Collaborators in Adventures in Research Creation (ARC) met again in Montreal on January 27 & 28 for further explorations into Korsakow. Midi Onodera and Phil Hoffman were back in town from Toronto, with Vicki Lean, MFA candidate in Film Production at York, and MBA, who is working as Phil’s assistant on this project. Vicki has made a Korsakow film using her father’s 8mm home-movie footage (which we’re now curious to see), so she’s well-placed to assist on Phil’s new K-film project. Phil is working with the late Marion McMahon’s archive, including her unfinished film project as well as various stories, notes and images from her personal archive. Midi continued to work on Midi’s Mystic Oracle of Axioms which she has just completed and will be revealing on her own website on Feb 29, so make sure you consult about your future later this month! has now launched: Midi’s Mystic Oracle of Axioms.

Working methods seemed to be this workshop’s implicit lesson as we peeked into the “back end” of people’s projects, the “Main Window” and “SNU Editors” that reveal a project’s architecture and the methods in the making: How many actual SNUs (smallest narrative units) were used, what keywords and what are their interrelationships? Midi talked about making the Mystic Oracle as a learning exercise to better comprehend first-hand how the K-system functioned. Her beautiful use of complex graphics and sounds evoke a clairvoyant’s mystic fortune tellings, an interesting paradox between the seemingly ephemeral psychic ability to see into the future and the rigourous structure that in fact guides one prediction to another in a strictly-determined set of relations.

While Midi’s project seemed one of deliberate construction and careful building and progressive adding on, Phil talked about the voluminous materials from Marion’s archive, and the relative freedom that Korsakow allowed in simply incorporating materials without excessive deliberation, and then inviting another force to be at work in decision-making and movement from SNU to SNU once broad keywords provided some thematizing. (Technically speaking, this would be Korsakow’s algorithms, but Phil seemed to leave this more open…) So, his film could work at multiple registers through keywording: archives, poetics, journaling, travel… Not unlike his earlier films (think ?O, Zoo!)

Also joining us this round was Nicole Robicheau, who is doing her MA in Media Studies in Communication Studies at Concordia, and working on a fascinating project about the Canada-US border at Stanstead QC and Derbyline VT. Employing voice interviews with locals in both towns and still photographs she took while doing fieldwork, Nicole is using Korsakow for the first time. Yet her seamless sound editing, her impeccable sound quality and rich content wouldn’t give this away (demonstrating her experience as a journalist for CBC). Using photographic ‘stills’ and keeping a listener/viewer engaged is no small feat, which she’s attained already in these early stages. The insights into the changing nature of this border are numerous, as local townspeople from both sides tell of the border’s history and increasing surveillance since 9/11.

ARC co-director Matt Soar also presented some of his preliminary SNUs for Ceci n’est pas Embres, mesmerizing rotoscoped images of road travels, still-photo collages with voice-over conversations of he and his family from winter 2010 in the miniscule town of Embres in France. He’s been working with editor, Dayna McLeod, who was also present and gave mini-workshops on subtitles and her signature ‘pop’ editing style of jump-cutting interviews, Korsakow programmer Dave Reisch dropped by on Day 2, and I (Monika Kin Gagnon), was also there, trying out the latest version ‘candidate,’ Korsakow 5.0.6, while playing with my films for Dayna’s amazing weekly video production challenge, 52 pick-up. We meet again in April.