Matt Soar: Lost Leaders, March 1, 2014

On Saturday, March 1, at 7 p.m. Counterpath hosted filmmaker and intermedia artist Matt Soar for a talk and screening of his work Lost Leaders in an event in association with the Media Archaeology Lab at CU-Boulder.

Lost Leaders is an ongoing exploration of the ‘ends’ of film: not just the always-imminent demise of physical film stock and chemical processing, but the heads and tails of film reels, most often referred to as ‘leaders’. This ‘hidden’ footage is littered with all kinds of esoteric markings: logos, lab notes, handwriting and type, color tests, projection cues – many of them taking up only one or two frames. Film leaders are doubly ‘lost’, then, due to their routine invisibility from the audience, and their impending obsolescence.

Working with sound artist Jackie Gallant, and a variety of tools (lightbox and macro lens, DSLR video camera and high-powered microscope, interactive narrative software) Lost Leaders is an extended poetic engagement with the ‘metadata’ of film: the graphical residue of film processing, printing, and projection.

Matt Soar is a Montreal-based filmmaker and intermedia artist. He is co-developer of the Korsakow System software, and Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. From February 27 to March 3, 2014, he will be the artist in residence at the Media Archeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.

(Image by Matt Soar)