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.
ALMA is the union of artists and researchers Marc-André Cossette and Alexandre Saunier. Fragments: The Shape of Things questions how automated data processing systems impact the perception of social relations and global conflicts, notably in terms of their anonymization and aestheticization. Audiovisual fragments composed or extracted from the news meet an amalgam of analog and electronic instruments, video game engines, photogrammetry, and sophisticated AI and A-Life techniques. ALMA conceptualizes a two-part live performance, where the realism of urban components is mystified through technological processes, recalling the distance between our bodies and the digital alterations of our realities.
With MSCZOE-01.01.2019, Thisquietarmy x Philippe Léonard A/V duo pushes the concept of an enlarged cinema even further to recreate the scale of the maritime disaster of the MSC Zoe, which resulted in the loss of 290 containers at sea, swapping analog hardware for modern, minimal digital technology. For this work as immersive as it is post-apocalyptic, Leonard works with digital controllers and software from VJ-ing, while Thisquietarmy trades his guitars and amplifiers for more synthetic kosmische electronic drones and off-techno industrial rhythms pulsed from 'recorded samples.
