Amanda: At the end of your essay "Fear of Flying,” as you are considering the impact of the American Empire on other nations, you ask, "What part do I play?" and "What do I do next?" As a filmmaker, writer and curator here in Canada, can you comment on the relationship between American politics and Canadian exhibition and filmmaking practices? What part do you play, and what do you do next?

Mike: The question of politics rubs at me, every smooth moment is newly raw after Canada's nine imperial years in Afghanistan. The daily accidental civilian deaths are covered over with the usual national security blankets. And we have seen, at the recent G8/G20 summit in Toronto, how quickly the most basic civil rights may be set aside. What do these far away too close events have to do with artist's film and video, with the question of practice for instance? Why is it, for instance, that one might attend fringe movie events round the globe and find scarcely a mention of warfare of any kind, instead, the freshly minted archives are teeming with universal themes and personal exiles. One of the ways an empire projects itself is through the pictures it creates. These can be so powerful that they refute physical, documentary evidence. This occurs each and every day in a program that insists on calling itself, without a hint of irony, the news. The news is filled with pictures, but most of these are ruling class fantasies, padded out with the scripted telltales of elected officials which we will learn, when no one cares any longer, were nearly all lies. How can we begin to create pictures that actually show something, in this fog of catastrophe that showers out of our touch screens and home computers, every day after day? How can we gain some ground for our practice? How do I know what I am looking at? What is my practice? How can I use this camera to look, instead of to repeat received opinions? Each time we raise a camera we are creating a relationship, hoping to find a way to create pictures that will look from both sides of the camera. The foundation of this practice, it seems to me, is ethics. Isn't it? An ethics of light. How can we learn to see the light that we are actually living in, here and now, in order to illuminate a face, for instance, a face we might have seen a hundred, a thousand times already? How to wait until the light already in that face arrives. How to live so that we have time enough to wait for that face, that light, this moment? This waiting, this suspension of time, this concern with the detail, with the small and overlooked, perhaps this is the beginning of a real politics of the image.

Amanda: You mention newscasts filled with pictures from the ruling class, and this leads me to additional questions of nationalism, borders and geographic identities. Here in Canada, much of our news comes from large media conglomerates based in the United States. Many of these pictures are based around territorial questions which form the root of so many wars and conflicts. How do we, as artists, approach these ideas of borders and national identity in the face of such seemingly arbitrary lines drawn on maps? Are we to engage with these boundaries?

Mike: Whenever I fly back into Canada, I watch the so-called security people pull several people of colour aside for extra questioning. Though many were no doubt raised in families who have resided in Canada for generations, their unbleached faces mark them as foreign and therefore dangerous. It’s so disheartening. As I watch them being led away, I can’t help thinking of the internment of Canadians of Japanese descent during the Second World War. Or the head tax on the Chinese at the turn of the last century (after workers were exploited to build the national railroad, they weren’t wanted any longer). Or turning away a boatful of Indians (at gunpoint no less) after the First World War. I think the question you ask can only be posed between white people of a certain class, everyone else is busy living with borders projected onto them, night and day. When Cameron speaks of not being able to get a cab to stop for him at night because he’s black, when Susan feels the hostility of fellow travelers on the Montreal metro because she’s holding hands with her black boyfriend, these picture borders are being projected again and again. What kinds of pictures might work to further a counter-momentum? To make “white” again a colour, to create a picture arena where multi-culturalism is as normative inside the frame as outside, in jury selections, in audiences, in panel speakers?

Amanda: How do we reconcile the light that we are living in with the darkness and resulting shadows?

Mike: I have been taught to embrace virtuous feelings, good foods, fine company. These qualities are high minded, as the saying goes, as if one could live somehow above one’s own life. But instead, I am down here in the murk of this present moment, and the many negative feelings that arise do not need to be sent away or covered over, but instead patiently watched. After the death of my friend Mark, I needed to be close to him, or to what remained of him, in his friends and familiars. I began making pilgrimages to the townhouse he lived in with Mirha-Soleil Ross, epicenter of grief and catastrophe. It was there that he ended his life, and that life was busy going on. How many cats were left behind, all wondering why? I didn’t enter this darkness to solve the question of his suicide, but to try and help, to pitch in, and to sit with my feelings, no matter how unbearable or uncomfortable. And from this place, caught between the living and dead, pictures began to emerge. A face caught in the morning light, a hand reaching to the window, a cat stretching out on the front step. These pictures became a beckoning path, and that path was filled with difficult, sometimes fraught, social relations, with people who had been pushed to the very edge of their own lives because of this catastrophe. We were trying to find a way to relate to one another even as the ground beneath us had turned to water. How easy it was to say yes to the charmed, easy grace of Mark’s manner. Death confers a temporary sainthood on nearly everyone it touches. How much more difficult it was to say yes to his shadows, particularly when they were so close to my own. In fact, to recognize them, to bring them into focus, meant living inside my own fears. This was the necessary prelude to attempt to begin to make a picture in stereo, that might sing from both sides of the camera.

Amanda: I am also moved by the image you paint of us looking from both sides of the camera; creating pictures that are at turned both inward and outward. Subject and object simultaneously observing and being observed.

Mike: The illusion, the promise in every advertisement, is that one need only raise the cellphone, the I-prosthetic, the camera, and point it in the direction of a momentary distraction and a picture will arrive. What has been banished from the digital picture is time. The assumption then, the picture behind the picture, is that there is no time in pictures, that pictures no longer take time. Though that’s not true now, and it wasn’t true a hundred years ago. I am not longing for another better time, don’t get me wrong, there are no good old days here. But the requirement that finite picture rolls would be loaded into cameras, and that they would need to be “developed,” after the moment of encounter, is itself a picture of the time that exists, or doesn’t exist, in each picture. Without this time one can create a “shadow practice” of picture making. With the aid of the souped-up, mega-pixelled image bazookas already available, it’s possible to create jewel-like mirages. But the most important qualities of a picture, I think, lie outside the intention of either party, before and behind the camera. There is something else coming into focus that can’t be found in a viewfinder, and sometimes it can’t be seen until years later.