Mark Nugent


Mark Nugent was a prolific British and Canadian filmmaker, digital artist and writer.

Early life

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Nugent emigrated to Canada with his family when he was seven.

Education

Nugent received a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University. He went on to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on scholarship and obtained a Master's in Fine Arts for Film Production.

Career

Nugent collaborated with a number of musicians to create experimental films and live presentations. He founded and toured with , a Montreal-based mixed-media performance group, and briefly worked for Chicago's H-Gun, producing commercial music videos. Until recently, his art was part of a genre that rarely attracted critical attention from anyone other than his peers.

1980s

In the late 1980s, Nugent travelled with the band FAT to Morocco and collected Super-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 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, Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, Stan Brakhage, and David Bohm, Nugent used a variety of media to explore his : the realms of consciousness, perception, alchemy, mysticism and quantum physics.
Nugent created films for a number of post-industrial bands and projected his work live, to great effect on the Download 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 images and cut-up writings, collaborating on a number of projects including the film Alchemical Conversations, and developing websites and commercial CD releases. Most recently, he collaborated on a series of images with .

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