The Province
May 24, 1968

Intermedia nights - More than mindless TV pablub

By NORMAN WILSON

What the ghosts of Rembrant and Emily Carr and other great artists of the past have said if they had been present in the Vancouver Art Gallery last night? Almost certainly most of them would have been with it.

As artists they, too, would likely be members of the present day avant guarde artistic community that is the driving force behind this weeks Intermedia Nights experimental presentation of light sound and movement.

When I arrived last night the wild new electronic music of My Indol Ring group had surely reached a crescendo in its orgy of sound.

The room was vibrating from the eardrum-shattering volume. Vibrating with it were most of the young crowd of about 200. There was nothing passive about their responsive about their responsive.

Many were on their feet gyrating in the frenetic movements of modern dance, their shadows joining the projected moving pictures on the walls in pulsating togetherness. Others were sitting in mediative fashion on the floor, their bodies swaying from side to side to become part of the environment.

There, too, was Film-maker Stan Fox of the CBC helping to bring the walls to life with projections of some of the mind-reeling films from last summer's most successful experimental late-night television series The Enterprise.

The best of them, titled You Are in Hell, was a rapid-fire hallucinatory attempt to show how the runaway pace direction of life, scientific progress and means of destruction were bringing man to the limits of comprehension and apparent nonsense of our mode of existence.

The fascinating, haunting musical accompaniment to this showed another and more sophisticated side of My Indole Ring's capabilities.

Following it came Gary Lee Nova's film, Steel Mushrooms, which with similar techniques to you are in hell, hammered out the message ov what could be the inevitable end to the present course of human society - the mushroom cloud.

What did it all add up to? That was for the individual to work out his own personal interpretation. At least for this crowd there was more than the mindless of another evening's mindless TV pablub.