Hello out there!
Laurie Watson
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The Rotarian Choir sings for you
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Talking face-to-face has dropped out of fashion, so let Encodeurs answer your call
Our relationship with technology has become so intricate and involved - it's a torrid affair, really - that I can't say I was too surprised to overhear viewers at Pierre-François Ouellette discuss things like dataflow, plotters, paths and what it means to "re-engineer the patch." Encodeurs is an interactive installation uniting obsolete technology and open source software by artists Darsha Hewitt, Alexandre Quessy, Alexandre Castonguay, Mathieu Bouchard and Ken Campbell. It offers a sample of the kind of work being presented concurrently at the second international PureData Convention- an event that, in all likelihood, will draw to it as many math-heads, techies and hackers as media artists.
Before entering Bourne Identity territory, I was transported back to the future with Rotarian Choir, a sound installation by Hewitt and Quessy. Featuring a singsong cast of wall-mounted and floor-bound rotary telephones, these modules of lost time use the original gong ringers to create touching musical compositions ranging from cheerful to melancholic.
Castonguay joins in on the fun with a tongue-in-cheek critique of corporate culture and his own levels of productivity in Motion Studies, featuring a dry point etching and a photograph of red and blue LED lights. Here, the artist turns a program similar to the ones designed to track workforce efficiency on himself, exposing his artistic/lazing practices. As it turns out, his inefficiency when charted visually adds up to a bunch
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of abstract lines converging in not-so-meaningful ways.In the third gallery space, Castonguay joins Bouchard and Campbell for Drawing by Numbers, an interactive piece that pairs public domain software with the latest marketing trends and "normative" consumer behaviour. Participants are asked to dance like fools in front of a screen, except that only gestures considered "typical" or consumer-friendly are programmed to be captured. A blade-tipped, wall-mounted plotter then slowly engraves these images on the wall adjacent from the screen. Pose like a model in an iPod ad campaign, for example, and you're guaranteed a big etch-a-sketch copy of yourself. Like most new technology, the process is good fun, but like most old technology, it requires a little patience.
Encodeurs
At Pierre-François Ouellette (372 Ste-Catherine W., suite 216), to Sept. 1
Vernissage Aug. 2, 2:30-5 p.m.
PureData Convention
At various venues, to Aug. 26
http://pure-data.ca
