Spotlight
The Province
Friday, May 17, 1968

INTERMEDIA - N I G H T S -

The mysterious Who of Intermedia
By JAMES SPEARS

Discovering what Intermedia is can be an easy and a pleasant talk with one of the involved, but discovering WHO is Intermedia is another matter.

In fact, a chat with two of the involved artists preparing for Intermedia Nights at the Vancouver Art Gallery indicate that it is better not to know.

Perhaps one-hundredth of the Who of Intermedia is Denis Vance, who prefers at the moment to be called a "sound sculptor." With two other Intermediamen, and Helen Goodwin, he is making and doing and feeling an event, an "environment" called +/- 216, (named after a star) which will be danced and seen Thursday at the Gallery.

Not only that, he is making a taped score for VAG-comissioned Prisma exhibit by Michael Morris and Gary Lee-Nova. That exhibit is partly a series of mirrors designed to bring into being reflected creations and partly a "joy-stick" which controls a compendium of programmed lights and sounds into the mirrored enclosure.

But at the Gallery he was stringing wires from a John Masciuch-invented series of neon tubes, which were partially designed to accommodate the Helen Goodwin dancers by Ted Young, an architect who came into Intermedia.

Vance freely admitted that cubes, turned him on. And that, with this current project and the help of Intermedia, he was able to work with a wild assortment of cube-effects. By extensions, the magic number for the environment is four, with four dancers, and four of many other things.

But when questioned, "who are all the other people at Intermedia, and what are all the other people at Intermedia, and what are they doing?" he did not, and could not talk.

When people ask him these verbal things like names, and projects, and meaning, he said that he could only show. Thats why he is an artist.

Helen Goodwin, who formerly was called a dancer and choreographer, and who is now an "environmentalist," sat quietly alongside Vance. She too is an artist, and at any minute she looked as if she might rise and dance out her communication,

Even more than that, it seemed that she wanted those near her to interview her through movement instead of words. But all too often, the only movement was one of a perplexed facial variety.

But there is more than one type of artist participating in Intermedia Nights. Next Thursday for instance, Stan Fox will bring parts of his experimental late-night TV series The Enterprise to the Vancouver Art Gallery.

His relationship with Intermedia grew out of a series of films, Cinema Vancouver, held at the Intermedia building. After a few months of regular film sessions open to the public, he was asked to participate in Intermedia Nights.

He will bring electronic configurations on film recorded from The Enterprise, plus other electronic films from a workshop at the B.C. Institute of Technology. A television camera and set have been borrowed so that spectators can turn themselves into television directors.