More, Less, About the Same | A Video by Alyssa Bornn

October 17- November 17, 2019
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art | 1, 460 Portage Ave | Winnipeg MB | Canada

From October 17 to November 17, 2019, Plug In ICA is screening More, Less, About the Same (2019) by Alyssa Bornn in our Breezeway as part of  Labour of Love: On Digital Economies in the Arts, a series of lectures, screenings, and workshops focused on digital economies of labour in the arts. Bornn’s video is a compilation of notebook fragments approximating a confession or the act of confiding of some things about pet death, mothers, houses, monotony, relationships, and/or photography. More, Less, About the Same is written and sequenced on the Videonics Titlemaker 2000. Bornn uses a piece equipment designed to subtitle video input as both a machine for writing as well as a way to animate text and images. Rather than a textual accompaniment to visual input, the artist’s texts are the visual input.

Labour of Love or LOL, takes the “public course” as a platform for engagement, this program highlights the various ways in which the digital is interrogated, explored, celebrated, pushed to its limit, reworked, re-invented by artists, scholars, curators, writers and others. The course encompasses a full array of events, delving into such topics as coding, circuit bending, VR, AI and AR, gaming, scanning, and 3D printing. Divided into two streams, a lecture and screening series, and workshops, Labour of Love at its most general examines the relationship between the economics of labour and the digital arts as it contends with the conditions of racial capitalism. As a research platform, we aim to build an understanding of the digital by presenting artists who invent new trajectories through various technologies.

Alyssa Bornn is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and organizer based in Winnipeg. Her practice regularly utilizes traditional photographic methods alongside alternative and outdated digital modes of image capture. In particular her work is centred around ideas relating to transference, interchangeability, medium non-specificity, language, failure, and the poetics of technical processes. She holds a BFA (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba and is a member of Open City Cinema, the co-director of the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, and an active member in Light Terrors – a loose collective showcasing moving image and audio works as live performance. She has run workshops for Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, PAVED Arts, and independently as Professional Development.

This program is made possible through the Digital Strategy Fund: Digital Literacy and Intelligence by the Canada Council for the Arts.

All lectures and screenings are free and open to the public.