Brief Profile: Tasman Richardson, Video Artist - Neubacher Shor ...
Brief Profile: Tasman Richardson, Video Artist - Neubacher Shor ...
Brief Profile: Tasman Richardson, Video Artist - Neubacher Shor ...
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<strong>Brief</strong> <strong>Profile</strong>: <strong>Tasman</strong> <strong>Richardson</strong>, <strong>Video</strong> <strong>Artist</strong><br />
11-06-09 2:15 PM<br />
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<strong>Brief</strong> <strong>Profile</strong>: <strong>Tasman</strong> <strong>Richardson</strong>, <strong>Video</strong> <strong>Artist</strong><br />
No comments // Mar 3rd, 2006 // Posted in <strong>Video</strong> by Andrea<br />
Imagine yourself as a teenager, hanging out in your mom’s basement amongst ratty sofas, wood panelling,<br />
and the smell of laundry detergent. You are in the prime of your girl-free, geek-lovin’ youth, and you are<br />
about to enjoy four hours of video games and Star Wars pissing contests with your three as-equallyenthused<br />
buddies. Do you remember that flush in your cheek when Princess Leia jumps around in a bikini?<br />
Do you remember the burn in your mouth from too many salt-and-vinegar chips? How about the sore throat<br />
after singing falsetto along with Iron Maiden while standing on the couch for too long?<br />
Dude, you have just relived Toronto-based <strong>Tasman</strong> <strong>Richardson</strong>’s world of the “basement boy,” to which he<br />
has dedicated his video art masterpiece, “Basement Boy Hardcore”.<br />
Self-described as “a semi-autobiographical self-marginalizing identity based investigation of North<br />
American geek culture cross-pollinated with breakbeat hardcore,” this dvd is a hypnotic collection of short<br />
videos that explore different icons in western geekdom. These icons include things like Star Wars, Black<br />
Sabbath, ninjas, and the well-loved shoot ‘em up videogames from our youth. What makes this video<br />
collection so amazing is <strong>Richardson</strong>’s unique editing technique – by treating the audio and visual elements<br />
of video as an organic whole, he manages to compose driving hardcore beats as he cuts and pastes each<br />
frame together. The result is a frenetic, startling audio/visual experience created out of familiar images from<br />
our hormonal youth.<br />
I learned more about <strong>Richardson</strong> and his work after talking to him between his trips abroad:<br />
ST: What is your training?<br />
TR: I majored in New Media for four years at OCAD and graduated in 1996.<br />
ST: Tell me more about your crazy-ass editing-for-sound technique. How did you develop it? What are the<br />
ups and downs that you’ve experience in using this type of editing style?<br />
TR: The technique is a progression from the literary cutups of Bryan Gysin and William Buroughs but it’s<br />
also influenced by more recent works by Coldcut. I was working on these old AB roll decks which are just<br />
tape rolling back and forth, so you can imagine how impossible it was to be precise with cuts this fast or<br />
http://silenttalkie.com/2006/03/03/video/brief-profile-tasman-richardson-video-artist/<br />
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<strong>Brief</strong> <strong>Profile</strong>: <strong>Tasman</strong> <strong>Richardson</strong>, <strong>Video</strong> <strong>Artist</strong><br />
11-06-09 2:15 PM<br />
small (1/30 of a second). It was all just cut and paste or pause and record if you know what I mean, but then<br />
along came digital non-linear editing in the form of a very crappy early incarnation called “Perception” for<br />
PC and before you knew it I had churned out five new videos, all of them in the style that I’d been wanting<br />
to express. After all this time, it’s still those first five that are the clearest primitive break way from standard<br />
practice.<br />
The technique is not so much about editing for sound as it is editing for symbolism and immediacy on all<br />
levels. I mean, yes, I listen to a clip and think ‘that sounds good’ but it needs to look good and if I freeze<br />
frame, it needs to have a strong composition. Each clip needs to visualize AND auralize something<br />
significant. Then when they all play together you get harmonies of information instead of noise.<br />
ST: Tell me more about your collective, www.famefame.com. How did you guys get involved with each<br />
other? What are the benefits/drawbacks?<br />
TR: FAMEFAME was born out of an earlier collective called JAWA. That’s a whole story in itself but I’ll<br />
cut it short. Jubal Brown and myself were already collaborating and I felt the need to take all my work in<br />
different mediums and place it under a banner… some kind of seal of approval or quality and that was<br />
FAMEFAME. It wasn’t officially founded until Josh Avery and Elenore Chesnutt started producing work<br />
that was complimentary to this goal. Then we drafted the manifesto, got our tattoos of loyalty and started<br />
the work.<br />
Since then, we have a new member, Alana Didur. FAMEFAME is complex because in some ways it’s a<br />
parody of many recognizable institutions, a record label, an artist collective, a curatorial body, an events<br />
promoter, a design house, etc. We work with everything from vinyl records to kinetic sculpture, although<br />
our main concern lately has been video in the JAWA style or<br />
the updated FAMEFAME style.<br />
ST: What do you think of the Toronto arts scene? I am particularly interested in your thoughts, as you have<br />
had so much international exposure and can view the local scene with a more objective eye.<br />
TR: This scene is very important because many cities don’t have anything like it. The artist-run side of<br />
things is very much in balance with the commercial. People may scoff at that but if you go to Paris of Tokyo<br />
you’ll feel crushed by the ridiculous demands of commercial venues and the impossible submissions process<br />
for getting noticed. There’s a lot of creative, underground sort of venue work being done in these places to<br />
counteract the commercial imbalance but that’s something we don’t have here, not to the same extreme. I<br />
didn’t appreciate that until recently but I’m really proud of it when I go anywhere outside of Canada. I’ve<br />
turned into this crazy nationalist canadiana pusher.<br />
The biggest problem with Toronto now is that we have it so good and we don’t know it so instead of<br />
keeping the artist run culture sharp and raising standards, there’s a tendency, especially in video, to dumb it<br />
down as some kind of accessibility thing for the public. That’s bullshit and it’s sad because when you lower<br />
the standard it’s harder to raise it again later. It’s not bi-directional, you can’t just give it a try and see. Once<br />
you start showing kid-friendly anti-intellectual, 40 year old identity base work you’re going to introduce an<br />
audience that naturally loves it because they’re just getting to know it for the first time. It’s our<br />
responsibility to bring the audience into the present, or even the future of the medium, not wow them with<br />
nostalgic concepts.<br />
It seems like Toronto will always have these two type of screenings as a result: the public surface art which<br />
http://silenttalkie.com/2006/03/03/video/brief-profile-tasman-richardson-video-artist/<br />
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<strong>Brief</strong> <strong>Profile</strong>: <strong>Tasman</strong> <strong>Richardson</strong>, <strong>Video</strong> <strong>Artist</strong><br />
11-06-09 2:15 PM<br />
is simplified, and the clique powered aficionado types that are so well versed in a medium that the average<br />
person has no hope of fitting in. We need to break that and find a way to introduce mature, complex themes<br />
in a easy to enjoy format. That’s what FAMEFAME is trying to do, and I hope we succeed.<br />
You can find more about <strong>Tasman</strong> <strong>Richardson</strong>’s work at www.famefame.com. You can also order a copy of<br />
“Basement Boy Hardcore” from their online shop.<br />
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