Seeds - on Moment One, 25 years later

The things we plant may grow far beyond us.

Lately I’ve come to notice that seeds I planted half a lifetime ago have borne fruit far beyond what I could fathom then.

I left film school with a vision for myself. I didn’t want to compete with other filmmakers for permission to make my movies. I idealized a movie that never ends, and that I would just keep feeding throughout my life. I didn’t know what this meant at the time. It was before there was any video online, but I pictured a kind of TV station, with each show belonging to the same universe, a kind of subjective cinematic experience.

So I took life on with this vision always in mind, with everything I ever did. This was always the ultimate goal, somewhere in the back of my mind.

I started VJing, and already this gave me a hint of what it could mean. And there was this gonzo idea too, of living in the movie, that maybe the endless movie was more about making a movie out of my life in real time.

By 2001, still at the dawn of the digital age, I put up a website called Moment Factory where I posted one moment per week. These moments were VJ sources of mine, not short films nor music videos, but something else. A different cinematic language that came from the musical and experiential nature of the new millennium VJ scene.

Before long, and I mean barely a couple of months, I had other VJs, filmmakers, videographers and music producers submitting content without my even asking. And thus I met many of the collaborators I still work with to this day.

In 2004, a fellow VJ friend of mine, Thien Vu Dang, started the Minutes at the SAT: one-minute videos, video haikus of sorts. Around that same time, he met Yasuko Tadokoro, who would become his wife and partner. Thien was always a federator of the scene, having previously created Mix Sessions, which brought together Montreal’s VJs. It was amazing!

The Minutes were more like open visual poems than strictly VJ spurts, and I thought they resembled my weekly Moments, so I invited his Minutes to join the Factory, hence creating the Minute Moments, which Thien and I animated for a good half decade, inviting anyone who wanted to make a one-minute video for MomentFactory.com every month.

Again, I met so many people that I still know and work with to this day. It’s incredible, the connections that came from those nights.

I made some of my very best friends from having put up that website and started my never-ending movie. Friends who are all celebrating anniversaries lately, crossing milestones: SAT 30, POP Montréal 25, MU 20, Moment Factory 25, and now MAPP 10.

And last night, as I was driving over the overpass toward NOMAD like I’ve done thousands of times, something occurred to me.

Maybe it was because this time I was heading under the overpass, to MINUTE_MAPP’s big night, where as many as 88 artists participated with their own one-minute mappings.

Perhaps I had made that Moment One, 25 years ago, without knowing the infinite things that would grow from it.

There is only one thing I can learn from this: keep planting seeds through time, because we cannot imagine what might come of them.

They may very well surpass us.

Let’s keep planting, my friends. .j.