30 / 30 -- Thirty Years of Hamilton Artists Inc

This video was initially six metres wide by two and a half metres tall, and had separately-edited intertitles. The audio was initially presented in a three-channel discreet mono format with stereo music accompaniment.

Without prejudice toward the previous fifty, I am fond of the last twelve minutes of the video.

Now 30 / 30 can be watched in a crappy online version, taken from a DVD source that I made a year and a half ago. The text remains readable on lower-resolution monitors, but is a bit small for 1680 or 1920. Frankly, some sacrifices need to be made to ensure a large distribution with a minimal cost. Perhaps I will format this for a 60 by 90 pixel cellphone to make the film eminently portable and completely unwatchable. Then I would surely feel as though the video had "made it".

Notes from the DVD:

30 / 30
a video by Quintin Hewlett, done in 2006

30 / 30 is an impressionistic celebration of art as it is practised in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. The impetus for this video project was to document the 30th anniversary of Hamilton Artists Inc., which is one of the oldest and most influential artist-run centres in Canada.

Diverging memories, artist feuds, technical issues – the loss of the audio masters to the digital ether, a continuously degrading camera – and reluctant or reclusive participants served to obscure an easy description of the Inc.

A polyphonous dialogue emerged from the ruined attempt at linear narrative. It was decided that any representation of the Inc. would not be authentic if it did not attempt to contain the various agreements, innuendos, discord, observations, myths, and political positioning between the members of the Inc.’s democracy.

An interview between two artists of the Inc.’s “second generation” in the 1990s is the structural locus for 30 / 30. This interview was itself structured upon the board game Trouble, which was chosen to serve as an aesthetic distillation of the interview process as well as a gag intended for Inc. insiders, for whom the two players represent the “troubling” of the Inc. The filmmaker chose to himself participate by the rules of the game being played, typically in the form of camera movement and thematic juxtaposition between events in the game and images juxtaposed in the other video field.

The video ends with two gestures of disruption, one material and the other symbolic. Alternately, they are optimistic and pessimistic toward the future success of Hamilton Artists Inc. The filmmaker intended this ambivalence to avoid the principle difficulty inherent to any “career retrospective”, namely that the summation of past glories suggests a decidedly inglorious future.

The video here presented was initially formatted for a large-screen and wide-stereo-image presentation at the Hamilton Artist Inc. gallery for December 2005 and May 2006. Fonts and graphics were resized for better display on conventional televisions, and the audio has been reduced from one stereo background music source and three discreet mono interview sources to one stereo image. Headphone monitoring is highly recommended.