Thanks to new technologies, artists can now make 3D films and play them like melodic, texture-based visual instruments in real time, performing in duets with acoustic musicians. A new genre of collaborative performance is in the making, as demonstrated in “Minimus 3D Arkestra,” a visual-sonic concert by Ikuo Nakamura (film) and Hayes Greenfield (sax/voice/effects rig).

The performance weaves three-dimensional film narratives, from the celestial to the terrestial — shot by Nakamura in stunning, remote and dramatic locations — into the fiercely innovative live acoustic and electronic music by Greenfield. Visuals include the Aurora Borealis (shot in the Canadian Northwest Territories), subways of NYC, canyons in Utah, villages in the Andes and scenes of Easter Island in the Pacific. Nakamura’s films are shot with two identical cameras in stereo 3-D and none of them are computer-generated. Similarly, none of Greenfield’s music is sampled or pre-recorded; it is entirely acoustic and performed live, in real time.

Using abstraction, animation, and re-enactments, Toronto-based artist Jean-Paul Kelly — the 2014 recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award for “artistic excellence in the moving image” at the New York Film Festival — has created a powerful series of short videos that examine the attractors and repulsors of various forms of media representation. Details from documentaries, press cuttings, publications, and online media streams are isolated, superimposed, composited, and otherwise reconfigured into new meanings — often in disturbing pairings of pleasure and pain, desire and trauma. The centrepiece of the program, Service of the goods, is a shot-by-shot reproduction of scenes from Frederick Wiseman documentaries, which have been stripped of their naturalistic signifiers to bring underlying ideologies into sharper focus. “This film is not only a bang-on piece of filmic analysis; it also poses fundamental questions about the representation of social institutions, and those stuck inside of them” (Michael Sicinski, Keyframe Magazine).