Coproductions 2015-2016

Alexandre St-Onge / Anne-F. Jacques / Herman Kolgen / Leyla Majeri & Katherine Kline / Nikki Forrest / Peter Flemming / Steve Bates / Bill Clintwood


Curator: Eric Mattson

Les Transformables v.102 seeks to present media artworks, kinetic and sound installations, as well as audiovisual performances shown in parallel to the installation works.

The works presented share a hybridity of artistic disciplines and technological mediums, be they digital or analog. They all exhibit a transformation of natural phenomena into composition by means of tools and techniques, which have been diverted from their original usage. Another common denominator to the works shown is the use of direct action, a performative act made by the artist within the framework of an installation he or she created. The works were thus conceived to serve multiple purposes.

The invited artists were selected based on the excellence of their artistic output and because their works raise important questions concerning digital art and science. The presenting artists work in various disciplines within the media art sector. They draw on technology and, at times, scientific means to pervert their creative process.



SCHEDULE OF PERFORMANCES / INTERVENTIONS:

Herman Kolgen: 9 June, 5pm
Steve Bates: 10 June, 7:15pm
Leyla Majeri & Katherine Kline: 10 June, 8pm
Alexandre St-Onge: 11 June, 12pm - 4pm
Anne-F. Jacques: 11 June, 4pm
Nikki Forrest: 12 June, 3:15pm
Peter Fleming: 12 June, 4pm
Bill Clintwood: 10, 11, 12 June



In partnership with Eastern Bloc. A presentation of Bloc ORAL.
With the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Project grant for collectives in media arts.

The artist collective groop*index is pleased to present the second edition of the Ibrida*Pluri festival, a pluridisciplinary event proposing a line-up of local visual and sound artists working together for the first time. For this edition of the festival, three partners will be presenting a program of short films during the festival : Videographe, Le Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) and filmkool wien (Vienna, Austria). The festival’s program is divided into three components: Exposition, Projection, Performance.



IBRIDA*EXPOSITION (21-22-23 April)

Artists : T. Lance, Mandi Morgan, Vitalyi Bulychev, Sonya Stefan, Iqrar Rizvi and Guillaume Vallée, Nathan Yaffe, Dana Gingras + Roger Tellier-Craig



IBRIDA*PROJECTION

FILMKOOP (21 April 2016 - 8pm)
Artists: Stefanie Weberhofer, Antoinette Zwirchmayr, Rosa John, Alina Tretinjak, Daniela Zahlner, Viktoria Schmid, Stefanie Weberhofer & Renato Unterberg, fanie Weberhofer, Guillermo Tellechea
Partner’s website: www.filmkoopwien.blogspot.ca

VIDEOGRAPHE (22 April 2016 - 8pm)
Filmic and sonic experimentations of the moving image
Curators: Audrey Brouxel and Guillaume Vallée
Artists : Éric Gaucher, Nikki Forrest, Katherine Liberovskaïa, Steven Woloshen, Frederic Moffet, Suzan Vachon, Nayla Dabaji
Partner’s website: www.videographe.org

LE GROUPE INTERVENTION VIDÉO (GIV) (23 April 2016 - 8pm)
Curator: Cheryl Sim
Artists : Claudia Del Fierro, Dana Inkster, Sojin Chun, Tran T. Kim Trang, byol-nathalie kimura lemoine, Dayna McLeod & Jackie Gallant, Myriam Jacob-Allard, Michelle Smith
Partner’s website: www.givideo.org



IBRIDA*PERFORMANCE

21 April - 9pm
- Nintendo Montreal Orkerstar + Alexandre St-Onge + Sonya Stefan + Phillipe Leonard
- Martin Rogriguez + Leon Louder + Ganesh (Mr. Saboteur)
- Rob Feulner + Éric Gingras + James Schidlowsky

22 April - 9pm
- Black Givre + Jean-Sébastien Truchy + Philippe Vandal + Karl Lemieux
- Charles Barabé - Charles-André Coderre + Guillaume Vallée
- Émilie Mouchous + Ylang Ylang & John Blouin

23 April - 9pm
- Sylvain Chaussé + Adrian Cook (Toronto)
- Animals of Distinction *Dana Gingras + Jamie Wright + Sonya Stefan
- Myriam Boucher + François Létourneau
- DJ Interstellar II


For more information:
www.ibridapluriblog.wordpress.com
www.haricot.ca/project/ibridaplurifestival

Elise Apap / Lysanne Côté / Sarah Da Silva Marques / Sean Gallagher / Adrian Harper / Laurie-Eve Laroche / Frank L. / Lea-Ann McNally / Ayam Yaldo


In_digestion is a showcase of work by students in the Intermedia program at Concordia University, which combines performance, video, and new media arts. The title describes the students’ collective artistic process, even though their individual practices differ in nature. This exhibit speaks to the students’ relentless exposure to new ideas and information, which they struggle to fully digest and understand. These works are their way of purging these ideas and unleashing them into the world. This exhibition is a remedy to their In_digestion, allowing them to share fluid, overlapping language and concerns whether focused on challenging social, environmental, and cultural relationships, or bringing awareness of the biological and the biodegradable. Immersing the audience in raw emotions, this is their gut reaction to the world around us.


Four of the artists exhibited explore different approaches to immersion. Sarah Da Silva Marques’ “Were-Oyster” is a macabre, yet playful, fabric-based stop-motion animation exploring the gender dynamics of monsters, projected in an intimate, blanket fort. “Avi’Eve,” a piece by Laurie Eve Laroche, creates riddles of sound and images within an atmospheric space conceived in order to convey the type of emotional turmoil that manifests out of fright and fascination. Elise Apap’s sensorial audiovisual installation “When the Earth Trembles” includes haptic feedback related to her experience of violent earthquakes. It investigates the tangibility of presence - sharing and challenging embodied memory. Lysanne Côté’s interactive installation “Ray” draws the viewer into a world of mirrors and reflections in order to create an overwhelming experience of light.

Lea-Ann McNally and Sean Gallagher explore the potentially transformative qualities of innovative organic media. McNally’s large sculptural light installation, built from colorful, organic pieces of bio-plastic that she produces, aims to raise awareness of alternative, eco-sensitive manufacturing processes and possibilities. Gallagher’s installation, “BLART!,” is an artistic experiment using live bacteria (SCOBYs) as its medium. It focuses attention on the interaction occurring between our intestinal microbiota and nervous system.

Ayam Yaldo's sculpture “In Flux” focuses on the essence of banality of each living body 'performing' on a daily basis through repeated gestures. Adrian Harper’s video projection “Visual Vomit” conveys the fractured identity of pop-culture’s spawn through visual fragmentation. Finally, Frank L. creates custom protective covers for street furniture in order to highlight the aesthetic of authority embedded in apparently simple, utilitarian, shared urban structures.

André Éric Letourneau / Daniel Canty / Daniel Olson / Douglas Scholes / Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt / Nicolas Dion / Patrick Beaulieu / Raymond Gervais / Rober Racine


La Marche (est haute) is a convivial exhibit, open to the general public, which closes off the eponymous series that took place during the spring of 2015 and brought together a series of ten artistic interventions in the urban space produced by Québécois artists. Exhibit, discussions, sound and video documentation
Curator: Eric Mattson

New and recent works by the artists:
André Éric Letourneau, Daniel Canty, Daniel Olson, Douglas Scholes, Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, Nicolas Dion, Patrick Beaulieu, Raymond Gervais

Discussions and artist talks with:
Max Stein (creator of interactive online map for La Marche (est haute)): 18 September, 3pm
Carsten Stabenow (Tuned City, Berlin): 20 September, 2pm
Daniel Canty: 20 September, 4pm
Daniel Olson, Douglas Scholes, Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, André Éric Létourneau: schedule TBC

Photo and video documentation of the ten actions that took place in the spring of 2015.


Between the months of April and June 2015, La Marche (est haute) presented ten artistic, digital, and audio interventions in the urban space, with the common denominator being that the actions required a slow-paced walk or at varying speeds. The initial phase of La Marche (est haute) was created with artists working in the fields of media, visual and audio arts, all of whom propose in their artistic practice a singular and personal approach to Montreal’s sonic and visual landscape. The documentation was provided by several participating artists: Bruno Julian, Catherine Béchard, Jacinthe Lessard, Manon Labrecque, Sabin Hudon, and by MINUTE.

The curator, Eric Mattson, and MINUTE Productions wish to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their financial support, as well as Eastern Bloc for its collaboration, and, of course, the artists, without whom an event of this nature would simply not have been possible.


For more information:

www.oral.qc.ca/concerts/2015-marche/index.html
www.oral-records.blogspot.ca
www.flickr.com/photos/oral_records/
www.vimeo.com/user4821253/videos

ALICE JARRY / CRAIG FAHNER / ERIN GEE / MYRIAM BLEAU / NATALIYA PETKOVA


Eastern Bloc is sending emerging Canadian and Québécois digital artists to Zagreb, Croatia, for the upcoming Device_art Triennial. True to its mission to support emerging Canadian digital artists, Eastern Bloc has selected five up-and-coming artists : Myriam Bleau, Erin Gee, Craig Fahner, Nataliya Petkova, Alice Jarry. The Device_art Triennial is produced by KONTEJNER, a Croatian curatorial organization. First initiated in 2004, Device_art exhibits art dealing with devices and robotics. The project is focused on exploring and communicating art that integrates the technological device as an artistic medium in a critically potent, provocative or playful manner.



Spectrales (Alice Jarry) is a kinetic site-specific installation. Knots, unusual tangles and modular geometries are made and unmade via the interaction of elements that reflect a collective dynamic. Time, gravity, mechanical traction and light inform this cumulative work related to spatiality where each stretched wire reshapes the topology of relationships between image, object, movement and space.

Coherer (Craig Fahner) is a spatialized sound installation that facilitates exploration of the aspects of our environment that exist only as invisible signal. As participants enter this field of signals, their presence disrupts the electromagnetic environment, affecting the soundscape that surrounds them. In the absence of viewers, drifting wireless signals sound like sparse cacophonous chatter.

Soft Revolvers (Myriam Bleau) is an audiovisual performance for four spinning tops built with clear acrylic by the artist. Each top is associated with an ‘instrument’ in an electronic music composition and the motion data collected by sensors – placed inside the tops – informs musical algorithms. The interfaces strongly evoke turntables and DJ culture, hip hop and dance music. LEDs placed inside the tops illuminate the body of the objects in a precise counterpoint to the music, creating stunning spinning halos.

La mariée remise à nu par le binaire (Nataliya Petkova) is a hybrid performance, where a robotic structure takes over the human vocal system in order to compose coded speech. Acting solely as a complex resonance box, the performer’s body is subjugated to the machine’s will to communicate with mutated generative speech. The work emerged from research on identity, language, translation and media transmutations.

The installation version of Swarming Emotional Pianos (Erin Gee) features video documentation of an actor that silently expresses different emotions. During this video’s recording, Gee also attached biosensors to the actor in order to capture data related to his physiological and emotional state. The video projection is surrounded by a fleet of chime robots activated through this biosensor data. The activation of the robots gives birth to an abstract musical piece that reflects the actor’s control and emotional intensity.


Triennial Device_Art website: www.kontejner.org/en/project/deviceart-5015