Mike Hoolboom

Award-winning Toronto film and video artist Mike Hoolboom opens his first novel with a tube-tanned doctor delivering bad news. 'There was a sadness in this doctor's face that remained a stranger to him, and it kept him young.' Flashes of this kind of incisiveness recur throughout the book. Two paragraphs later Auden, our narrator, describes the weird numbness that can settle in when mortality hits us in the chops. 'I felt the muscles in my face as a large pack of steel balls that needed to be coaxed and herded to form basic human responses.' Who of us has not been there?

Of the three human enterprises most often named as means to defy death — religion, art and sex — Mike Hoolboom's novel The Steve Machine is most heartily concerned with the latter two.

The Steve Machine is a novel that toys with our notion of reality. A kind of fictionalized biography of Toronto video artist Steve Reinke, it is a faithful meditation on his art that nevertheless skews some of the key details of his life (in particular, the fictional 'Steve' is here diagnosed as HIV positive, which the real-life Reinke is not).

Mike Hoolboom has established himself over the past three decades as not only one of Canada's greatest film artists, but as one of the most passionate and hard-working proselytizers and chroniclers of what he calls the "fringe" film/video movement.

Taking its title from Man Ray, Practical Dreamers comprises 27 conversations between the author (a respected veteran filmmaker himself) and Canadian fringe film and video artists on the subject of how and why they put their thoughts and dreams into moving pictures. The interviewees (Kent Monkman, Jeff Erbach and Su Rynard, to name a few) represent the range of perspectives being explored in film and video today and speak candidly about both specific inspirations and their general creative philosophy.