A colourful ceremony in which we salute the arrival of the artists in town! Come join the party!
A colourful ceremony in which we salute the arrival of the artists in town! Come join the party!
Luc Courchesne is a digital art pioneer. Throughout his career he has created engaging works of art which have earned him prestigious awards, more than 180 exhibitions around the world and a place in large collections. More than ever, two fundamental questions present themselves: Where am I? Who am I? The projects Apparitions, Ontologies éphémères and Vienne claire-obscure explore these questions in a world cast into increasing upheaval by computer algorithms and network technologies. This lecture introduces these projects, the processes they bring to bear, the experiences they strive to provide and the issues they raise.
Founded in 2006 with a vocation to convey knowledge, Campus SAT is the educational wing of the Société des arts technologiques, which supports artists from every background in their use of digital technologies and promoting innovation both with respect to technology and in terms of surpassing oneself in artistic creation.
During the Symposium, introductory kiosks will enable young people and adults to discover live video creation (VJing), video mapping and image-by-image animation.
Michel Boulanger’s project consists in taking
as his object of study the space of the studio with the goal of creating bizarre extensions of its architecture and mechanics. He will undertake this work as a kind of drawing, both organic and very organised, extending in space by means of a play of intertwined branches, like that of 3D modelling software used to create forms. This volumetric drawing will convey tension between life
forces and the more rationalised forces of our viewing systems for digital imagery.
Technological inventions and transformations in the ways of seeing in the nineteenth century: archival photographs and films commented on by art historians.
France, 2021, 52 min • Réalisation / Director : Stefan Cornic • Documentaire / Documentary
Entitled Plan Ligne Point – planer au-dessus de la continuité, Chantal Lagacé’s project intends to highlight the sprawling graphic representation of networks of streets, highways and, through a causal relation, that of the electrical wires and cables they run alongside. To carry out this project, Lagacé will conduct research into geographical maps and establish a body of documentary photographs. She will also take photographs and audiovisual footage from a helicopter over the city. These photographs and audiovisual materials will accompany a geographical map of Baie-Saint-Paul, depicting these networks on the ground using nails and coloured cord.
Oli Sorensen’s project is entitled Nuage, a term commonly used in information technology. The many contradictions of this cloud fascinate him: the term describes a vaporous object whose irregular and shifting contours encompass an infinity of virtual practices on the Internet. At the same time, all these practices are carried out by an equally vast ensemble of tangible devices with a material effect on society’s financial, psychological, public health and ecological conditions. The work will include a tangible version made up of acrylic paintings and a virtual version made online with brief NFT animations. Sorensen claims that these digital practices are not as innovative as one might think, but rather that they are part of an evolving continuum closely tied to their technical and social heritage.
A visual artist, member of the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV), Sandra Tremblay is also a consultant and a cultural interpreter. The artistic projects she conceives involve social inclusion and a valorisation of a poetic sensibility and of imagination.
During the Symposium, she will offer five creative workshops which examine our relations with the tangible world and the digital language. Visitors will be able to experience through drawing, collage, gestures and words how the virtual transforms their relations with time, space and others.
Irene Anton’s project is an intervention-invasion of networks. Made out of recuperated and reused tights, her installations are made up of around 150 thin tights in a network full of knots (like basal ganglia in the brain). These textile structures are a reflection of contemporary phenomena such as globalisation and the World Wide Web – our “global brain” – which link up the entire world. The public will be invited to walk under the elevated parts of this network and to linger there. It will also be possible to handle this material and, by interacting with it, to contribute, in a sense, to creating a social network.
A hard-hitting documentary on the ability of social media to control our behaviour, denounced by former creators now sounding the alarm.
Écrans & Réseaux 2.0 plunges into the materiality of the image and of screens. Serge Clément’s project will also address the notion of codified representations in cinema and carry out an open analysis of the image in its extensions. His project is located at the heart of the question of photography in the digital age, with images from Clément’s archives. These archives derive from research into urbanisation and consist also in documentation by means of photograms and in a reconstitution of his cinematic memories. In his recreated studio, he hopes to discuss random encounters of image and content brought out by his encounters with the public.
Herman Kolgen will here highlight the evolution of his use of new media, from the 1980s to his most recent productions. A creator of a highly technological form of art, Kolgen will shed light on his interest in nature and on his experiments at the boundary of the perceptible, the visible and the invisible. The discussion will engage various projects carried out and will also examine the role of technology and its connection to creativity. Herman Kolgen is a self-taught artist with a multidisciplinary body of work. His sound and visual installations and performances have been presented at the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale (Berlin), Mutek and Elektra (Montreal), Shanghai eARTS and at several museums (MCAM, the Pompidou Centre, MMCA -Seoul, MASS MOCA). He is the recipient of several awards, including the Gouverneur général Vidéoforme award (France) and the Ars Electronica award.
Sylvie Laplante’s project is a sound installation which will disseminate a multi-channel composition conceived out of different sources of sound captured in Baie-Saint-Paul. These recordings will then be transformed through editing to fragment, displace, stretch, condense and put these tracks back together in new compositions. In the editing interface, the captured sounds will become visual in the form of coloured strips of varying lengths, representing the sound waves of the recordings. In an exhibition space, the compositions will play independently, simultaneously and in a loop to create a constant out-of-synch effect. The public will be invited to share the narrative that arises from their experience of this sound installation.
The mission of the Musée ambulant, founded in 2017, is to make art accessible by going to the public wherever it may be. It presents dissemination and outreach activities throughout Quebec which provide direct, interactive and novel contact with works of art.
During the Symposium, the Musée ambulant invites you to discover Secrets des bois, an interactive survey enabling to dive in the magic of the artworks of Marie-France Tremblay, by means of an augmented reality app. Presented in the trail behind the Maison Mère (63, rue Ambroise-Fafard, Baie-Saint-Paul) every morning, between 10h and noon.
During the Symposium, the Musée ambulant invites you to experience its Super véhicule d'immersion artistique (S-VIA) by creating an augmented reality artwork! Through the discovery of the manipulable artwork series Les Fées from the artist Fanny Mesnard, we invite you to create your own little sculpture that can be digitized, then teleported into virtual reality headsets to enable you to continue your creation, alone or as a family, in the digital universe!
Sébastien Lafleur’s project will take the form of an interactive installation bringing together kinetic sculpture, video art and video mapping projection. Foregrounding the aesthetic and experimental experience offered to built environments by technology, this work will examine our relations with connected spaces, smart homes and architecture in the digital age. It will invite visitors to interact with the space and objects. Using various movement sensors, electronic circuits and touch sensors, it will be possible to modify the visuals and ambience of the installation through contact with objects and by moving about. Interventions will make it possible to set in motion a kinetic sculpture and to transform in real time the sound ambience, the colours of the lights and the visual appearance of the video projections.
Oscar-winner for special effects in 2016, this film features an android, created by artificial intelligence, and takes up the unsettling relations between humans and machines.
Marilyne Busque-Dubois’ project seeks to highlight the encounter between two kinds of connection: that of the digital and that of nature. She will create a BioBlitz Charlevoix on the INaturalist portal in order to compile her photographs of wild organisms in the region. The public will be invited to do the same and to share their feelings at the moment of observation or during this period of their life. Short poems (haikus) reflecting the connection between these feelings and the species observed will be created and written on a piece of fabric depicting a waterfall. At its foot will be a few stones, onto which she will have transferred some of the photographs. Together, these elements will create a participatory installation showing the traces we leave on the web, like fossils.
In this conversation, Yves Gingras and Anne Beauchemin will discuss the connections formed throughout history between art, science and technology. Drawing on the history of science and the history of art, they will look back on eloquent examples from the past before taking up aspects of the hidden side of science, technology and art in the world today. Yves Gingras is a professor of the history and sociology of science in the history department at UQAM and scientific director of the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST). He is the author of several books, earning him Quebec’s Prix Léon-Gérin in the humanities and social sciences in 2018. He was named knight in the Ordre national du Québec in 2019, in particular for his talent as a popularizer.
Syllad’s project is entitled TRANS-HUMANCE, volet Baie-Saint-Paul — Les arbres nous observent et se disent: “Pauvres humains . . . ils sont complètement déconnectés!” Digital art, 3D sculptures, optical fibres and citizen action are the components of this project. Sculptures called RACIEL will be created out of tree branches from the town of Baie-Saint-Paul and connected with disseminating optical fibres. The public will be invited to identify a tree in town with meaning for them and to share the connection between them and this tree in particular.
With this project, Carolyne Scenna seeks to invite the public to enter into the fabrication of images used to constitute an artwork; first in the production of experimental digital animation and in setting up an immersive installation. The animation sequences will be produced out of assemblages of objects echoing the phenomenon of autonomous sensory meridian response, or the agreeable sensation felt in the cranium in response to stimulus. The videos made specifically to give rise to this kind of sensation are fascinating by virtue of their intimacy, their aesthetic and their format, which often imitates a practical demonstration. The installation will be made up of both artworks and of a video made out of sequences of created images. Various hyperbolic devices will destabilise the continuity of the way the works are read.
The arrival of the digital age has been accompanied by the growing power of social media, whose platforms use inventiveness to find ever new ways of connecting us with each other. But do all these publications, these stories, these “likes” and “shares” really create a connection? And, above all, do they enable us to stay in contact with ourselves?
With this activity, the Symposium invites you to reconnect with your experience of art by expressing, in the medium of your choice (drawing, painting, writing), how this 40th edition has been inspiring to you. Afterwards, you can add your creation to a tangible web-net, made out of rope. In this way you can connect your own experience with that of other visitors, in an interconnected whole.
Interviews with the earliest creators of electronic music in a constructive dialogue on the connections between art and technology.
Vasilis Vasili’s project is a sculpted interpretation of a digital camera. A part of his work is based on the concept of fear. Fear is a situation or an emotion that activates the human being on trying to create an environment of protection. In some aspects that protection can also become aggressive. Art is a tool that is used to "cheat" the fear. Watch towers are spaces to control the environment and stay safe from any enemy. In our time, the watching towers are the digital cameras mounted to the walls. Every organization and every individual are trying to preserve what they build. Through this project, the artist will share his philosophic approach on the concepts of art, life, fear and death with the public.
Through her project L’Ancêtre, Patricia Lortie makes a symbolic gesture and restores cardboard to the shape of a tree. The sculpture will be made out of corrugated cardboard using a process of her own invention, and will be accompanied by a video projection. Visitors will be able to touch the sculpture and take it in their arms in order to remind them of our primordial connection with the natural world. Making the sculpture will require gathering recycled corrugated cardboard. A public appeal for corrugated cardboard will test, on a local level, the interconnectivity offered by digital networks. This invitation will prompt people to examine their consumption and create a real connection between artwork and individual. Through the use of recycled cardboard, Lortie interrogates our ties to overconsumption and our use of the forest to support the online shopping industry.
Awarding of the UQAM Jean-Claude-Rochefort Grant created in memory of this important figure in contemporary art in Quebec, this grant is awarded to a student in art history at the Université du Québec à Montréal who stands out for his or her research into contemporary art. Visitors to the Symposium are invited to come meet the winner of the 2022 Jean-Claude-Rochefort Grant. Born in St-Hilarion and died en 2010, Jean-Claude Rochefort lived in the Charlevoix region and in Montreal, where he worked as an art critic (Le Devoir, Spirale, Vie des Arts) and independent curator.
Hédy Gobaa’s project is entitled Lorsqu’ici devient là-bas. In today’s globalised world and as a migrant himself, Gobaa feels that what eludes us today is a sense of place. Who among us can still claim to having remained faithful to the place where we grew up? Using a computer to prefabricate his paintings, Gobaa will create hybrid landscapes from those of Tunisia and Quebec using superimposition, the incorporation of elements, cut-outs and manipulated shapes and colours. He would like to express the fact that the way of looking of the interconnected traveller who inhabits several places is hybrid; that these travellers superimpose snapshots one on top of the other; and that they accumulate these snapshots, erase things and create a kind of monstrous deformation.
The 40th edition of the Symposium will come to a close in music: come party with Qualité Motel! This Quebec electro-pop group, whose reputation as a performance machine needs no introduction, will give a closing show that will really wow your eyes and ears!
A presentation of the artworks created during the 40th Symposium.