'Artist talk'
June 12th
Artist talk / Fragments: A Cognitive Merzbau
- Abstract: Fragments is an ongoing series of audiovisual research-creation works that bring together live performance, generative music, video game design, photogrammetry, lighting design, audiovisual production, and theatre dramaturgy. By using a collage approach that mesh together autonomous computational systems, human performance, and real-world imagery and sound, the series explore the complex feelings of living in an algorithm-driven world, living away from one’s homeland, meeting and sharing across cultural differences, sustaining social lives at a distance and across borders, and relating to the mediatized lives of strangers.
Three pieces are discussed: Poetics of Otherness, that explores the hyper–mediatisation of warzones, Stabat Mater, that inquires into the anonymity of living in urban metropolis, and The Shape of Things, that dives into the atemporality of large-scale infrastructures.
Fragments is an ongoing series of audiovisual works that bring together multiple Montreal-based, but nationally-diverse, collaborators in the fields of generative music, lighting design, audiovisual production, graphic design, and research-creation. Together they explore the complex feelings of living in an algorithm-driven world, living away from their homelands, meeting and sharing across cultural differences, and sustaining social lives at a distance and across borders. As part of this series, The Shape of Things is an original creation led by Alexandre Saunier & Marc-André Cossette as the duo ALMA.
- Biography: ALMA (Alexandre Saunier & Marc-André Cossette) mixes together cutting-edge AI & A-Life algorithms with drum machines, analog and virtual synthesizers, photogrammetry, procedural graphics, and video-game engines to invoke memories of inaccessible places, the sensations of the material world, and the feeling of being together.
Alexandre Saunier is a multimedia artist and PhD Candidate at Concordia University. His research addresses the intersection between artistic creation with light, autonomous systems, and sensory perception. His artistic work is regularly presented in international festival such as Mutek, Bcn_Llum, Impakt, and Festival de la Imagen.
Marc-André Cossette is a transdisciplinary artist and PhD Candidate at Concordia University working on the relation between technology and performing arts using sound, visual, interaction design and Artificial. His work has been presented both in Canada and internationally, notably at Tangente Danse (Canada), Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), El Matadero (Spain) and CMMAS (Mexico).
Venue
- MACBA - Convent dels Àngels
Plaça dels Àngels, 5, Barcelona
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