The Homage/After… project (20%) asks students to design a video or media installation, or a performance piece in the style of one of the artist’s discussed in the class. The project will take form as a proposal for the work and include: 1) a description of the original work to be re-invented; 2) a working title and an outline of the proposed work as it responds to the original production; 3) a statement of your intentions in revisiting and revising the themes of the original work; 4) a description of the formal and/or material components, as well as the spatial arrangements of the final work; and 5) illustrations of key visual, textual or sound elements. The illustrations can refer to the original work or other relevant works. (750 – 1000 words, typed DOUBLE-SPACED and HARDCOPY) To be submitted and presented in class during the final week of class, December 9.
Example The Creators: A Recreation of The Sleepwalkers by Doug Aitken
Entitled The Creators, my project will involve the recreation of an installation work by video artist Doug Aitken. I’m interested in reworking an homage to New York City that the artist produced this past year. Aitken’s The Sleepwalkers, a multi-layered narrative work, involved multiple projections, on eight large screens installed on the buildings facing the Museum of Modern Art in downtown NYC. The Sleepwalkers told the story of five different NYC inhabitants as they moved through the streets and passages of the city at night. In particular, the work sought to reveal areas of the city otherwise unseen or unnoticed–abandoned underground rail systems, spaces behind signs, in alleyways. Involved in real and fantastic scenarios, Aitken’s characters seemed only partially awake as they traveled through urban space; when situations occurred and events unfolded they did so in both actual and dreamtime. After the businessman collided with a taxicab, we saw him dancing on its rooftop. When the office worker daydreamed in the photocopy room, the office turned into a concert hall. As the press release for The Sleepwalkers states “the characters provide a blueprint for the metropolis as a living, breathing organism fueled by the desires, energies and ambitions of its inhabitants.” The characters’ dreams thus represented the myriad of possibilities offered by the city.
The Creators will adapt the idea of nocturnal fantasy experience of the urban environment to the setting of Montreal. Like The Sleepwalkers, The Creators will comprise a series of short narrative, video works featuring different characters’ experiences of the city at night, but my project will present artists and other cultural workers as characters instead of business men, office workers and the like, and the fantasy sequences will be willed instead of involuntary, creative acts of interpretation, historical recollection and storytelling. My intention in revising the character’s roles and the nature of the events unfolded in the story is to underscore the active and creative nature of social and civic transformation. Dreams may fuel possibilities for existence but vision and engagement makes social experiences and cities change.
Like Aitken’s work, The Creators will also be installed on multiple screens erected on buildings in Montreal’s downtown core. But, where Aitken clustered his screens around the one museum, mine will be dispersed amongst many and also projected onto other buildings in the city’s centre. Projections will be sited on the Contemporary and Fine Arts museums’ walls, certainly, but also on the architecture of surrounding sites that have different historical, political, commercial and cultural significance for the city– the Hydro Quebec building, City Hall, Palais de justice, buildings along the Lachine Canal, the old port and Griffintown, for example. In each instance an artist will be invited to animate the site by producing a time-based narrative for projection, about the space itself or about a contemporary or historical figure or community that has contributed to shaping the character of the site via creative endeavor, and hence the city of Montréal as a whole. The only restrictions are that the artists work with the large-scale projection format, and that the stories involve the surface of projection in the setting of the stories.
In Aitken’s work the exterior projections functioned to enliven the urban environment, the projections acting as psychic ascriptions of human impulses onto physical sites and, more simply, as dynamic and dramatic filmic displays. So too, the various projections in The Creators will work to develop symbolic correspondences between individual and collective desires and ambitions and the shaping of physical space. The installation and scale of the film works in The Creators will be similarly impressive for their exterior situation and as emotionally affective in their animation of otherwise static space. But where the clustering of screens on proximate buildings in The Sleepwalkers meant to provide a physically restricted site for the spatial unfolding of the story so to contain the different narratives in a singular site and link the experiences of each character, my proposed work will disperse the screens across a larger environment in an effort to isolate each character and experience – physically as well as temporally – from each other. The overall effect will be to tell a story of collective effort that transpires across time and space and so imagines the city as an entity that is uneven in developments but nonetheless continual in its process of unfolding. Similarly, the spatial and temporal dispersal of characters and situations suggests that individual experience is distinct in time and circumstance as well as space, but has collective import and significance. The stories will still be linked, by virtue of their common purpose and by a common design, and even more importantly by consequence: each alone they represent a part of a whole of stories of historical events, figures and incidents that together make up the the larger narrative of Montréal. 
