In the early 1960ies, a number of filmmakers emerged in the United States and Europe to produce remarkable films that challenged any previous formal tendency in avant-garde filmmaking. The Structuralist filmmakers— including Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Kurt Kren––arranged their shots according to mathematical principles, attempting to produce non-narrative and non-illusionist films to oppose the cinematic apparatus.

DIM Cinema presents a selection of archival work by New York artist Leslie Thornton in parallel with her exhibition at Vancouver’s Unit 17. A pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, Thornton works at the limits of cinema, video, and digital media. Films such as X-TRACTS and Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue, both screening here, have coloured the development of her oeuvre over subsequent decades.

At a time when images are increasingly subject to digital processing through a multiplicity of technologies and formats, artists are confronted by a plethora of visual and expressive possibilities. The 16mm films and videos by New York artists assembled for this programme present personal ways of chemically or digitally manipulating moving images.

Works by Peggy Ahwesh, Katherine Bauer, Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime), Sarah Halpern, Josh Lewis, Zach Nader, Keith Sanborn, Leslie Thornton, Matt Town