• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts, is a singular effort, a visually exuberant work that is also on the vanguard of theoretical engagement, a symbiosis of form and content, in full-colour throughout, inclusive of extensive imagery, graphic intrigues and typographical accent - a rare and desirable art-infused statement of the city's media art scene - now.

DAMP is a long overdue critical engagement regarding the specificities of contemporary Vancouver media arts. The editors' effort is not so much to look to the past, nor to confine themselves within the borders of a collective of one sort or another. Their intent is to examine and speak to the now and the future of practice in Vancouver, its relationship to world art-media, and to the strategies of artists in this particular region. Origins of thought - from First Nations source code onwards - create a framework and starting point from which to study this mediacity. By re-focussing on the relative unknowns of this scene - the hidden and supressed histories, the city's internal and external mythologies and imaginary futures - they are revealing a plainly visible but unacknowledged praxis. DAMP will act as a catalyst for discussion that stretches well beyond this locale, as it creates response and reaction from points east, internal, and beyond nation borders.

DAMP includes over 25 contributions from such artists as Laiwan, Fiona Bowie, Ann Marie Fleming, David Rimmer, Warren Arcan, and Yum Lam Li, and critical essays by such well respected Vancouver theorists as Clint Burnham, Jayce Salloum, and Randy Lee Cutler.

Praise for DAMP:

BC Books for BC Schools Pick

"A terminal city primer stuffed to bursting with ideas about the city as a movie. Here Vancouver appears at last beyond the reach of condo moguls and dime store politicos, re-imagined instead as a first person picture crawl all wrapped up in candy coated word balloons and champagne prose. Here are the dissenters, the ones who have run out of real estate but never ideas, the underground comics and lush life photographs, the alien spotters and new media theorists. Essential stuff." (Mike Hoolboom, filmmaker and author of Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada)

"Vancouver's experimental film and media culture is a tenacious and many-rooted weed, far from the cultural centres of Canada, North America, and the world and unwarmed by the city's Hollywood hothouse. As the late Ken Anderlini writes inside, our media art scene may be what saves Vancouver, precisely because it's one of the few things in our city that is not for sale. From our damp city's volatile humus grows this book, its beautiful and uncategorizable pages composing a variegated, weird, enchanting flower." (Laura U. Marks, Associate Professor and Dena Wosk, University Professor in Art and Culture Studies, Simon Fraser University)

"The impressions of Vancouver captured by its leading new media artists and theorists in this collection are both more anxious and credible than the ersatz Hollywood movies, TV shows and real estate ads that emanate from the corporate coast. The artists depict their city as a place perpetually in a state of becoming, as ungraspable as rain, whose direction can only be inferred by its traces, like charged particles in a cloud chamber. In this dance of decay and fluorescence, the only constants are the ache of loss and the effervescence of the new." (Liam Lacey, Arts and Film Contributor, The Globe and Mail)

Oliver Hockenhull has had critical essays published in many art magazines in Canada—such as C, POV, and Fuse. He is also a noted filmmaker and media artist whose works screen around the globe—from numerous Vancouver International Film Festival screenings to screenings at MOMA, Melbourne, Kerala, Rotterdam, Chicago, Amsterdam, Paris, etc.

Oliver Hockenhull's profile page

Alex Mackenzie was founder and curator of both the Blinding Light Cinema and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He is past editor of Workprint, 250W and contributed to a variety of publications including Take One Magazine and various gallery and festival catalogues and imprints. His media work has screened throughout Europe and North America. He is also an accomplished graphic designer, having worked with, among others, Infinity Features, the National Film Board of Canada, Tabata Productions, Omni Film, and a broad range of film publicity and music CD packaging concerns.

Alex MacKenzie's profile page

Damp: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art