to be a touchstone for INCITE #4, could you share some
thoughts on his passing and the manner in which legacy served as
inspiration for the upcoming issue?
KASHMERE: Amos and Marcia Vogel, in
particular the work they did with the Cinema 16 screening series
beginning in the late-40s, have been an inspiration for me and
countless others. They created a model for exhibiting independent and
experimental cinema that microcinemas such as a Light Industry, Other
Cinema, UnionDocs, etc continue to follow. Amos had a unique approach
to programming – the dialectical collision of diverse forms and
genres, that continues to resonate strongly today. He was also
fiercely independent, strongly against censorship, believed in the
importance of good design, personal expression, and political
agitation. In addition, Cinema 16 testifies to the importance of
partnerships throughout the history of avant-garde cinema, even if
they aren’t always properly or fully acknowledged. It’s hard to
imagine Stan Brakhage’s films without the contributions of Jane
Brakhage, for instance, beyond her role as “muse.”
I never had the chance to
meet Amos, or Marcia, but their grandson, Jesse, was a student at
Oberlin during my time there and
I had the chance to meet him and talk with
him. When Amos passed away last year, I heard about it from Jesse. I
believe those personal connections are what make the world/s of
experimental film and video unique. It’s a very giving and generous
and closely-knit community, even though those relationships can
sometimes be difficult or confrontational. People aren’t in it for
the money, obviously, but because they believe in the importance of
radical expression through moving images, which has the ability to
change lives and affect the way we see and interpret the world.
Those are the kinds of
things that I’m hoping to pay tribute to with INCITE generally, and
this new issue specifically. Our goal with issue #4, is, at least in
part, to provide a practical guide for 16mm film exhibition. Thanks
to Alain LeTourneau and 40 Frames, we are publishing an array of
technical resources in the volume. We also have testimonials from the
projection booth, and a DIY screening checklist courtesy of Christina
Battle. By focusing attention on the procedures of 16mm film
exhibition, within the wider context of microcinema practice, I feel
like we’re honoring the work that Amos and Marcia did with Cinema
16 while carrying their legacy forward.
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(Marcia and Amos Vogel)
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INCITE
#4: Exhibition Guide
Edited
by Brett Kashmere and Walter Forsberg
Table
of Contents:
http://www.incite-online.net/issuefour.html
Introduction:
http://www.incite-online.net/intro4.html
INDIEGOGO: http://igg.me/at/INCITE4
WEBSITE:
http://www.incite-online.net/
FACEBOOK:
http://www.facebook.com/incite.journal
TWITTER:
http://twitter.com/incite_online
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1 comments:
"What was Jefferson Presents...?"
I'm gonna get all teary eyed when I read this...
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