Sam Perry

Biography

Writer, filmmaker, artist. Sam Perry was born in 1939. As a student at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960s, Perry came into contact with the experimental multimedia work of David Orcutt, who supported Perry's growing interest in film animation. By the mid-1960s, Perry's film and image projections would play a key role in the events at the Sound Gallery and the Motion Studio. In addition, Perry spearheaded the Tripps Festial (July 29-31, 1966), a multimedia sensorium of music, film, slides, and moving liquid utilizing over fifty projectors and 25,000 square feet of screen. Performers included Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Daily Flash, and poet Michael McClure. Perry's interest lay in such an environment's ability to transform a participant's consciousness. The addition of light and film projections to musical performance was an attempt to alter the traditional relationship between audience and entertainer, shifting the focus away from the individual performances to the collective production of new realities. Perry took his own life in 1966.