From Tuesday, August 24 to Friday, August 27, the Play series’ eight double programs carve out space for experimentation inside Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle. Play highlights the exploratory, visceral and immersive character of contemporary artists in digital art, audiovisual creation, and electronic music.
mesocosm is an audiovisual landscape exploration presented by sound artists Philippe Vandal, Joël Lavoie and media artist Emma Forgues. Combining modular synthesis, field recordings, lifelike computer generated elements and real-time video manipulation, mesocosm seeks to orchestrate the parameters of an autonomous ecosystem drawing inspiration from the erratic and unpredictable behaviors of the most basic forms of life. Formed from microscopic particles of sound and imagery, a new materiality emerges, gentle and violent at once. Among the spaces bordering on glitch, noise, ambient and electroacoustics, mesocosm reveals a synthetic and organic visual universe at the edge of chaos and harmony.
Uniquely complex AV performance, Empty Vessels merges robotics, AI neural networks, classical instrumentation and experimental metaphysics. Custom-built by Montreal Life Support in order to play each string at the same time, three sophisticated robotic structures cradles as many cellos placed at the center of the installation; linked together by Woulg’s intricate web of algorithms, these automatons will independently compose evolving yet synthetic harmonies, transcending the very artists who gave them life.
