Mark Nugent was a prolific British and Canadian filmmaker,

digital art Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various names ...

ist and writer.

Early life

Born in

Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle upon Tyne ( RP: , ), or simply Newcastle, is a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England. The city is located on the River Tyne's northern bank and forms the largest part of the Tyneside built-up area. Newcastle is ...

, UK, Nugent emigrated to Canada with his family when he was seven.

Education

Nugent received a BFA in Film Production from

Concordia University Concordia University ( French: ''Université Concordia'') is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1974 following the merger of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University, Concordia is one of the t ...

. He went on to attend the

School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...

on scholarship and obtained a

Master's A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

in Fine Arts for Film Production.

Career

Nugent collaborated with a number of musicians (including

Download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar system. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote s ...

Dead Voices on Air Dead Voices on Air is Mark Spybey's experimental and industrial project formed after his departure from Zoviet France.Lengel, Kerry (December 2, 1999). "Dead Voices' Music Comes Alive", ''The Arizona Republic'', p. 47. Dead Voices on Air has coll ...

, Coil
FAT
Nimrod,

Hafler Trio The Hafler Trio is an English conceptual, performance and sound art collaborative between Andrew M. McKenzie, the only permanent member, and guest sound artists, performers, and/or musicians. The project has seen the release of numerous albu ...

Bruce Gilbert Bruce Clifford Gilbert (born 18 May 1946) is an English musician. One of the founding members of the influential and experimental art punk band Wire (band), Wire,Strong, Martin C. (2003) ''The Great Indie Discography'', Canongate, , p. 180-182 ...

, Vent du Mont Scharr and

Elliott Sharp Elliott Sharp (born March 1, 1951) is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released ...

) to create

experimental film Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, parti ...

s and live presentations. He founded and toured wit
Roughage
a

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...

-based

mixed-media In visual art, mixed media describes artwork in which more than one medium or material has been employed. Assemblages, collages, and sculpture are three common examples of art using different media. Materials used to create mixed media art incl ...

performance group, and briefly worked for Chicago's

H-Gun H-Gun Labs, officially, H-Gun Corp. (1988–2001), was a film/ animation consortium that started in Chicago and expanded to include a San Francisco studio. H-Gun began as a collective of students from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago a ...

, producing

commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...

music videos. Until recently, his art was part of a

genre Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other for ...

that rarely attracted critical attention from anyone other than his

peers Peers may refer to: People * Donald Peers * Edgar Allison Peers, English academician * Gavin Peers * John Peers, Australian tennis player * Kerry Peers * Mark Peers * Michael Peers * Steve Peers * Teddy Peers (1886–1935), Welsh international ...

1980s

In the late 1980s, Nugent travelled with the band FAT to

Morocco Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to ...

and collected

Super-8 Super 8 mm film is a motion-picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement over the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format. The film is nominally 8 mm wide, the same as older formatted 8& ...

footage that he would later use in his 1989 video for the Elliott Sharp-led ensemble Carbon, and in his 1992 for the band Coil.

1990s

Nugent produced a large number of

hallucinatory A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. Hallucination is a combinatio ...

films in the early nineties, combining his acute ability to optically process seemingly abstract images and colours, with super 8 footage and film. In the tradition of

William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular cultur ...

Chris Marker Chris Marker (; 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and Essay#Film, film essayist. His best known films are ''La Jetée'' (1962), ''A Grin Without a Cat'' (1977) and ''S ...

Werner Herzog Werner Herzog (; born 5 September 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with un ...

Stan Brakhage James Stanley Brakhage ( ; January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film. Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large ...

, and

David Bohm David Joseph Bohm (; 20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992) was an American-Brazilian-British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th centuryPeat 1997, pp. 316-317 and who contributed u ...

, Nugent used a variety of media to explore his fascinations: the realms of

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

alchemy Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, ...

mysticism Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in u ...

and

quantum physics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, qua ...

. Nugent created films for a number of post-industrial bands and projected his work live, to great effect on the

tour of Europe in 1996. In 1997, Nugent founded the website Psilence Image Environments to showcase his digital image work.

2000s

For ten years Nugent worked on numerous

digital image A digital image is an image composed of picture elements, also known as ''pixels'', each with ''finite'', '' discrete quantities'' of numeric representation for its intensity or gray level that is an output from its two-dimensional functions ...

s and cut-up writings, collaborating on a number of projects including the film ''Alchemical Conversations'' (2003), and developing websites and commercial CD releases. Most recently, he collaborated on a series of images wit
Aaron Campbell

Death

Nugent died on 16 December 2009 of a heart attack aged 48. His funeral was held on 9 January 2010 in Montreal. Nugent's preserved video work is to be included in a collection housed in museums around the world.

Film and video

*1985 ''Grain Films'' (16mm) *1985 ''Cameraman On-Are you There? Are you Listening – Velcrow Ripper'' (16mm) *1986 ''On Air'' (16mm) *1987 ''Manual Labour'' LSD-and the politics of pharmaceuticals. The image machine and the spectacle. Semantics and disappearance. The creation and the process. Rest after the storm. *1987 ''Carrousel (to Hell)'' Optically printed Funny satirical film. *1989 ''Carbon-Inverse Proportions'' Music film by Mark Nugent and Leah Singer. Music by Elliott Sharp. All optically printed, no computers were used in this film. A prescient view of the clash of civilisations. *1992 ''Dark River'' (Coil) Music film shot in Morocco and Wyoming. Music by Coil. Based on the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Made using film based optical printing. No computers were used in this film. Dedicated to the memory of Jhon Balance of Coil. *1992 ''Mr. Sullivan'' What happened? We heard him scream and came and found him like this. A tongue in cheek, black humour collage film made as a music video for the band Nimrod. Later adapted for Vent du Mont Scharr. *1993 ''Rain Will Fall'' by I Mother Earth from H-Gun with Eric Koziel. Mark did optical printing and image manipulation of 16mm film Eric shot in Mexico with the band and some other actors. *1994 ''I Married a Munchkin'' Opticals and color consultant. *''Sex on Wheelz'' video, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. *1995 Mark Nugent's Optical Seizures, Edison Electric, Vancouver, BC, Canada. *1996 ''Base Metal'' (Download) Amiga performance video for Download 1996 world tour. *1996 ''Eyes of Stanley Pain'' (Download) Amiga tour video from 1996 world tour. *1996 ''Glassblower'' (Download) Live performance video for Download's 1996 world tour. From the album "The Eyes of Stanley Pain." Made on an Amiga Live board. *1996 ''The Turin Cloud'' (Download) Live performance video for 1996 Download world tour. From the album "The Eyes of Stanley Pain." Made with a real time Amiga Live board. *1996 ''Sunni C'' (Download) A hallucinatory vision of psychosis and the space that lies between. Produced on an Amiga Live board. *2003 ''Alchemical Conversations'' (Alchemy and archetypes) with Dead Voices on Air.

References

External links

Mark Nugent obituary
from ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

''
Liquid Atmospheres
a visual collaboration between Aaron Campbell and Mark Nugent
FEELD
a gallery of Nugent's visual works
Psilence Image Environments
a gallery of Nugent's visual works
emagician1's Channel
at YouTube, a collection of Nugent's videos

a collection of Nugent's visual images
Indelible Mark, ACE: Selections from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Movie Archive: Direct-on-Film / Optical Printing
exhibition at the Warhol featuring films by Mark Nugent
Vent du Mont Scharr website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nugent, Mark British filmmakers Writers from Newcastle upon Tyne 2009 deaths Year of birth missing