The Flitter and The giST n

Graham Parker shot 100 hours of footage (working with cinematographer Ben Tiven) while in residence at EMPAC during January 2010 for two projects, The Flitter and The giST n. Both works were included in Parker’s solo show at EMPAC, The Confidence Man. The giST n is a partial recreation of a “making of” documentary entitled The Art of The Sting (which accompanied the DVD of the 1973 film The Sting). Initially in a familiar documentary form, the piece quickly becomes unreliable: performance styles vary; microphones intrude; takes extend for too long or are cut short; line rehearsals make it to the final cut. At times it is not clear what is being described (a film? a con?) and every witness, in front of and behind the camera, becomes suspect. In The Flitter, writer and performer Carl Hancock Rux delivers a monologue based on text (including spam emails and a short essay on the phenomenon of spam fed through indexing software and alphabetized by the first letter of each line so that the essay and surrounding texts are “dissolved” together) derived from Parker’s 2009 book Fair Use (notes from spam).