Bruce Elder

Biography

Bruce Elder’s professional work is divided into two distinct fields: he works as an artist, making personal films; and as a cultural theorist, publishing articles, papers and books on art and culture. His film work has been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Film Workshop, Berlin’s Kino Arsensal, Paris’ Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles’ Film Forum, Stadtfilmmuseum München, and Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis. Retrospectives of his work have been presented by Anthology Film Archives (NY), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinématheque Québecoise, Il Festival Senzatitolo (Trento), Images ‘97 (Toronto) and the Antechamber (Regina).
Since 1982, Elder’s films have made increasing use of digital image processing techniques. His interest in the mathematics of digital image processing led him to study and to publish on computer programming and artificial intelligence and to a voting membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. Recently, he was awarded a Canada Council/NSERC New Media Initiatives grant (with Dr. Ling Guan, Canada Research Chair, Multimedia Engineering), a Ryerson Research Chair and a Research/Creation Grant in Fine Arts from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to make a film applying innovative methods in image processing and machine learning to producing a film on alchemical themes.
He has published dozens of articles – on electronic music, painting, film, photography, social theory, literature and philosophy. Elder is also the author of a key text on Canadian culture, entitled Image & Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. In 1997, he published A Body of Vision, a book which looks at representations of the body in poetry and avant-garde film, and in 1998 brought out The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition. He has received grants for writing and publication from the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and SSHRC, including a three-year grant to work on the topic of the cinema’s relation to artistic movements of the twentieth century. He has given guest lectures at many universities, film centres and galleries, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada.
Bruce. Elder serves as Ryerson’s Program Director of the York University/Ryerson University Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture.

Conference

" Multiple Screen Works and their Relation to the Conception of Seeing as Production "

This paper takes an historical approach to considering the motivations for the use of multiple screens. It considers, first, films that made use of multiple images/multiple screens and the commentary on them – commentary that anticipates the contemporary rhetoric about the capacity of interactive forms to liberate the viewer by giving him/her a more productive role. Theorists of new media have often claim that digital media have increased the capacity for interactivity and liberation to such an extent that it has assumed a different character. The paper offers a critical examination of this claim, first, by considering analogous claims propounded in theories of cinema and, second, by considering efforts of nineteen and early twentieth century visual artist to accord the spectator a more productive role. The paper examines epistemological crisis that precipitated these efforts of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists, a crises brought on by the repudiation of the belief that sensation reports an external world and a growing acceptance that the world we know is a world our minds forge.