Mike Hoolboom

Event: Storytellers: Literature and Film

Bio: Mike Hoolboom is a fringe media artist and archaeologist. He has won the best short film award twice at TIFF, for Frank's Cock and Letters from Home. Among his many publications are the novel The Steve Machine and the scholarly film book Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists (both published by Coach House Books). Hoolboom won the Bell Award in Video Art, presented by the Canada Council for the Arts for "exceptional contribution to the advancement of video art and practices in Canada" in 2009.

"Canada's most important avant-garde filmmaker since Michael Snow"
—Cameron Bailey, artistic director, TIFF.

Find out more here.

Book: The Steve Machine
Synopsis: When Auden learns he's HIV-positive, he decides to head for Toronto, leaving behind Sudbury and his old personality. Determined to construct a whole new Auden, he gets a new job, new clothes, new habits, new friends, new ways of speaking. And all of these things seem to be leading him inevitably towards Steve, Steve Reinke.

Steve—and here's where it gets confusing—is, in real life as well as in The Steve Machine, a renowned video artist (The Hundred Videos), someone who makes television for one person at a time, small-screen excursions that cure migraines and allow viewers to see five seconds into the future.

Book: Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists
Synopsis: In Practical Dreamers, twenty-seven artists dish about how they get it done and why it matters. The conversations are personal, up close and jargon free, smart without smarting.
Mike Hoolboom talks footage recycling with Alessa Cohene (Supposed To) and Jubal Brown (Life Is Pornography); investigates the documentaries of Donigan Cumming (My Dinner With Weegee); looks at the Middle East with Jayce Salloum (This Is Not Beirut); discusses identity with queer Asian avatars Richard Fung (Dirty Laundry), Midi Onodera (The Displaced View) and Ho Tam (The Yellow Pages), and First Nations vets Kent Monkman (Blood River) and Shelley Niro (Honey Moccasin); and addresses the visions of Peter Mettler (Gambling, Gods and LSD).