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The Wooden Lightbox: A secret art of seeing artist: Alex Mackenzie curated by Zoë Constantinides At Concordia University’s downtown Montreal campus on February 15, 2010, Alex MacKenzie performed The Wooden Lightbox live in an intimate setting with a hand-cranked 16mm projector built from various relic parts and framed in an austere wooden box. The manual operation of the projector, placed in the middle of the audience, invokes a pre-electronic, pre-digital era of moving pictures, when aesthetic astonishment was achieved through stagecraft and mechanical mastery. In the role of travelling projectionist, MacKenzie renews a tradition of itinerant exhibition from a time when the endurance of cinema was not seen as a given, and the shape of the medium’s future was yet undetermined. Through this invocation of the early days of cinema, The Wooden Lightbox confronts our taste for novelty and challenges the amnesia of new media discourses, demonstrating how concepts of mobility, interactivity, and visual wonder have long been central to moving image innovation. Following the performance, MacKenzie spoke about his practice and took questions from the audience. |