One of the most highly anticipated nights of the Images Festival took place last night... we mean it when we say night. No Images was, as the name suggests, completely antithetical to the experimental film and video festival's raison d'etre of "moving image culture," unless you count the images dancing on your retina. A concert of experimental music and sound art taking place in total darkness, No Images was every bit the sensory-deprivation head-trip it promised to be. A large crowd came out to the Innis Town Hall, which somehow got permission from the U of T powers-that-be to black out everything including exit signs within its boxy confines. Ushers led the crowd row by row, hand in hand, to their seats, aided only by flashlights. Even waiting for the show to start was a tense experience. 100% darkness is something we rarely experience with our eyes open, and it's a little disturbing to realize your eyes are adjusting — because, deep in the black, there's nothing to adjust to. The show consisted of four performances, with a hilariously terse introduction by co-presenter, Christof Migone (the Montreal conceptual artist who is currently director/curator of the Blackwood Gallery at U of T Mississauga).

Two of the performances were primarily spoken-word-based, with Annie MacDonell leading things off with a friendly tour through the concept of "room tone" (the sound a room makes when left it total "silence"), and both she and closer Alex Snukal referenced the Cagean notion of "Silence," and the impossibility thereof: when all our senses are stripped away, we are still left with the high-pitched sound of our own nervous system. Snukal, contrary to his persona as cuddly electro boffin AnimalMonster, took on the voice of an art-world Darth Vader, reinforcing his total control over the crowd with an entirely text-based piece that in its self-referentiality, recalled Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room. (Note: I found out the following night that it wasn't in fact Snukal, but the voice of Jonathan Adjemian.) The Voice of God(dess), however, came from Mary Margaret O'Hara, projected overhead in a humorous, multi-speaker voice collab with her niece, Alexis O'Hara, which also featured a invisible dance piece. The surround-speaker set-up was also employed for Ryan Driver's piece for (by the sounds of it) thumb-ruler and mouth-reeds, which also featured a wordless female vocalist, and given the level of its abstraction, was the most alienating of the four performances. Overall, a memorable experience and testament to the inescapable power of sound.

Tonight (April 7), Images Festival takes over our beloved SPK a.k.a. the Polish Combatants Hall, at 206 Beverley Street, south of College. The fourth of this year's Live Images series, at 9:30pm, is entitled Revenge of the Theory Persons, or Don't Just Sit There,
Gentle Presence, and it is curated and presented by
Toronto artists Oliver Husain and Kathleen Smith. I'm not really sure what to expect of this piece, but the program describes it as a series of "short films with a dance or movement bias, accompanied by an arrangement or re-arrangement of everyday objects." This will be followed at 11pm by a Super-8 fim program, the first Toronto edition of the One Take Super 8 Event (OTS8!) from Regina, Saskatchewan, in which films are created using just a single cartridge of Super-8 film.