FESTVAL SOUNDS LIKE VI : Echoing (silent) Machines (Les Transformables v.103)

FESTVAL SOUNDS LIKE VI : Echoing (silent) Machines (Les Transformables v.103) Production : Paved Arts. Saskatoon. 13 au 17 juillet 2016 1 exposition, 9 performances, 1 atelier avec : Alexandre St-Onge, Anne F. Jacques, Diana Burgoyne (Victoria), Ellen Moffat (Saskatoon), Leyla Majeri & Katherine Kline, Nikki Forrest, Steve Bates, Thomas Bégin, et Tod Emel (Saskatoon) Bourse du Conseil des Arts du Canada, obtenue par le festival Bourse du Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Diffusion d’œuvres à l’extérieur du Québec

ECHOING (SILENT) MACHINES
Eric Mattson's curatorial project, entitled Echoing (silent) machines, presents the installation and performance work of ten 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.

THOMAS BÉGIN
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.

STEVE BATES
Steve Bates is an artist and musician living in Montréal. 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.

DIANA BURGOYNE
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.

TOD EMEL
For his latest project Arboreal Audio, Tod Emel turned his ear towards Western Canadian forests decimated by a recent Mountain Pine Beetle infestation. The affected trees were Lodgepole Pine, over-matured from a forest fire management plan that for many years extinguished naturally occurring forest fires as a matter of course. Added to this was successive years of warmer than normal winter temperatures and arid summer conditions attributable to anthropogenic climate change. His approach to this project reflects upon this causal relationship between human actions and their far-reaching, often unforeseen effects.

Although the scale of the disaster is immense and the implications for the global ecosystem are significant and profoundly dire, acknowledgement of the situation outside of the region is disproportionately lacking. Through Arboreal Audio Emel has not only drawn direct attention to the magnitude of the problem but has seeked to reclaim sonic traces of what was lost as those expanses of forest died off. Over a two week period in spring 2016, Emel assembled an extensive sound library created within a forest riddled with beetle-killed trees. These sounds have been used as raw material in creating a new body of improvised electroacoustic work. I think of This project is a sonic silviculture of sorts. Instead of harvesting physical trees and milling them into lumber for construction applications, Emel has selectively harvested tree sounds to be repurposed in constructing immersive sonic architectures. Far from creating a soporific “sounds of nature” relaxation soundtrack, these works constitute a disruption of the pastoral imaginary by presenting something much more uncanny: a reclaimed and artificially reanimated forest, bearing the unmistakeable stamp of human interference.

NIKKI FORREST
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.
In her production residency Nikki Forrest will continue to explore the interaction of the senses and technology that dominates her practice. In particular she will investigate the use, misuse and idiosyncratic adaptation of cameras, microphones and external recording devices to generate audio and video material. This material will be 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.

ANNE-F JACQUES
Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, 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.

KATHERINE KLINE + LEYLA MAJERI
Katherine Kline, aka Celine Bion, makes music with synthesizer, tape and field recordings of psychic channeling sessions. She plays in the Powers, collaborates with Montreal artist Leyla Majeri, and is one half of Dreamcatcher. She is currently doing her doctorate in Communication Studies at Concordia where she studies the psychoanalytic unconscious and ecological theory.

Leyla Majeri est une artiste visuelle originaire de Montréal. Sa pratique s’est développée autour de la sérigraphie pour éventuellement s’étendre au film expérimental d’animation déployé sous forme d’installation et de performance cinématographique. En filiation avec l’animation « directe » et « sans caméra », son travail associe la sérigraphie à des procédés filmiques sur pellicule, détournant ainsi l’image imprimée de son aspect statique pour en révéler l’énergie cinétique et le potentiel sonore. Son travail a été présenté au Canada, aux États-Unis et en Europe, dans le cadre d'expositions collectives et d’événements dédiés à la musique expérimentale et à l’art vidéo. Elle termine actuellement des études à la maîtrise en arts visuels et médiatiques à l'UQAM.

ELLEN MOFFAT
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.

ALEXANDRE ST-ONGE
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.

CARSTEN STABENOW
Carsten Stabenow (1972) works as free curator, producer, communication designer, and artist at the intersection of artistic production and mediation. He studied communications and postgraduate interdisciplinary studies in Berlin, and is the initiator of diverse festivals, formats, and initiatives within the context of new media, art + science, and sound art. Stabenow is the founder of the German media art festival garage, initiator and artistic director of Tuned City, and co-founder of the Berlin art and media production platform DOCK. As a member of the Staalplaat Soundsystem and solo, he has realized several installations and performed worldwide. In his work he is interested especially in physical, social and political parameters of space.