Vital Signs Conference, 2005, pp. [14].

Old Tom, New Tom

" When one looks at something, one's not only looking at it directly, but one's also
looking at it through the assault that has already been made on one by photography and
film." [1] Francis Bacon

Though still a relatively recent activity, working with the moving image in the digital age has a
history. This record resides in an evolving cultural process of looking that Bacon identifies
above. It can also be referenced back to that non-narrative tradition of the moving image that
runs through experimental film and video production. Although that is a practice that has
become problematic in Australian conditions, an experimental / "avant-garde" tradition of film
and video art continues internationally to offer critical ways of articulating the human
condition, especially at those margins at which such an oppositional practice itself tends to be
situated. Canada, a place with which Australia shares many parallels, offers a continuing, lively
tradition in this area. Mike Hoolboom's Tom (2002 75 minutes, Video) is presented here as
exemplar evidence of such a continuing spirit. Tom, created using digital technologies, can be
considered in terms of both old and new media. It is a work that has been historically
informed by the work of a previous generation, like the work of film artists Al Razutis and Jack
Chambers. This is a connection that will be examined further to underline the regenerative
resilience of Canadian moving image art. What this ongoing tradition offers a contemporary
digital practice is a fully formed mastery over technique and an articulate, mature language
that speaks directly to the viewer.

Tom is Mike Hoolboom's biography of filmmaker Tom Chomont and his City, New York and
includes excerpts of his films including Phases of the Moon (1968) and Sadistic Self Portrait
(1994). Tom tells of his struggle with HIV and Parkinson's disease and disarmingly recounts
confronting memories of infanticide, incest, fetishism and death. These revelations are then
processed through an array of technique, pulled out of Hoolboom's lifelong immersion in
fringe film [2], bringing to bear layered photos, home movies, video, appropriated archival and
found footage and images directly out of the video rental store, to supply a cathartic visual
processing machine. Arthur Kroker's ideas about panic bodies [3] and excremental culture [4]
permeate both the structure and content of this video. It is in part an examination of the
erasure and loss of B0's experimental film while at the same time re-inventing it as a resilient
form of moviemaking for the digital age; A "Vital Sign" that there is a creative tradition of
moving image art worth persevering with and re-connecting to. [5]
The Old and the New

Experimental Film and video continue to flourish outside Australia in North America and
Europe. It evolves and continues to be distributed through such organizations as, for example
the Lux in London [6], SixPackFilm in Vienna [7], Light Cone in Paris [8],Video Data Bank in
Chicago [9] and CFMDC in Toronto [10].Such work remains part of a line of alternative
cinematic investigation, sitting outside the mainstream, and often critiquing and analyzing that
commercial center. Hoolboom, as a long-term card-carrying participant in this project, offers a
sophisticated, confronting and historically aware renewal of that Canadian specific "cinema we
need" [11].

Lev Manovich creatively appropriates frames from Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera
(16mm 1929 Russia) as foundation topography for the prologue to his seminal 2001 text: The
Language of New Media and further recycles these images as Interface, to signpost different
sections of the text in that book. Manovich's branding of Man With a Movie Camera as meta-
film is welcome and telling and he states that: Vertov is able to achieve something that new
media artists still have to learn- how to merge database and narrative into a new form.[12] But
there is a New Media myopia at work here, because a well documented international history of
moving image work emerged after and "out of' Vertov. This is an apparently invisible history
even to Manovich and certainly here in Australia. Hoolboom offers the latest incarnation of this
"invisible cinema".

We will further examine how Hoolboom's Tom offers a contemporary merging of Vertov's
database and content and outline how this is a method and form already reworked by
generations of experimental or personal film artists like Al Razutis and Jack Chambers in Canada
and informed, in Canada by theorists such as George Grant [13], Harold lnnis [14] and Arthur
Kroker [15] to give this work a particular technological spin. I would suggest that in such a
constellation a history for new media art is there for the taking.

Why zoom in on Canada when there are so many global possibilities? It is more than the fact
that Hoolboom is Canadian and Tom is a Canadian film. It is more that a focus on Canada
underlines to an Australian audience that such a practice can arise from a familiar place, a place
with which we share a number of commonalities including our parallel, colonial histories.
Canada offers the possibility of a dispersion of our short-sightedness.

Within the new world of such ex-colonies as Canada and Australia there is often a myopic
understanding of our own history. The idea of Terra Nullus itself sets up a tradition of denial
and erasure. There was plenty here before the first fleet arrived. There is a formula here that
continues to be repeated. The new tends to replace the settled, the old with an associated
forgetting. Such a dysfunctional tradition silently permeates all aspects of our culture, including
creative and technological production. In Australia the emergence of the digital saw a
concurrent collapse of critical, financial and exhibition support of experimental film, with a
resulting decline in production.
This Vital Signs Conference itself is evidence that the new cycle of production that replaced it,
which has been complicit in the forgetting of the experimental, now faces threats to its own
funding and identity. It could be argued that such moves on digital production are strengthened
because of New Media's lack of connection to its own roots in experimental or avant-garde
moving image production.

In Canada, as elsewhere, the historical connection has been maintained. Earlier on Canadian
artist Jack Chambers, for example, saw personal film as an area of creative production where a
colonial denial could be addressed. The problem for new world art, wrote Jack Chambers in
1969 is that it "runs the risk of an impoverished materialism through omitting the historical
dimension"[16]. But "Where North American artists do embody an historic dimension is in the
medium of personal filmmaking. They form a major part of film's "roots" and are making
enormous advances in the organic-mind growth of this art." [17]

Kroker's observation that the Canadian discourse on technology "is situated between the future
of the New World and the past of European culture"[1B] further credentials Canada as a colonial
site for examining a New/Old Media interface or amalgam. This is a status Australia shares
without the lucidity and spine of Canada's integrated fringe filmmaking activity, exemplified in
Hoolboom's work, which here as already stated has fallen by the wayside, has dis-connected in
the scramble in and out of the new. An impetus to re-focus and re-claim this tradition for an
enriched Australian creative practice of the moving image is overdue.

The Direct

Tom offers a timely and critical renewal and development on from previous experimental work
in its ability to communicate directly to its audience through its visual imagery. This idea of "the
direct" is perceived as critical to a definition of experimental film and video by Small [19].
Small's Direct Theory contends that experimental film as a genre does its theorizing intrinsically
and directly through its methods of assembly, through the making of the work itself.

Small [20] develops a checklist to help define the genre of experimental film and video: a-
collaborative construction, economic independence, brevity, non-narrative structures, technical
innovation, avoidance of verbal language, mental imagery, and reflexivity. These characteristics
make a compelling roadmap for digital construction as well and Small's characteristics of
mental imagery and reflexivity are especially relevant to an understanding of Tom.

Though alien and irrelevant to popular cinema what Small brings to the surface as unique to
experimental cinema is often part of the accepted wisdom of art in other media. The tactic of
"the direct" is also effectively employed by painter Francis Bacon and in the work of Jack
Chambers (as will be discussed later). Bacon's work offers evidence of this strategy in painting,
photography, and the space between a series of images. His paintings are a unique and
personal vision of "the body in ruins" which straddle the figurative and the abstract and are
framed by his interest in photography and cinema. Bacon's strategies echo the way that Tom
impacts immediately and viscerally through its image flow to its audience. We will examine
Bacon's ideas further before we return to the Canadian connection and its project with
technique.

Van Alphen [21] outlines how Bacon's work, often described as reflecting the disturbed pain of
the artist, also settles and imbues a sense of personal loss on the viewer. Through distortion
and ambivalent representations the artist disorients the senses of the viewer and
communicates directly at a bodily level to his audience.

Sylvester's [22] incisive interviews with Bacon relay this process in the artist's own words. It
becomes clear, for example, that Bacon is obsessed with the open mouth in his work and this is
a moment appropriated from cinema. This fixation is grounded in the frozen silent shock of the
nanny scream from
Eisenstein's groundbreaking Odessa Steps montage sequence in Battleship Potemkin (Russia, 66
minutes 1925). Within Bacon's practice there is also a persistent returning to Muybridge's pre-
cinema serial recordings of figures in movement. This is the same immersion that occurs in
Tom. There is the same historic referencing of cinema and pre-cinema in the mass of re-
contextualized found footage from which Tom is constructed.

Bacon works through the photograph and memory rather than through sittings with his
subjects. "I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs
than actually having them seated there before me." [23] It is a relationship that reminds one of
Mike Hoolboom's relationship to Tom Chomont. Tom's revelations are often routed through
other imagery and other representational forms before they arrive at the viewer. This imagery
is often needed to absorb and process the impact of Chomont's revelations about his life and
his family.

Bacon repeatedly worked with images in series, using the triptych to create relationships: I see
every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. [24] In the series one
picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they are better in series than they are
separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able to make the one image that sums up
all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more. [25]

The Holy Grail of the singular image is not at issue for Hoolboom as Small also indicates. Bacon
is after a further distillation. Hoolboom's focus is the moving image itself and includes its
reflexive examination. His is a documentation and articulation of these changing relationships.
The play of shifting sequences of imagery and subtle flow is the body of his work. He presents a
string of mental imagery, externalized thought, that resonates with Bacon's reflexive thinking
about his own work. Hoolboom unfolds in the moving image that body in ruins that Bacon fixes
in his painting. For both artists, the effect on the body of the audience is targeted along this
shared trajectory.

Bacon regards breaking through media determined habits about the way we take in
information as critical to his art: We nearly always live through screens- a screened existence.
And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to
time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens [26]. To achieve a direct impact
on his audience Bacon's method connects back to Russian Formalist strategies like de-
familiarization and baring the device articulated by Shlovsky [27]. What I want to do is to distort
the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the
appearance. [28] Small also identifies these as critical operations for experimental cinema
(reflexivity and technical innovation). At its best Tom also breaks, disconnects from its screened
existence.

For Bacon communicating directly to the body requires a denial of storytelling (perceived as an
intellectual activity). It's a very very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes
across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe
through the brain. [29] The moment the story begins to be elaborated the boredom sets in; the
story talks louder than the paint. [30]

This tension between storytelling and some visual visceral impact also exists in Tom, where Tom
Chomont's voice intermittently breaks through the image flow to relate some event from his
life, usually confrontational and/or catastrophic, offering an element of story that the imagery
feeds off and takes up. The story is not being elaborated by this image flow but seem to take us
to a place where the images impact directly onto the nervous system to help our bodies work
through Tom Chomont's enunciated "home truths".

The Virtuosity of Technique

For Hoolboom this direct use of imagery arises out of his role in the project of Canadian
personal filmmaking and Canadian intellectual thought. A discussion of two Canadian feature
length films: Jack Chamber's Hart of London and Al Razutis's Amerika can help to underline a
connection between the direct and technique. They too arise out of and help define a Canadian
fringe filmmaking practice that is organized, technologically articulate and self aware with a
critical political dimension that addresses issues of image and database re-appropriation, non-
narrative structure and abstraction. It is interesting that three films also critically and self-
reflexively re-deploy historical material as content.

Al Razutis's Amerika (1972-1983152 minutes single- or 56-minutes triple-screen 16mm) is a

"feature-length experimental film which was created one reel at a time to function as a mosaic
that expresses the various sensations, myths, landscapes of the industrialized Western culture
(1960's-1980's) through the eyes of media-anarchism and avant-garde techniques." [31] To
investigate various forms of filmic representation and their underlying ideologies Razutis uses
an array of time-lapse, optical printing, video, and audio synthesis techniques to interrogate the
mainstream and continually re-contextualize the film's own construction. The serial
construction and the out-there confronting meshing of technique with political concerns has
been taken up by Hoolboom in his work. With Tom he brings this tension clearly back into the
personal.

Quite apart from the argument of its invisibility, of it having been erased, there is also an
argument that the avant-garde or experimental has been neutered within new media
production. What has been this repressed other to mainstream cinema; the experimental, the
avant-garde, the underground, fringe cinema, graphic film and video art, Wollen's counter-
cinema, no-budget and personal filmmaking makes its prodigal return to the center of New
Media production. But the avant-garde no longer spits in the face of institutional art. The avant-
garde has become materialized in the computer [32] manifesting McLuhan's "all center without
margins" [33]. The avant-garde returns emptied of its political edge and rhetorical grounding.

Such an homogenization can be further outlined by focusing in on a specific technique or

technical strategy. Single frame Time-lapse, a strategy often utilized within experimental
production with an interval-a-meter attached to the movie camera, becomes a redundant
coupling in the digital domain. With real time recording now seamlessly malleable, its duration
shrunk and stretched at will in postproduction, time-lapse has not so much disappeared as a
trick or special effect but re-emerged embedded within the form of the technology itself.

The enabling of collage through cut and paste commands, the convergence of graphics, titles,
text, sound and a host of animation strategies with image manipulation and tweaking, sound
and live action into computer-based editing packages like Macromedia Director, Adobe After
Effects and Final Cut Pro digitizes the Experimental film-maker's strategic toolbox and promises
to turbo-charge her tradition. Yet it seems the prodigal returns neutered, in zombie-like fields
of homogenized clones.

Having begun his project pre-digital Al Razutis's trajectory mirrors these changes and
inconsistencies. Razutis's career long take on technology is now accessed at any computer
keyboard. His drive and commitment appear to dissipate in the endless expansive fields of
information overflow that can define the web.

His spraying of "The avant-garde spits in the face of institutional art" on the brand new screen
at the Vancouver Cinematheque, "ruining" it forever, has long been part of avant-garde
folklore. His retrospective at the Osnabruck European Media Arts Festival of old and new work
in 2002 hands him contemporary kudos and relevance. Collage remains king inside the
computer. Re-located online as Visual Alchemist/Activist Razutis's project with technique
continues. Yet his larger-than-life invocations are harder to hear, less distinct amongst the
mushrooming cacophony of numerous online voices and multiple technical games.

Such a softening, diffusion or demobilization of the avant-garde's critical edge is addressed and
reclaimed in the hyper- layering, editing and collection strategies employed by Hoolboom in
Tom.

Jack Chambers’ painting, his writing and film work further illuminate the connection between
technique and the "direct" strategies employed by Bacon. Hart of London (1968-70 80 minutes,
16mm) by Jack Chambers is a lyrical mixture of archival and newsreel footage of London,
Ontario mingled with images shot by Chambers himself. The film introduces a deer that is
stalked and killed in downtown London, setting up a struggle between civilization and nature
that permeates the film, through its life and death cycles and the everyday images of life in
London. It is through the visionary collage of this material, its superimpositions and pace that
the film attains its cumulative impact and reputation: The four films of Jack Chambers have
changed the whole history of film, despite their neglect, in a way that isn't even possible within
the field of painting. [34]

Chamber's move from his realist painting to film was realized through his silver paintings. They
were concerned with transforming space to time. As the viewer moved the image fluctuated
between a negative and positive image. [35] These "instant movies" [36] were Chamber's
response to the new demands that photography had placed on representational painting and
moved him though an aesthetic history of cinema to its current technical state, which merges
image and sound.

There are traces of Bacon's "direct" cosmology in Chamber's thinking. Chambers underlines the
critical role of history when he posits that 'Technology is a historic process that learns from itself
and perpetuates what it learns by a tradition, thereby passing on the accomplishments of its
own history''[37] Such an integrative process passes technique through Chambers and Razutis
to Hoolboom, for example, and this is Manovich's evolving database (here already in play
before the emergence of the digital). Technique is viscerally integrated into the body. It is a
conditioning that evolves over time to the manipulative practice, to the adaptation of results to
the nervous system" [38] Meaning is communicated directly to the body and then, for
Chambers, like Bacon, the boredom does not set in.

For Canadian philosopher George Grant this can be a difficult and critical process, especially in
the colonies. The tension at play concerns the margins resisting the center. "We can hold in our
minds the enormous benefits of technological society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it
may have deprived us, because technique is ourselves" [39]. For Grant the modern self is being
colonized from within, perhaps mapped as Foucault's technologized self and McLuhan's body
extensions and connects with Van Alphen's reading of Bacon as loss of self. Loss becomes
difficult to express within such technical topographies, though Parker Tyler has observed that
"The void itself is a ground." [40] It is at such blind spots that Bacon or Chambers can inject
their vision directly into the nervous system and Bacon can elicit the "exhilarating despair" [41]
of the repressed "other" coming into view.

Grant implores "only in listening for the intimations of deprival can we live critically in that
dynamo. [42] We need to articulate a world of "dead identities, dead vision, and an
overwhelming sense of inner dread and anxiety'' [43]. Artists whose inner life is infected by
displacement and rage (Razutis), leukemia (Chambers) and HIV (Hoolboom) are well placed to
use their colonized bodies (their Panic Bodies) as database to directly articulate such depravity.
When the site of such activity takes place within a colony that itself acts as a victim [44], artists
need to develop a layered vision to articulate and transgress that implosive situation.

Chamber's articulation of his creative practice as Perceptual Realism seems to parallel Kroker's
reading of another Canadian thinker, Harold Innis's work as Technological Realism. Innis
"sought to preserve some critical space in Canadian discourse for the recovery of an authentic
sense of time" [45] Innis argues that to foster a stable western culture like Canada, the
countervailing centrifugal and centripetal forces of time/duration and space/territory need to
be in balance. The migration of technique from the United States, as advanced technological
society, to Canada (as advanced dependent state) is evidence of the triumph of the colonizing
monopolies of space: the global electronic media that is seen to be in need of tempering by a
cultural impulse to recover time, to remember.

Now at the post-modern (articulated by Kroker with his compacted swaggering prose, akin to
Hoolboom's gung-ho layered pastiche of image and technique) the fault lines between time and
space have heated and morphed the hype into hyper: hyper-drive, hyper-real, hyper-space,
hyper-aesthetic. This is the triumph of technique as the post-modern (Razutis's legacy): the
current container of Capitalism's "progress".

Within Innis's cultural script the personal cinema of Chambers and Hoolboom especially can be
read as a bulwark, enabling authentic civil discourse, a cultural remembering within Canada by
re-ordering the debris of commercial media activity. Unfortunately for Razutis his displacement
to Canada as "asylum seeker'' from California retraces the trajectory of technique itself and
thus performs a double whammy on his enraged body. There is a trace of Hoolboom's
relationship to Razutis in the subject of Tom; New York experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont,
which allows for a revitalization of Razutis politically charged project.

Summation

And so we arrive again at Hoolboom who, like Razutis, also had his stint in Terminal City [46].
His "Three Decades of Rage" [47] acts as witness advocate and fan to Razutis's rant and his
affiliation to the Escarpment School in Ontario accesses the pedigree of Chamber's leukemia
terminated project. His layered database consists of the history of Canadian reflexive thought, a
life lived in North American avant-garde film, his own activism within its making and the daily
reminder of his own HIV colonized body. This database is directly incorporated into the body of
his work, re-constituted in the biography about biography that is Tom.

Tom salvages the media detritus that we all consume in our daily lives and transforms it into
the matter of some externalized mental bustle that is personal and unique. It is not garbage in,
garbage out after all. The neutering of the avant-garde at the moment it is enabled within the
computer does have a twist, it does not have to be "terminal". Hoolboom has figured out how
to turn his scavenged shit into gold and meet Grant's challenge in a post-modern context by
listening to his body.

It seems as if the surface of cinema itself is the body that is being marked and reconstituted and
"the personal" forever challenged and changed by the infection of this material into the psyche.
As observers there is a directness about this infection that makes it our infection, bubbling away
in our heads, eyes, heart and so on. We can walk away from the cinema and our screens with
that self-belief back in our bodies; that the tools, the strategies, the technique can be found to
re-invent ourselves out of the "new chaos" that Kroker maps out: "unlike billboards in the age
of pavement, these advertisements are injected directly into the veins of the post-flesh body like
bar codes burned into flesh." [48] There is value in history after all. This is what Tom gives to
me.
It can happen here. It has happened before.

Dirk de Bruyn

July 2005

[1] Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon Thames and Hudson London 1975: p.
30

[2] There are several terms that are used interchangeably: fringe film, personal film,
experimental film and video, film and video art. This reflects a kind of homelessness for this
area of art production that now seems to be also reflected in what is now happening with terms
like new media, digital media, multimedia, interactive art and so on.

[3] See Kroker, A., M. Kroker, and D. Cook, Panic Encyclopedia: the definitive guide to the
Postmodern Scene. Culture Texts, Macmillan Basingstoke 1989

Kroker, A. and M. Kroker, Body Invaders : Sexuality and the Postmodern Condition. Macmillan
Education Basingstoke 1988

[4] Kroker, A. and D. Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-
aesthetics. 2nd ed.
St. Martin's Press. New York 1988

[5] It is understood that a number of readers may not have had access to a screening of
Tom, especially Australian readers. For those there are descriptive elements in this text that
leave a trace of the work. Yet even this video's absence from view creates its own mischievous
impact on discussions about erasure, denial and forgetting. I think the primary task is to make
the argument for re-connection can be effectively enough understood without a viewing of Tom.

[6] See <http://www.lux.org.uk/> viewed 8 November 2020.

[7] <http://www.sixpackfilm.com/?lang=en&p=info> viewed 8 November 2020

[8] <http://fmp.lightcone.org:8000/lightcone/us/acc-us.html> viewed 8 November 2020

[9] <http://www.vdb.org/default.html> viewed 8 November 2020

[10] Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre Website: <http:l/www.cfrndc.org/> viewed 8

November 2020

[11] See Elder, Bruce. The Cinema We Need in Canadian Forum Vol LXIV No. 746
(February 1985) pp 227-243. this article that was critical to a discussion around "the cinema we
have" and "the cinema we need" that occurred in Canada in the 80's.

[12] Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press,
2001: p. 243

[13] see: Grant, G., Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. House of
Anansi. Toronto. 1969
[14] See: Innis, H.A., The Bias of Communication. University of Toronto Press. Toronto 1952
And Innis, H.A. and M.Q. Innis, Empire and Communications. University of Toronto Press.
Toronto 1972

[15] Arthur Kroker's own (Kroker, Arthur Technology and the Canadian Mind
Innis/McLuhan/Grant New World Perspectives Montreal 1984) is a good overview of this
tradition and indicates how these theorists connect to each other. In fact Kroker's relationship
and building on the thinkers he investigates compliments Hoolboom's (and others such as Phil
Hoffman and Barbara Sternberg ) relationship to Al Razutis, Jack Chambers, Rick Hancox,
Joyce Weiland, Michael Snow and others.

[16] Chambers. Jack in Elder, Kathryn (ed) The Films of Jack Chambers. Cinematheque,
Ontario 2002: 35

[17] Ibid: 43

[18] Kroker, Arthur Technology and the Canadian Mind Innis/McLuhan/Grant New World
Perspectives Montreal 1984: p. 7

[19] Small, Edward Direct Theory: Experimental Film as Major Genre, Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1994

[20] Ibid.

[21] Van Alphen, Ernst. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self Reaktion Books London 1992

[22] Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon Thames and Hudson London 1975

[23] Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon : p 40

[24] Ibid: 21

[25] Ibid: 22

[26] Ibid: 82

[27] See Shlovsky, Victor. Art as Technique in The Critical Tradition. Ed., David H. Richter,
New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1989

[28] Ibid: 40

[29] Ibid: 18

[30] Ibid: 22

[31] see Al Razutis Website:

<http://www.holonet.khm.deNisual_Alchemy/film_cat.html#amerika> viewed 9 November 2020

[32] Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media: p 307 -to paraphrase Manovich's: In short,
the avant-garde became materialized in a computer.

[33] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill Toronto
1964: p 2

[34] Brakhage, Stan in Elder, Kathryn (ed) The Films of Jack Chambers. Cinematheque,
Ontario 2002: 45

[35] Chambers, Jack n Elder, Kathryn (ed) The Films of Jack Chambers. Cinematheque,
Ontario 2002: 47.

[36] Ibid: 13

[37] Ibid: 35

[38] Ibid: 35

[39] Grant George Technology and Empire : p 137

[40] Quoted by Kardish, Larry in Elder, Kathryn (ed) The Films of Jack Chambers.
Cinematheque, Ontario 2002: p 186

[41] Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon Thames & Hudson London 1975: p 83

[42] Grant George Technology and Empire: p 142

[43] Kroker, Arthur. Technology and the Canadian Mind: p 22

[44] Margaret Atwood makes this argument in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature House of Anansi Toronto 1972

[45] Kroker, Arthur. Technology and the Canadian Mind: p 124

[46] A partly endearing moniker for Vancouver.

[47] Hoolboom, Mike. Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada. Gutter Press
Toronto 1997: pp 56-73

[48] Kroker, Arthur and Weinstein, Michael A. Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual New
World Perspectives, 1994: p 109