The Upgrade! Montreal + SAT[mix_sessions]:: Nordic music

6pm – free

At this month’s
Upgrade! Montreal gathering, two artists from Montreal,
Valérie Lamontagne and Esther Bourdages, will
each make a presentation and participate to a roundtable, as usual.

Valérie
will be speaking on her work in new media and net-art concerning the body, art
and technology surrounding the concepts of presence, being and identity. Esther
will be speaking on the use of vinyl and turntables in the modern and contemporary
arts in different genres and media, as well as performing her own work with
turntables. The evening wil kick off with DJ tobias c. van Veen.

Valérie
Lamontagne
mobilegaze.com/valerie

Valérie Lamontagne
is a Montréal artist, freelance art critic and independent curator. She
received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1993) and Master of Fine Arts (2001) from
Concordia University in Montréal where she presently teaches in the Computation
Arts Program. She regularly writes about new media and performance art in publications
such as Parachute, BalckFlash, HorizonZero, Rhizome and the Magazine Électronique
du CIAC. Past Web art curatorial projects include Maid in Cyberspace Web Festival,
Studio XX (Montréal, 2000); Location/Dislocation co-curated with Sylvie
Parent, New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, 2001); Matter+Memory produced
with MobileGaze (Montréal, 2002); Ellipse , Musée national des
beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec City, 2002); and produced
with MobileGaze and showcased at Oboro (Montréal, 2004); InterAccess
/ Images Festival (Toronto, 2004); and CYNETart (Dresden, 2004). Her media-based
artwork and relational performances have been presented across Canada, the United
States, Europe and online. Recent projects include: the live Webcast performance
of The Advice Bunny presented at the Biennale Internazionale Arte Giovane (Turin,
2002); Better Homes presented in the “Science Fair” exhibition,
Studio XX (Montréal, 2002); Sister Valerie of the Internet produced in
collaboration with La Chambre Blanche (Quebec City, 2003) and presented at Year
Zero One (Toronto, 2003); and FILE (Sao Paulo, 2004). Her photo / performance
series Becoming Balthus was presented at Artspace (Peterborough, 2003); Articule
(Montreal, 2004); and VU Photo (Québec City, 2004). The recent photo
/ video project exploring spiritualism, Spiritualist Embrace, was presented
at Klein Art Works (Chicago, 2004). Present projects include Masquerade, a photo
performance work exploring the Louis Feuillade film Les Vampires, and a wearables
project basec on the Charles Perrault fairy tale Peau d’Âne featuring
a dress made of the moon, sun, and sky. She is a co-founder of the media arts
collective MobileGaze.

Abstract:

_Digital Presence_
will explore converging media practices involving the body, performance and
technology. Through a presentation of the artist’s work we will investigate
how the body, representation technologies and digital mediaconspire to create
new forms of art articulated around being, identity and time. Charting the changing
role of the body in performance – from the representational (photographic
presence), transformative (video presence), avatar-based (web presence) to networked
projections (Wi-Fi presence) – we will discover the impact of technology
on current and past emanations of “presence”.

Esther
Bourdages
vinylinterventions.com

Esther Bourdages
is a Montréal based artist and author of articles and critical commentaries
on contemporary art. She holds a Masters degree in Art History from the Université
de Montréal (focus on the swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely). She investigates
new forms of sculpture within an expanded field, leading her to explore art
in situ, installation art, sound art and more recently, multimedia and web art.
She is also involved with artist-run centers in Montréal including e:Cube
and collaborates with the collectives Dame, mobilegaze.com, muzikaktiv and notype.com.

Esther makes audio
art under the name of esther b. where she mainly plays toy turntables and manipulates
vinyl. She is part of the Adminstrative Board of E:cube (art association), where
she organises art events and curates a series of concerts of experimental music
called “Un microphone dans une tempête de noize” [A Microphone
in a Storm of Noize]. She is part of the turntabilist trio Vinyl Interventions
with Carrie Gates (Saskatoon) and Marinko Jareb (St. Catherines, Ontario). Since
2002 the trio has presented a workshop on vinyl and turntablist art including
Esther’s talk: “The Echo of the Vinyl Record, Between the Sound and
the Visual, Between the Past and the Present.”

Abstract:

“The Echo
of the Vinyl Record, Between the Sound and the Visual, Between the Past and
the Present”

This talk interrogates
the practices of modern and contemporary visual and sound artists utilizing
vinyl and turntables as both a medium of creation and as a space of memory.
It’s a matter of reuniting visual and sonic research to study the relations
of exchange that connect the two: relations that link listening and watching,
the sonorous and the visible. The record, as a serial object, is considered
a plastic material and a site of manipulation and intervention favourable for
the following practices: sculpture, assemblage, collage, installation, etc.
There is also the question of harvesting the context that favored the development
and blossoming of the phonographic arts.

This communication
is based on the interaction and the coexistence of the fields of history, philosophy
and theories of new media.

Pour plus
d’information : http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca

SAT[mix_sessions]
: An
electro night featuring Quebec Connection and Le Monochrome.
Just back from their mini-tour with David Kristian, they are ready to deliver
both live and DJ sets to expose their common vision of “Nordic music”,
presenting German and Scandinavian brands of electro while digging back into
forgotten local heroes like Kebekelektrik and Trans X (Living on Video). The
visuals will be generated by the Drone collective, that has
developped its own real-time image processing software.

Quebec
Connection
Quebec Connection is Nathaniel Hebert, a post-student, Montreal native. “Quebec
Connection is an excuse to revel in the sum of my experiences, culling a lifetime
of exposure to early goth, new wave, industrial and EBM, into something meaningful
and culturally redeeming.” Nat Hebert was also a DJ at CISM 89.3FM and
organizer of nights at Purple Haze.

The CD “Bonjour
Expo” is out now on Protomusik Records. The CD has made the 2004 top 10
selections of local journalists, while the artist has been selected among the
Noisemakers 2005 of Montreal Mirror. The full CD culls a wide spectrum of influences,
paired down into a conceptual electro-disco world, a world of white-on-black
vector arcade lands, organic 70s-era dusty percussion, the un-hip science of
analogue synthesis, nordic exoticism, stately moog-brass ensembles, and crown
corporation propaganda.
www.quebecconnection.ca

Le Monochrome
Le Monochrome is Sylvain Aubé. He founded the Monochrome label to expose
his vision of retro-futurism and minimalism in electronic and indie music. A
long time fan of analogue synths and lofi electronic, he produced a string of
EPs as well as releasing CDs by Montreal artists David Kristian and A Vertical
Mosaic. www.monochrome.ca

Drone
Created by a team of 5 Montreal-based programmers, Drone is an open source software
for real-time digital visuals distributed under the Gnu Public Licence. It is
based on a development philosophy that allies artistic creation, state-of-the-art
technology and easiness of use.
The current Drone members are Julien Keable, Mathieu Guindon, Jean-Sébastien
Senécal, Norman Casagrande and Jonathan Villeneuve. www.drone.ws