Videoseries 86/87
Videotape by Colin Campbell
Curated by Kerri Kwinter
49th Parallel Centre for Contemporary Art, New York, 1986

No Voice Over, 1985, 25 minutes, colour

No Voice Over is a story of movement, communication and chance; of motion and travel through a modern world haunted by its history and its future. Five primary characters whose lives are entwined – or implicated – maintain intense and dramatic relations without ever being all in the same place at the same time. As friends and colleagues they devise a system of audio-tape communication to stay in touch with each other while dispersed and moving throughout the world: Canada, Italy, Brazil, Alaska and Japan. From a distance they take turns narrating, directing, influencing and guessing at each other’s lives.

Having abandoned the immediacy and reciprocity of the telephone, their lives, voices, conversations and the determinant moments of their friendship are always mediated by an electronic technology which seems to acquire a life of its own. Monologues are delivered as voice-overs to corresponding images; as the voice speaks, the visuals switch between the moment of the tape’s recording, its playback, portions of the event being recounted or impressions of an event pre-seen. As a result, the technological plane on which the narrative unfolds collapses progressive time and replaces it with a series of significant placeless moments. In the space that is created where past, present and premonition are all of equal import, the underlying question becomes one of cause. On the one hand, Campbell questions and complicates our customary reading of the cause of a real or fictional event, and on the other, he exposes that narrative’s tentative control over and dependence on, the cause-effect relation. Can a story adequately construct the web of intersecting influences which may or may not contribute to an event’s occurrence – in this case to a possibly pre-seen, possibly prevented death?

Colin Campbell has been working in video since 1972. He has produced fourty-four tapes over the past fourteen years and has exhibited his work in Canada, the United States, Europe and South America. Mr. Campbell currently lives in Toronto where he teaches at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art.

Kerri Kwinter is an independent writer who divides her time between Toronto and New York.