DREAM I MERSION
From March 27th to July 25th 2010, the SAT take part to the DREAM | MERSION exhibition presented at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, (NTMoFA).
DREAM | MERSION
The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art (NTMoFA), present DREAM | MERSION exhibition from March 27th to July 25th, 2010. This exhibition bring together the artistic work of fifteen artists from Quebec, produced under the Fabrique numérique artistic residencies, laboratory of exploration and creation at the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT].
Museum visitors will be invited to see various immersive creations projected to DigiArk, (Digital Arts Creativity and Resource Center). After dark / After the Night by Yan Breuleux and Alain Thibault; Experiencing the Sacred by Martine Koutnouyan, Joseph Lefèvre and Matthew Burton; City at Night by Jean-Ambroise Vesac; Reflexions … Reflections by Manuel Chantre and Jean Ranger and Road Trip by Sylvain Aubé and Zone Grise will be presented for the first time abroad.
From March 27th to April 4th, Yan Breuleux, Jean-Ambroise Vesac, Alexandre Quessy, Joseph Lefèvre and René Barsalo will also be on hand to share their visions and experiences with a series of conferences and workshops on culture and digital technologies .
This exhibition opens the way for future artistic collaboration and research between the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Society for Arts and Technology, both actively involved in the production and dissemination of digital arts.
Openning schedule :
Monday : closed
Tuesday to Friday : 9.30am to 4.30pm
Saturday and Sunday : 9.30am to 5.30pm
Price : Free.
Location : National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
1.DigiArk’s immersive program / March 26th to July 25th 2010
• After the dark/ After the night
Visual: Yan Breuleux
Audio: Alain Thibault
Immersive audiovisual work created for 360° projection and 8-channel audio system.This immersive project consists of a series of audiovisual sequences made up of numerous surround loops that exist in a constant state of flux. Light and aural pulsations connect in order to form the integral elements of this peice. After the Dark’s audiovisual material is comprised of complex patterns that interact with the physical space in which the projection takes place.
Events are distributed via time and space so as to disseminate the spectator’s attention
throughout the entirety of the installation experience. As light and sound projections travel throughout the circular environment, an exponentially accelerating curve is produced. The speed, in conjunction with the aforementioned elements, creates a hypnotizing atmosphere.
Yan Breuleux specializes in experimental animation for immersive video productions. Over the last decade, he has worked in collaboration with musicians and composers to create multiscreen, panoramic and hemispheric pieces. As part of the duo PURFORM (in collaboration with composer Alain Thibault), he has produced projects that have been presented at festivals such as Transmediale in Berlin (1999, 2004), ISEA in Paris (2000) and Japan (2002), Dissonanze in Rome (2003) and Lille (2004), and Scopitone in Nantes (2009). His next performance is expected to take place at the festival Némo in Paris in 2010. Breuleux’s on-line projects have been presented at the Musée du Québec in Rimouski and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art of New York. He was responsible for designing the panoramic video project Ars Natura for
the Society for Arts And Technology and recently completed a multi-screen HD project for the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques.
Alain Thibault is an electronic music producer and one half of the PURFORM duo (in collaboration with visual artist Yan Breuleux). Their most recent performance, A-B-C-D-Light, was recently presented in September 2009 in France (Nantes and Paris). Their multi-screen work FAUSTechnology was created during the 2001 edition of ELEKTRA in Montréal and presented in October 2002 in Nagoya, Japan at the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA), at Dissonanze in Rome in 2003, and at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2006. Black Box, created by Thibault in May 2003 at Montréal’s Usine C for a quadraphonic multi-screen audio system, was presented at Transmediale in Berlin, Mixed Media in Milan and TRANSART in Bolzano, Italy. In 1999, Thibault founded the ELEKTRA Festival, the Montreal-based annual
international digital arts event for which he continues to head artistic direction.
• L’expérience du sacré / Experiencing the Sacred
research, scenario, visual conception : Martine Koutnouyan
graphic conception : Joseph Lefèvre
aural conception, composition, sound design : Matthew Burton.
In a modern society that demonstrates an overwhelming emphasis on superficial values, our team felt compelled to present a work where we could, in our own way, describe what makes us human. Following this, we examined that which dehumanizes us and finally, that which unites us.
The result is a 30 minute-long, large-scale multimedia panorama combining
graphic design, video, photography, and sacred and electronic music into a single
immersive experience. Experiencing the Sacred is a living poem, inspired by three
fundamental existential questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? And
where are we going?
We hope to give meaning to our work by addressing crucial subject matter such
as war, nature, the birth of our planet, happiness, love, and death, thereby
conveying the underlying emotions evoked by these themes.
Martine Koutnouyan‘s artistic career took flight when she began organizing live art events and directing local galleries in Montreal. As artist Joseph Lefèvre’s companion, she has assisted with several of his artistic projects since 1987. As a team, their collaborations have included the L’Espace du Chamane hypermedia installations, the web pieces L’initiation, Ex-voto and Au bord du fleuve/On the Riverside, as well as the immersive multimedia creation, L’expérience du sacré/Experiencing the Sacred. In 2001, Koutnouyan’s entered the world of VJing with the band Wetfish at the SAT under the moniker VJ Liberty.
Joseph Lefèvre is a new media artist, arts administrator and educator. Lefèvre holds a masters degree in visual arts and another in multimedia. His projects include Le café de l’abattoir, presented at Siggraph 1992; Il pleut sur le temple,part of the 1987 Images du futur event; the Traces et contrastes presentation at the ISEA conference in Montreal in 1995; and L’espace du chamane which was awarded the Québec-Canada Möbius Prize in 2000. The web version of this
project was also chosen for the 2000 Montreal biennial. Lefèvre is currently directing the artist-in-residence program for the SAT in Montreal. Lefèvre is also the co-ordinator and co-founder of the SAT[MixSessions] and has participated in many local and international exhibitions. Currently, he is concentrating on video creation and immersive environments. As a Vj, Lefèvre continues to perform his live visuals sessions alongside various local and international artists.
Matthew Burton, a.k.a. Komodo, is a Montreal-based composer, musician and DJ who specializes in playing fast dub basslines on the Australian didgeridoo. Burton is also known for his beat and bass-heavy music production and for playing an assortment of other instruments such as the Turkish flute and frame drum. His DJ sets feature live instrumental performances and showcase many of his original tracks produced specifically for his live shows, which he describes as “dubstep and other bass-heavy grooves”. On stage, Komodo has performed at numerous international events, including the opening gala for the Lion King show in Paris,
the Istanbul International Jazz Festival, the MUTEK electronic music festival in Montreal, the opening of the Time-Warner building in New York, the worldpremiere gala for “Kà” (Cirque du Soleil) in Las Vegas, the Dubai 5th International Film Festival, and most recently, headlining acts in Querétaro, Mexico, as well as in Beijing and Shanghai, China.
• City at night
By Jean-Ambroise Vesac
Amidst the dark veil of night and surrounded by an endless horizon, the exhilaration of infinity can be felt. A city sparkles in the distance, full of dreams in which anything is possible. At the centre of this universe lies the spectator, enthralled and waiting… We have entered City at Night, a project that places the spectator at the heart of the exhibit. City at Night is not a mere representation of nightlife, but a project that tries to reach human feelings of intimacy and perceptive space much in the same way that urban nightlife does. The project immerses the public in moving lights, imagery and sound, thereby playing with parallax, perceptive and
emotional spaces. Desire is at the essence of our imaginations, and it is this very emotion that gives way to the construction of new realities. In City at Night, immaterial space mixes with velocity, darkness, and shooting stars in order to create new emotional and sensory impressions within the spectator.
The artistic statement that Vesac is putting forth with this project is that immersion is not just a new way of making cinema. Instead, it is an opportunity to build new fields of experimentation and create new sensations of reality. By placing the viewer in an immersive Cyclorama, the hyper-acute and “omniversality” aspects of City at Night express the space-time and individual relationships of the global digital society that we find ourselves in today. In this age, human beings are at once many people, in many places, and therefore embody multiple viewpoints and narratives of a single situation.
Jean-Ambroise Vesac‘s eclectic practice, as a new media artist, encompasses the fields of small robotics, video immersion and performance. Vesac’s visual signature is saturated, explosive colour blended into 3D graphic form, and he is known for his use of concrete audio sources in order to produce his unique aural landscape creations. Vesac also mixes computing and improvisation in his works, and his singular artistic style is further expressed via his involvement in all aspects of production: Vesac builds his own software and expression tools, and samples code much like other digital artists sample music for audio creation. At this time, Vesac is working to create new ways to interact with audio-visual content directly: his interactive compositions employ artificial intelligence in order to behave like living structures. Vesac’s research is based on the notion of experimentation, and his work aims to offer the public a unique relationship to emotions and sensory perception via augmented reality.
• Reflexions … Reflections
Imagery, camerawork, animation, video production: Jean Ranger
Music and sound design: Manuel Chantre
Through a meditative vision loosely inspired by Rio de Janeiro comes a series of silhouettes, organic entities and human essences co-existing in fabricated landscapes. The project conjures up unconscious telepathic phenomena and the non-linear narration presents a unique language that alternates between natural and urban settings, technological networks and trains of thought.
Jean Ranger has been interested, for several years, in the multiple modes of perception created by various social environments. His performances place visual language at the foreground of the theatrical stage. He presents a new type of live digital cinema in which contemplative imagery, sound, and choreography creates a contrasting experience. Ranger’s work pushes each spectator into choosing their own narrative from the multiple iconographic paths that are simultaneously proposed. The reflections of the creative laboratory Mindroots, which Ranger founded, are intimately related to the emergence of new interactive technologies and particularly to those of the Web allowing for the practice of open narratives that employ various codes, textures and fragments of reality. Ranger has created scenic installations, improvisational videos, and immersive video environments.
For Manuel Chantre, the construction and deconstruction of cultural symbols has always been a source of inspiration. As a new media artist, his approach has been characterized by integrating music, audio art, programming, electronics, and most recently, video. As a performer, Chantre has used popcorn, modified musical Christmas cards, video game consoles, interactive
dolls and other objects as sound and visual sources. The exploration of immersive environments and new narrative languages occupy an equally important part of his practice.
Inspired by the misappropriation of mass culture, Chantre founded the Popcore collective in 2006 in collaboration with the SAT’s weekly MixSessions events. Members of the collective (including Danny Perreault, Dimitri della Faille, Simon Laroche, and Jean-Ambroise Vesac) directly improvised with modified objects in order to employ them as musical and visual sources. This project allowed members to explore different approaches in digital art and aesthetics. The final appearances by the collective were presented under the moniker Popcore Duo, a “noise/narrative” performance that Chantre and Laroche created based on the deconstruction of a robotic body,
contemporary rituals and sport culture.
• Road Trip
Video and Audio: Sylvain Aubé & Zone Grise
Roadtrip is an immersive project illustrating the gradual transition from a low density natural environment into the chaos of urbanity. This audiovisual project is a portrait of human involvement and impact in contrasting environments, expressed by a long crescendo.
As we travel through a small portion of the American continent, sound and image are the guides and vectors of our attention. This immersive experience places the viewer in a series of panoramic videos of selected locations. The constant travel represented throughout the production is based on spaces that are unidentified but strongly represented in the collective subconscious. Much like a road movie, Roadtrip does not deliver a comprehensive portrait of America, but rather a voyage that spans across several arbitrary locations.
Zone Grise (French for “Grey Area”) was co-founded by Sylvain Aubé along with Charles-Alexandre Grégoire in 2003 as a platform for music improvisation and audiovisual collaborations. Between 2003 and 2006, the collective had grown to include ten members and had released two collective compilations. Zonegrise also hosted several audio events and various live performes in Montreal including a showcase at the Suoni per il populo Festival in 2006. The sound creations of Sylvain Aubé, Charles-Alexandre Grégoire, Francois Blouin, Hugo Cantin and other members can be found on the online compilation Zonegrise 00.
Sylvain Aubé
Iconoclastic enough to remix kitschy music in high-tech fine arts exhibitions; geeky enough to learn the intricacies of music software. Sylvain Aubé now earns a living as a Web 2.0 professional. When not enjoying the joys of fatherhood, he loves taking it easy on its brain cells by creating immersive 360 degree projects. As a self-taught creator, Aubé is also known in Montreal for his label monochrome.ca, his netlabel Musique Nordique, his live music performances as Monochrome, his collaborations with David Kristian, Quebec Connection, and SAT[MixSessions]. Aubé has also contributed to the Postaudio project. As a co-founder, he has been the right hemisphere type for Zone Grise.
2. Participatory interactive installation : DREAM | MOTION / from March 30th to July 25th 2010
One important aspect of the SAT positive contamination strategy, is enabling people to envision their creative potential with digital culture, not seeing themselves only as cultural content consumers. The participatory installation DREAM | MOTION is based on Toonloop, an open source live stop motion animation software and a project developed by two members of the artist and researcher community of the SAT, Alexandre Quessy with the help of Tristan Mathews. Inside the Museum in a specific public area, the Toonloop installation would be set-up enabling the public to participate under the supervision of a trained animator. During our stay, Alexandre will give several workshops to the public and the artists and train the Museum team on how to operate the installation once we are gone.
Alexandre Quessy is a Montreal-based artist and programmer. His special interests are electronics, experimental audio and interactive video. His favorite themes are movement, learning and outdated technology. Among his past works are humorous installations like The Human Sequencer, presented in 2007 at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), in New York, and during the Pure Data event at the SAT. As a composer of electroacoustic music, he worked with Darsh Hewitt to create The Rotarian Choir, a choral piece in which the singers are all telephone ringtones. As a programmer, he is involved in developing open source software and participative websites, and regularly gives workshops on the use of interactive technologies for artistic creation. Quessy is currently pursuing a master’s degree in communications at the University of Quebec at Montreal.
3. Conferences / March 28th 2010
Two conferences are proposed for sharing experiences and point of views between these research and creative communities. These conferences could be inserted in a conference program that could include presenters from Taiwan or could be given independently in the museum auditorium.
- Conference 1 : «Digital culture: the mutations triggered by our tools » by René Barsalo.
Based on the above citation from McCluhan, the Society for Art and Technology is seen as a very fertile mutation space. This conference will present some of the questions regarding the ongoing cultural mutations and the tools that are being developed at the SAT[Metalab].
Each technology enables new forms of creations… and new forms of cultural mutation. Where are we heading? What impacts could it have on national cultures, societies and institutions?
- Conference 2 : « The Digital Factory – a new exploration territory for artists » by Joseph Lefèvre.
Since then many artists and collectives, as Marcel Duchamp, Dziga Vertov, Edward Muybridge, George Brecht, Fluxus, Nam June Paik, etc., decided to explore the new technologies and the new tools available to them at their time of living to produce specific installations and contents. Each invention was linked to the evolution of the technology. What are these tools today and what are the possibilities for the artists to experiment new way of creation ? How could they appropriate themselves these tools and technologies? During this conference Joseph Lefevre will try to answer these questions by presenting some experiments made with newmedia artists inside the « Digital Factory » at the SAT and will explain how artist could access these new residencies territories for the production of immersive environments.
4. Workshops / March 31st and April 3rd 2010
Two workshops, one articulated around the production of content for immersive environments with Yan Breuleux, Jean-Ambroise Vesac, Joseph Lefèvre and technical DigiArk’s team will be offered from March 31st to April 2nd 2010.
The other one around stop motion animation, named Toonloop, will be offered on April 3rd 2010. Alexandre Quessy, Toonloop’s creator and Jean-Ambroise Vesac, with technical DigiArk’s team, will animate it for the general public and the artists.
5. Closing event / April 4th, 2010
This special closing event will be a great opportunity to end the conference and workshop cycle offered by the SAT and a way to celebrate with Taiwanese collaborators.
Immersives workshops’ results will be shown during this closing event. SAT’s artists with NTMoFA’s selection will work on that event to make it a success.
About NTMoFa :
The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMOFA) was founded in 1988. It was temporarily closed for rebuilding in 1999 due to widespread devastation caused by the September 21st earthquake that year, and reopened in July 2004 with a brand new look. The NTMOFA is dedicated to the education and promotion of visual arts. It places great emphasis on collecting works by Taiwanese artists and exploring unique characteristics of modern and contemporary Taiwanese arts. Its aims are: to organize the most diverse range of themed visual art exhibitions, to foster long-term art exchanges with overseas institutions, to actively participate in major international events, to promote art education, and to provide the public with a pleasing and multi-faceted environment for viewing art.
Visit the official website via : www.ntmofa.gov.tw