Le BLOC ORAL: 2018

LES TRANSFORMABLES (V) Production : Eric Mattson. Galerie Latitude 53, Edmonton, avril-mai 2018 Performances, installations avec : Alexandre St-Onge, Anne F. Jacques, Thomas Bégin, Steve Bates, Ellen Moffat, Diana Burgoyne, Steve Bates + Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt

TRANSFORMABLES (V)

Presented by Montreal Collective Le Bloc ORAL
(artists and composers Anne-F. Jacques, Alexandre St-Onge, Thomas Bégin & Art, music and sound curator Eric Mattson).
Curated by Eric Mattson

Member of this unit dedicated to hybrid forms of contemporary creation, questioning the relation between production and diffusion, and representing this collective within this application, Eric Mattson endows the following project with both a depth of knowledge regarding Media Art & Sound Art practices and a wealth of experience-- having developed curatorial art projects both for galleries and for series of outdoor urban interventions. In recent years, Eric Mattson has commissioned many works in media art, sound art as well kinetik art. Musically he worked for various festivals including Mutek, Send+Receive, Sounds Like, and CTM Berlin and produced many sound objects under the label ORAL.

Eric Mattson's curatorial project, entitled Transformables, supported by Le Bloc ORAL, presents the installation and performance work of multidisciplinary artists for whom sound is conceived of as wholly material. Invited artists are distinguished by their use of unusual tools for the development and creation of sound, and an idiosyncratic process of material invention characterizes their respective performances in sound, music or noise. The notion of mechanisms is the core of this event, literally as well as figuratively. Visitors are exposed to mechanical sculptural processes which generate sound, sometimes in relation to images. The presented works are the result of hybridization between analog and digital production techniques. These creative attitudes, which break with the agreed upon or familiar use of artistic tools, allow us to explore and discover unknown or inaccessible spaces. Other projects plunge us into a sensate reflection upon memory and the understanding of the physical spaces around us.

This project deals with various positions any listener, viewer, may experiment in front of the selected works. All of them can be apprehended in two modes : the exhibition helps the lecture of the works in a traditional way, dealing with positive contamination, the perambulation in the space gives an horizontal reading of the group of art works ; the program of performances (when possible) gives a new reading and hearing of each work, in a more vertical way, the artist using the work as an instrument for a performance giving more room to spontaneity and dynamics.

For now, Transformables (V) introduces the works of the 3 members of Le Bloc ORAL collective, as well as works by other participants chosen by the curator, whom names and works may change depending of time, locations and conditions.

Followings works give good idea of the whole project. These works were part of the 3 first Transformables, v.101, Rouyn-Noranda, Gallery l’Écart, May 2016 ; v.102, Montréal, Eastern Bloc, june 2016 ; v.103, Saskatoon, Sight & Sound festival (program Echoing (silent) Machines), Paved Art, July 2016.

ALEXANDRE ST-ONGE (Montreal, QC)
BTEBETB
BTEBETB is an installation generated by a series of experiments on the transfomation of material through diverse processes of interdisciplinary deterritorialization.

Alexandre St-Onge is an audio artist, a musician/improviser (bass, voice and electronics) and a sonic performer. Philosophiae doctor (PhD) in art (UQAM, 2015), he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable and he has released over ten solo albums including Semblances (Avatar), viorupeeeeihean (Oral),Entités (Oral) and Kasi Naigo (squintfuckerpress) amongst others. He founded squintfuckerpress with Christof Migone and he plays in quite a few bands which released several albums : Et Sans, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Klaxon Gueule, Pink Saliva, mineminemine, Shalabi Effect, Les esprits frappeurs and undo. As a composer he has worked for interdisciplinary company kondition pluriel, as well as composing for artists such as Marie Brassard, Karine Denault, Lynda Gaudreau, Line Nault, Jérémie Niel, Maryse Poulin and Mariko Tanabe.

ANNE-F JACQUES (Montreal, QC)
Fluid States
Fluid States is composed of a small population of contraptions and devices, put in motion by motors and interacting with one another. the said contraptions generate sound through friction, bouncing, acceleration and electrical vibrations.

Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested iamplification, erratic sound reproduction devices and construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects and unpolished sounds. She performs regularly, has many ongoing collaboration projects (with Tim Olive, Miguel A. Garcia, Takamitsu Ohta and Nicolas Dion, to name a few) and makes soundtracks for Julie Doucet’s animated films. She has presented sound installations in many artist-run centers in Canada and sound performances in North America, Europe and Japan. Anne-F is also involved with Crustacés Tapes, a postal sound distribution project.

DIANA BURGOYNE (Victoria, BC)
Stuck To The Wall
5 high frequency sounds emanate from circuits mounted to each wall. When the audience enters the space two performers will be pressing on spots on the wall to silence the sounds. They will hold the pose for as long as possible. When it is no longer possible to hold the pose they will each stand back from the wall releasing the sounds into the space. They will then switch walls and resume postures to deactivate the sounds.

Diana Burgoyne has worked as an artist and educator within the field of New Media creating performances, installations, sculptures and facilitating workshops. She refers to herself as an “electronic folk artist” as defined by the late electronic music composer Martin Bartlet. Burgoyne has performed at The Franklin Furnace, New York, Gianzzo Live Berlin and Soundwaves San Francisco in addition to many others. Her work has been exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Reim (France), Eindhoven (Holland), and Auckland New Zealand. She has been an artist in residence at the The Banff Centre, San Francisco’s Exploratorium, New Zealand’s Colab and Symbiosis in Mexico. She has also participated in several new media conferences and has been teaching a class entitled “Creative Electronics” at Emily Carr University since 1998.

ELLEN MOFFAT (Saskatoon, SK)
Surface : Signals
Surfaces, materials and objects are resonators and conductors for sound making in audio installation and performance. A rhythmic, low frequency signal of varying amplitude pulses as a recurring audio presence, the sound ranging from near silence to noise as direct and as secondary sound. The signal vibrates the interfaces and objects directly; sound is amplified and distributed by the materials. Vibration triggers spatial movement of the objects, causing sonic collisions and releasing resonant frequencies as secondary sound. surface : signals explores resonance, relations and sound making using Dadaist play, punning, experimentation and metaphor.

Ellen Moffat is a media installation artist whose work focuses on sound and space, image and text in independent, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. Rooted in the vocabulary of sculpture - space, the body and materiality - her primary media is sound. Her audio projects range from multi-channel installations, to electroacoustic instruments, to performance and live actions, to community projects. Recurring elements in her work are constructed and found interfaces, transducers, real-time processing and experimental sound-making using high-low technology and aesthetics. Her investigation is a poetic and conceptual inquiry into sound and space, experience, communication and social relations.
Her work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Venice, Paris, Brooklyn and Florida. As a cultural worker, she has completed contracts as sessional instructor, community resident artist and writer. Born in Toronto, she is based in Saskatoon where she is a Professional Affiliate of the University of Saskatchewan.

NIKKI FORREST (Montreal, QC)
Variations For Obstructed Camera
Variations for Obstructed Camera explores the creative potential arising from the transformation of sensory information through technology, performance and improvisation focusing in particular on the use, misuse and idiosyncratic adaptation of cameras, microphones and external recording devices. The artist is interested in the idea that recording procedures can detect and contact registers that usually remain inaccessible or infra-sensory. The resulting material is not representational but is instead a record of a specific time and place.

In her production, Nikki Forrest explores the interaction of the senses and technology that dominates her practice. In particular she investigates the use, misuse and idiosyncratic adaptation of cameras, microphones and external recording devices to generate audio and video material. This material is processed and edited to produce the installation loop and remixed live using a combination of digital and non-digital devices in the performance. The artist is interested in the creative potential arising from the transformation of sensory information through technology, performance and improvisation as well as the possibilities offered by recording devices to detect and capture information that is not ordinarily apparent. Technical devices used in this way do not replace or necessarily extend the human sensorium but operate in conjunction, in parallel or in conversation with it.
Nikki Forrest is a Montreal based artist whose practice includes video, sound, drawing, installation and performance projects. Her current work explores the improvisatory flow of ideas, materials and process emerging from a multidisciplinary studio practice, looking in particular at the intersection of perception, memory and technology. Nikki’s work is included in the collections of The National Gallery of Canada, The Saskatchewan Arts Board and Concordia University.

STEVE BATES (Montreal, QC)
Bunker Bartók (Installation)
Bunker Bartók is a two channel sound work that was recorded at Le fort de Souville on the World War Battlefield of Verdun, France, in November 2015. By suspending two omnidirectional microphones into a machine gun turret connected to a tunnel leading to other parts of the fortress, the acoustic space of this site was recorded. Now bathed in an eery quiet, the turret holds only the sound of the surrounding forest reflecting off of its 18” thick steel walls. As a careful act of intervention into the site, I placed a small FM radio to hear the acoustic effect of the turret and large underground bunker. By chance, a Bartók violin sonate was broadcast at the same time. The music immediately became, for me, a sort of broadcast of sorrow and I imagine it as a kind of sonic elegy to those who suffered so much. Bunker Bartók utilizes the original recordings and processed versions of the same recordings.

Two Listening Positions (Performance)
Two Listening Positions is a performance using field recordings collected on the World War One Battlefield of Verdun, France. The site, where the battle lasted 303 days and nights between February 21 – December 20, 1916, with casualties estimated as high as 976,000 is very charged to this day. Relics of the war such as unexploded bombs, poison gas bottles and human and animal bones are still very present. Two Listening Positions is a performance using recordings of the Verdun Forest in a windstorm, FM radio signals, French military helicopters and ruins of the battlefield, and a water lock in the town of Verdun. Whereas Bunker Bartók is imagined as an elegy to those soldiers, civilians and animals who lost so much in the Battle of Verdun, Two Listening Positions is a raging blast of broadband noise in protest against the elite who caused the war and continue to do so throughout the world.

Originally from Winnipeg, Steve Bates is an artist and musician living in Montreal. His work listens to boundaries and borders, points of contact and conflict. Thresholds are explored, stretched and, at times, completely broken. Information and signal feed back onto themselves creating new situations and events. The sonic is the starting point for his projects which are evocations of communication networks and systems, or expressions of spatial and temporal experience. He frequently uses sound material that is site-specific in an attempt to uncover place and how the sonic effects our experience of site. Time can be measured, stretched, pulled at, ignored, and extended. He is currently developing a multi-year project investigating historical and contemporary aspects of auditory hallucination. He releases music both solo and collaboratively, often through his own small scale publishing and curatorial project, The Dim Coast. His work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Europe and Senegal. He works in the field, on the air, in museological/gallery and performance contexts. These shifting territories reflect the content of his practice.

THOMAS BÉGIN (Montreal, QC)
Larsen Surf
Larsen Surf is a sound installation, a synthesizer oscillating in space , exploiting phenomenon of Positive Feed-Back for generating complex sound loops . Cobbled together from electric guitars, amplifiers, speakers and wire, this system develops and maintains sound schemes without requiring the introduction of any external information. It is a musical system capable of self-regulation.

Technical Description : The system consists of three electric guitars (and bass guitars) or more. Each guitars is connected to an amplifier that powers two speakers . On the membrane of each of these speakers is attached a wire. This wire links the guitar string to the speaker membrane. So when typing the guitar string, the vibration of the speaker membrane is piped back directly into the guitar string through the wire. Feedback is then generated, which, if allowed to develop, will produce a sound amplifying to infinite volume (a Larsen feed back) probably resulting in the destruction of speakers. However, by combining several guitars arranged with wires and connecting those different wires between them, the many feedbacks start negotiating their way through the net of wires to the guitar strings. They begin to intermodifier each other dynamically creating complex wave patterns. By tuning the system, different sound patterns can be produce and used as material for improvisation. The physical properties of the different component of the system, become the structuring elements that determine and produce the sound composition.

Both in his installations and performances, Montreal artist Thomas Bégin brilliantly combines the goals of scientist who aspires to the realization of these, to the playful overflow of the artist who can get lost in the maze of creation but who also aspires to an exemplary finality of the work. Multidisciplinary artist, he wonders and distorts by minimizing the active ingredients in the sciences that study meticulously. he offers his own theorems in fields such as mechanics and optics to ultimately develop its own cybernetic and art.

CONSTAT :

L’exposition Les Transformables (V) à la galerie Latitude 53 et la tenue d’un cycle de performances ont eu lieu dans de bonnes conditions.
Située au centre ville de la ville d’Edmonton en Alberta, cette galerie a une grande superficie répartie en 3 espaces principaux. Dérogeant à leurs habitudes de programmation, les responsables de Latitude 53, dont le directeur artistique Adam Waldron-Blain, avaient accepté ma proposition d’occuper entièrement cet ensemble avec des installations cinétiques, numériques, visuelles et sonores. Les artistes présents à Edmonton étaient Alexandre St-Onge, Anne-F. Jacques, Nikki Forrest, Steve Bates et Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, de Montréal ; Diana Burgoyne de Victoria et Ellen Moffat de Saskatoon.

L’exposition:
Le titre Les Transformables (V) évoque à la fois la transformation d’informations et de contenus grâce à des passages, des traductions d’un média à un autre, mais aussi le double usage des œuvres, en exposition, à long terme, et en performances, à un moment donné. Cette exposition, présentée du 13 avril au 26 mai 2018, est une réussite tant du point de vue de la singularité des œuvres présentées que de l’unité qui s’en détache. Les nombreux visiteurs rencontrés au vernissage ont célébré son caractère unique en égard aux habituelles expositions qu’accueillent les rares galeries de la ville. Pour les prochaines semaines d’exposition, alors que nous sommes toutes et tous rentré(e) s chez nous, les œuvres vont exister en mode exposition.

Anne-F. Jacques et Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt partage l’espace dit communautaire, Ellen Moffat et Diana Burgoyne occupent la galerie principale alors que Nikki Forrest et Steve Bates, ayant besoin d’un espace plus sombre, ont été installés dans la salle des projets. L’installation minimale d'Alexandre St-Onge loge dans le débarras, à l’arrière immédiat de la galerie, là où des objets hétéroclites s’amoncellent. L’œuvre de Anne-F. Jacques est une installation sonore et sculpturale, placée sur le sol, et faites de bois et de fines lames de tuile noire qui en se déplaçant mécaniquement produisent une composition sonore. Nikki Forrest présente une œuvre vidéographique réalisée grâce un appareil photo sans obturateur et une architecture de papiers transparents de couleurs. Steve Bates présente Chairs Falling : des vidéos silencieux sont visibles sur deux grands moniteurs placés sur deux murs à angle droit alors que le visiteur doit s’asseoir en face d’une batterie (musique), porter un casque afin de regarder et écouter sur un IPad placé dans la caisse claire un montage vidéo montrant l’artiste poussant des chaises dans divers escaliers extérieurs de la ville de Montréal. Six dessins faits de superpositions de lignes tracées au crayon feutre noir occupent un mur. Chacun d’eux est devenu une partition à lire. Des instructions, aussi des explications, sont imprimées sur des beaux papiers déposés sur un lutrin. Finalement, un IPhone, une unité de traitement sonore, un petit haut-parleur et quelques pages imprimées suffisent à occuper tout l’espace qu’Alexandre St-Onge a choisi. Sont travail est une longue succession de traductions de contenus d’un média par un autre et ainsi de suite… avant de se solidifier en cette proposition minimale.

Les performances:
Le vernissage a eu lieu le 13 avril 2018 à 19h, un public nombreux y a assisté. Deux performances ont marqué la soirée. L’artiste de Victoria Diana Burgoyne a parcouru les espaces, pendant deux heures, affublée d’un masque qui émet des sons dépendamment de l’espace et de ses mouvements. De Montréal, commençant dans le réduit qu’il décida d’occuper, continuant dans la galerie pour finalement terminer sa « course » sur le trottoir à l’avant de la galerie, Alexandre St-Onge a effectué une performance sonore, à la fois poétique et physique, une déambulation comme lui seul en a le secret. Ces actions présageaient la journée du lendemain, le samedi 14 avril, alors que deux programmes de performances étaient prévus, entrecoupés par un repas collectif. Désireux d’établir des collaborations avec des institutions locales, j’avais invité une musicienne et deux musiciens d’Edmonton à partager l’affiche. Ainsi Raylene Campbell, Gary James Joynes et Mark Templeton, que je connaissais pour avoir travaillé avec eux à Montréal dans le passé, se sont joints aux artistes invités dans deux séquences de performances en solos mais aussi en duos.

Samedi 14 avril 2018
De 15h30 à 17h30 :
Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt & Steve Bates
Anne-F. Jacques
Anne F. Jacques & Ellen Moffat
Ellen Moffat
Mark Templeton

De 19h30 à 21h30 :
Nikki Forrest & Anne-F. Jacques
Alexandre St-Onge
Raylene Campbell
Nikki Forrest
Steve Bates & Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt
Gary James Joynes.

Si un public épars assista à la première séance, la seconde connut un succès d’audience. Les deux programmes furent appréciés de celles et ceux présents. La diversité ne fut en aucun cas un obstacle au dialogue entre les propositions, au contraire, l’enchainement des performances fut fluide, sans interruptions, offrant une continuité bien que les spectateurs auditeurs avaient à se déplacer pour suivre les diverses actions réalisées en majorité dans les espaces de présentation des œuvres.

Tous les artistes présents m’ont signifié leur intérêt de travailler ensemble et leur volonté de collaborer avec lE Bloc Oral pour que de nouvelles itérations des Transformables aient lieu. Montréal, Vancouver ou Victoria sont villes auxquelles elles et ils pensent pour la tenue prochaine d’une nouvelle exposition : Les Transformables (VI)

Le BLOC ORAL

ACCÈS DIRECT

LA CONTAMINATION EST (ici) POSITIVE

LES TRANSFORMABLES (V)

à venir :

LE BLOC ORAL : Événements / Events ; Expositions / exhibitions

LA CONTAMINATION EST (ici) POSITIVE Exposition sonore. Mai 2018. Eastern Bloc, Montréal Compositions contaminées et contaminantes de : Alexandre Burton, Alexandre St-Onge, André Eric Letourneau, Émilie Payeur, Félix-Antoine Morin, Line Katcho, Marc-alexandre Reinhardt, Nikki Forrest, Patrice Coulombe, Pierre-Yves Martel Bourse du Conseil des Art du Canada, programme Du concept à la réalisation

ACCÈS DIRECT

LA CONTAMINATION EST (ici) POSITIVE

LES TRANSFORMABLES (V)

à venir :

LE BLOC ORAL : Événements / Events ; Expositions / exhibitions

S’abonner à