New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry Digital Arts Media Symposium

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Jon McRae

Visitors interacting with a videopoem in Poets with a Video Camera.

Photo by Four Eyes Portraits.

Convened by Surrey-based poet and critic Tom Konyves, this event will include a keynote talk by Sarah Tremlett, author of The Poetics of Poetry Film (University of Chicago, 2021). There will also be a panel presentation and discussions with Daniel H. Dugas, Annie Frazier Henry, Heather Haley, Kurt Heintz, Adeena Karasick & Jim Andrews, Valerie LeBlanc, Matt Mullins, Javier Robledo, and Fiona Tinwei Lam. Poet Adeena Karasick will give a performance.

The poets and artists gathered for the symposium will discuss the defining features of this hybrid artform, the institutional histories, and the role of collaboration. This event is for those curious to learn about videopoetry for the first time as well as practitioners of the artform.

This year’s symposium is inspired by the Gallery’s fall exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980–2020 on until December 11 and guest curated by Tom Konyves. This marks the first comprehensive retrospective of videopoetry in a Canadian art museum.

About the Convener

Born in Budapest and based in Montreal until 1983, Tom Konyves is one of the original seven poets dubbed The Vehicule Poets. A graduate of Concordia University, he joined Montreal's first artist-run centre Vehicule Art in 1977 where he was instrumental in forming the “group of seven” who produced some of Montreal's most original multimedia performances, collage texts, videopoems, literary magazines, and books for their time. After he moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s—and later to Surrey, BC where he currently lives—Konyves continued to develop his literary and video practice. Konyves has produced videopoems for over five decades and his works have been exhibited at every major poetry film festival held in continental Europe, as well as Argentina, the UK, Canada, and the US. He is noted for writing the 2011 essay "Videopoetry: A Manifesto" that is considered “a fascinating and necessary pioneering contribution to the field of poetry and videopoetry, specifically” and has had more than 30 000 views from 67 countries and been translated into four languages. The Weimar Germany Poetry Festival and the Oeiras Poetry Festival in Portugal honoured him with a retrospective of his works in 2020 and 2021 respectively. He has published seven books of poetry and a surrealist novella in addition to many essays and reviews.