Montreal's 1976 Summer Olympics saw the city gesturing, often haphazardly, towards modernity.  One particular stride towards innovation was captured in the ceremonial torch relay.  Rather than being transported on foot as per tradition, the Olympic Flame was electronically transmitted via satellite from Athens to Ottawa by means of an electronic pulse derived from the eternal flame.  In Ottawa, the signal was transformed into a laser, which then ignited a torch that was carried by hand to Montreal.

We propose to transport a flame from the site of the first nuclear reactor built for commercial use in the United States in Shippingport, PA to an exhibition at the Society for Art and Technology Studies in Montreal, QC.  Rather than simply restaging the 1976 relay, our collaboration seeks to collapse the distances between this artifact of the atomic age and the context of the Montreal Olympics as a way to reinterpret their inherent utopian ideologies and access their entropic potential.   

Through this dramatization, we intend to explore the genealogy of energy and technological progress as a cyclical and transformative process, where primordial flame becomes converted into nuclear fission, electricity, signal, light, and back into fire.  

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Craig Fahner is interested in negotiations between the virtual and the real, the ubiquitous and the unlikely. His electronic and sound based work has been exhibited across Canada and the United States, such as the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas and the Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto.  web: craigfahner.com/

Steve Gurysh explores the relations between artistic, ecological, and technological inquiry through field research, site-specific sculpture, and alchemical gestures.  He has exhibited his work at venues such as the Center for the Study of the End of Things in Charlottesville, VA and Cabinet Magazine’s Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, NY.  web: stevegurysh.com/

Radio Test #1 

2011

Installation, electronics

Radio Test #1 is an attempt to reintroduce a minor element of wonder to our interactions with/understandings of our technological environment. 

@ SAT september 23 : VERNISSAGE : 19h to 21h30

september 24 & 25: 11h to 17h

Colin Rothfels is an amateur futurist and compulsive generalist whose work and study explore the fringes and backwaters of the cultural and technological world. Living in Montreal, his most recently enduring obsession is with finding non-technical ways to explore and share deeply technical ideas, and with finding social and cultural contexts where those exchanges can be made possible.

Bienvenue/Welcome is a bilingual publication printed on the ubiquitous place mats found at diners in Montreal. It is an effort to provide inspiring material in a medium that is both unconventional and everyday. It recalls mornings of breakfast made fun with facts and games printed on the backs of cereal boxes, and it plays with the idea that a leisurely meal is also the best time to digest information. Diners are crossroads for an ever-expanding spectrum of city-dwellers.

Montreal’s historic “two solitudes”—anglophones and francophones—are just two parts of the city’s demographic. Immigration has thrown the city’s makeup into flux. Diners, known in Quebec as casse-croûtes, are a quintessentially North American institution. However, their informality, low prices and long business hours unite hungry people from all walks of life, making them a site of cultural exchange. Montreal’s textured array of identities converge and occasionally clash in these unique spaces, often yielding surprising and amusing results. Bienvenue wants to explore the individuals, objects (and meals) that create Montreal, and invites all those who encounter it to explore it as well. It can be found in select diners across the city.

http://bienvenuewelcome.tumblr.com/

@ POP Quarters : each day of festival.

@ SAT café : september 23 - 25th

@ various diners across the city : forever!

Ming Lin : 

Ming Lin studies anthropology and art history at McGill University. She is interested in the role objects play in everyday life, in constructing meaning and identity, and how our investigation of them can lead to new frameworks for looking at art. Ming started collecting Montreal diner placemats years ago and has enjoyed getting to know the city though its various culinary offerings.

Madeline Coleman :

a freelance writer and the associate editor of Maisonneuve magazine. 

Hilary Ison:

"Currently nursing a sourdough while her undergraduate degree is crowning, Hilary Ison is a food-obsessed student and singer."

Aditi Ohri:

" Aditi Ohri is not a girl, not yet a woman. All she needs is time and a glass of fine red wine, while she eats poutine. "

In celebration of the 10 Year Anniversary of POP Montréal, Richmond Lam presents Portraits of POP. Featuring the many faces of Montréal's music community, this monochromatic series will be the third installment of Lam's exploration through portraiture. It will be exhibited at the SAT and the POP Quarters, as a part of Art Pop.

@ POP Quarters : each day of festival. VERNISSAGE: WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 21: event

@ SAT café : september 23 - 25th. event

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Richmond Lam is a freelance photographer based in Montréal. His portraits and documentary photographs celebrate music, fashion and youth culture. 

http://richmondlam.com

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Sound maps are in many ways the most effective auditory archive of an environment, touching on aspects political, artistic, cultural, historical, and technological. The Montréal Sound Map is an ongoing and continually evolving project with the goal of a constant addition of new recordings being placed into a browsable tagging system

MTL Sound Map is an interface the Stein's designed in 2009. It has received much attention throughout the city, and has exhibited as a permanent public space installation at the BAnQ - la Grande Bibliothèque de Montreal in Winter of 2010.

Check it out here>>> http://montrealsoundmap.com/

and also the browsable touch screen at the SAT -- VERNISSAGE : AND NO ONE WAS AROUND, september 23, 19h!

Julian and Maxwell Stein are twins from Pennsylvania,  USA. They have been living and working in Montreal for the past 4 years, studying electroacoustics & making sound-works all throughout the city - and very often they make sound works WITH the city. Julian and Max are both research assistants of Sandeep Bhagwati's matralab, at the Hexagram research centre. 

MTL Sound Map is an interface the Stein's designed in 2009, and since have been commissioned to design similar soundmaps for cities around the world including Stockholm, and Brussels.

Raphaelle Frigon  is a Montreal-based artist, working at the juncture of biology and technology. Her work concurrently explores ideas of disembodied information and identity-building processes. She performed and exhibited in a wide variety of contexts since 2005, from abandoned buildings to contemporary art festivals.

web: raphaellefrigon.com

Patryk Stasieczek is a media artist from Edmonton, Alberta and is currently based in of Montréal, Quebec. His work addresses the ontological nature of the lens and the verifiability of such media. Using photography & video to draw out the direct relationship forged within perception, Patryk Stasieczek has exhibited his work at Société des arts technologiques, Eastern Bloc, Galerie Les Territoires in Montréal. He is also one of the 200 international artists selected to participate in this years The Cheaper Show held in Vancouver, BC.

web: stasieczek.net  |  a camera phone  |  acidplane  |  blog    

Aurora Urbem explores synchronicity and sensory connections through sound sculptures, multichannel audio, and video. 

"if you listen, when weirdly the lights are streaming, perhaps you may hear a whisper low.”  -From "Northern Lights" - T.A. Robertson

"the sound was as if rhythms unrealized within were the whole round of heaven. not, as in thunder, being rolled about, a gill--brack about to descend: this was a levitation of things."  -From "Aura" - Colin Simms

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Max Stein studies electroacoustic composition at Concordia University in Montréal. His work explores urban soundscapes through electroacoustic composition, online mapping, and live performance in public spaces. Stein designed and runs the Montréal Sound Map, an ongoing Google-maps based archive of sound recordings uploaded by inhabitants and visitors from various locations around the city.

Drew Barnet is a musician and student of electroacoustic composition at Concordia. His musical performances are rooted in improvisation and often incorporate an element of live electronics. More recently he has begun collaborating on sound-based installation work, and is seeking to find new ways to challenge people’s perception and expectations.

Julian Stein is a composer and sound enthusiast currently residing and studying in Montréal. His interests lie primarily in musical applications of phonetics, bioacoustics, synchronization, and the urban environment. He is a founding member of the Concordia Electroacoustic Studies Student Association (CESSA) and co-creator of the Montreal Sound Map, an interactive Google Maps-based archive of Montreal's soundscape.

Karen Zalamea  

Self Geste

single-channel video   |   06:05   |   4:3, b&w, stereo sound

Self Geste presents the artist performing a series of gesture s that references grooming one’s self—from straightening a collar to fixing one’s hair. The actions are continuously repeated in ordered and remixed progressions, like a codified vocabulary of body language whose signification is lost in the manic repetition. What remains is a ritualized emptying of meaning.

@ SAT september 23 : VERNISSAGE. 19h to 22h

september 24 & 25 : 11h to 17h

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Karen Zalamea works in and between photography, video, performance and sculpture. Her artistic practice enquires into the relationship between the body, gesture, labour, repetition and rhythm. In 2009, she completed a Master of Fine Art degree at Concordia University under the supervision of Manon De Pauw. She is the recipient of several awards, including the inaugural Sylvie and Simon Blais Foundation Award for Emerging Visual Artists. Her work has been exhibited and screened in Canada, the United States, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Mexico. Karen Zalamea lives and works in Montréal.

Links:

Stereo Efficiency Cheer from Karen Zalamea on Vimeo.

http://karenzalamea.com/04aux/aux.html