#patrick lemieux

[epigraphexhibition]

from Metagaming (Stephanie Boluk & Patrick Lemieux, 2017)

[freddiemercurylegendabovelegends]

🔸The Girl In The Audience

by Patrick Lemieux

The band had agreed prior to this to allow the company Mobilevision to film them in concert. The resulting film would be toured by the company for paying audiences. Two special concerts were planned for November 24th and 25th for The Forum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 19 year old Sarah Bernard had no idea that attending the concerts would result in her being immortalized on film.

“I attended both nights for the Montreal shows, and was fortunate enough to be up front both nights,” says Sarah, “My sister Cathy and her friend Christian Giddings got three tickets for both nights and invited me to go, as they knew I was a fan, so I was lucky in that sense.”

Sarah goes on to explain, “I had been a Queen fan since the mid-1970s, when I received my first Queen album. It was Sheer Heart Attack, and it was given to me as a gift. I would often listen to certain songs and associate them with certain memories in my mind, and listening to Killer Queen always reminded me of the first time I played the album and broke in my record player at my best friend’s house. The album that I played the most in the ‘70s, however, was probably A Day at the Races. I had seen Queen two times before the Montreal shows.

At the Montreal shows, Sarah was able to make her way to a priceless spot perfect for taking pictures. "I’m sure there were reserved spots up front for professional photographers and media people outside of the film crew, but most people around me were simply fans,” she says.

Throughout the concert film, which is edited together from both nights, Sarah can be glimpsed center stage in the audience, occasionally taking pictures. Unfortunately, she no longer has the photos she took at the shows. Sarah says, “They were not the greatest quality, but I was proud of them.”

Of the band’s performance, Sarah says of Freddie, “I recall thinking that he made it very hard to NOT watch him. He was a wonderful performer, and I was reminded of how incredibly he commanded the stage. It had been a few years since I’d seen them last, and I’d forgotten what a force he really was up there. In the two shows I’d seen before, I was not as close to the stage, but I was still enchanted by how he worked the crowd. It really was like he held us all in the palm of his hand. Like we were being manipulated, and we loved it! A feeling I’ve felt with very few other acts. Brian and Roger were just as swift and amazing as I’d remembered from the previous shows. Watching Roger drum was almost hypnotic! John always seemed like the quiet and reserved type in photos and magazines, but live on stage, he always shined!”

Sarah goes on to recall, “Towards the end of the first show, I had spent some time trying to get their attention for a wave or a smile, and I made eye contact with John who nodded at me and returned my smile, which made my night even better! I also remember getting goosebumps during a few numbers both nights and even in the two previous shows I’d seen. Most notably during, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’!”

At the end of “Love Of My Life,” the cameras captured a truly moving moment in Sarah’s reaction as she stands still and glassy-eyed amid the erupting audience around her. She remembers what was going through her mind in that moment, “Every time I heard ‘Love of My Life’, I felt a bit emotional. I had fallen in love with a man who I truly saw a future with, and who used to play a few songs to serenade me while we were dating. ‘Love of My Life’ was one of those songs, and both nights I can remember feeling like I was on the verge of very happy tears just thinking about my love. He was on my mind and in my heart at the time I was being filmed.”

Sarah didn’t know she specifically had been filmed in her moment of quiet reflection, “We did see the cameras at the shows, but I never really noticed them facing me. I assumed they were filming the crowd as a mass of people.”

“Those were my last two shows with Freddie”

Full Interview 👇

https://www.queenonline.com/features/the-girl-in-the-audience-fan-feature-by-patrick-lemieux

➡️ Patrick Lemieux is a Canadian artist and writer. He is co-author (with Adam Unger) of The Queen Chronology book, available at Amazon -

[comparativetarot]

The Tower. Art by Patrick Lemieux, from the ETA Tarot.

[mendelpalace]

Some of the mid-game discussions from Triforce: The Topologies of Zelda by Patrick Lemieux & Stephanie Boluk

[epigraphexhibition]

from Metagaming (Stephanie Boluk & Patrick Lemieux, 2017)

[zangtumb]

Everything but the Clouds - Patrick LeMieux

[zangtumb]

Coin Heaven -  Patrick LeMieux

On of the most famous ROM hacks is Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2003, 2009). Exhibited at the Whitney in 2004, Arcangel claims “Super Mario Clouds is an old Mario Brothers cartridge which I modified to erase everything but the clouds.” Although Arcangel embraces the hacker ethos and has open sourced much of his artwork, advertising exactly how to "erase" Super Mario Bros. I discovered that if you attempt to follow his steps, an entirely different game is produced.

In Coin Heaven an invisible Mario walks on invisible ground, looping endlessly in a cloudscape where a cinematic sequence once took place between World 1-1 and World 1-2 of the original Super Mario Bros. Beyond the speed, shape, color, and pattern of the slowly passing clouds something is very different. A lone coin remains blinking in the menu. To the chagrin of many ROM hackers, this tiny, blinking coin is also what is known as “Sprite 0,” the first sprite in the Picture Processing Unit or PPU’s memory and the only sprite that includes a hard-coded “hit flag” responsible for triggering scrolling in Super Mario Bros.

Time does not move without money and making Sprite 0 invisible freezes the game. Apparently all that is solid does not melt into air as Sprite 0 symbolizes not the formal autonomy of games, art, and capital—but the desire for a type of utopia in which these practices operate without material base. The blinking coin, then, only appears to offer the player a “coin heaven”—the name of three specific bonus zones in Super Mario Bros. devoid of enemies and filled with money. While Arcangel’s piece is famous for its erasure of the gameplay from Super Mario Bros., it also effects an erasure of the game’s medium specificity, depicting Super Mario Clouds as a utopian autonomous zone that renders invisible the game’s history of money and materiality. By contrast, Coin Heaven refuses this portrayal, demonstrating the deep history that is hard coded into the game’s electrical circuits.