Visual and sound installation in collaboration with Philippe-Aubert Gauthier
The project started thanks to a grant for research and creation in media art from the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec (CALQ) in 2009. First artist residency, for the sound aspect of the project at Diapason sound art gallery, Brooklyn, New York, USA, 2009. Later the sound composition and spatialization was done at Oboro (an artists-run center in Montréal, Canada). Second artist residency at the Studio d'Essai of Les Productions Recto-Verso in Québec City supported by a grant from Sherbrooke's City.
The project started thanks to a grant for research and creation in media art from the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec (CALQ) in 2009. First artist residency, for the sound aspect of the project at Diapason sound art gallery, Brooklyn, New York, USA, 2009. Later the sound composition and spatialization was done at Oboro (an artists-run center in Montréal, Canada). Second artist residency at the Studio d'Essai of Les Productions Recto-Verso in Québec City supported by a grant from Sherbrooke's City.
If,
during the last century, the development of transport largely
participated to the city's space composition and function as we know
it, the telecommunication techniques pursues the urban and social tissue transformation by accelerating the displacement process: by
abolishing the idea of distance with the instant telecommunication.
And so, by creating a new urbanity notion: one which is no more
attached to the physical zone created by the city, but one which more
associated to telecommunication tools and virtualization of
exchanges.
Amid the virtualization techniques, new representation modes, we find the
video games. Sometimes played alone, sometimes played in network, it
becomes in the second case, a reduced form of communication between
anonymous beings in visual and sound « mises
en scènes »/staging evoking a second city's
representation. More often, because of military games popularity,
this fictitious representation imply a militarization of the urban
space and of the gamers relations.
This
project position is at the crossroad of history and thematic of
these considerations which gathers military virtual game, the
reality and the urban space representation and also the birth of
stereotyped representation.
« Télétoxie »
is an immersive installation that gathers: photomontages, generative
video, dynamic light composition and spatialized sound. This
installation is inspired by military video games soundscapes and
which directly address the banalized “omnipresence” of death
representation in these kinds of games.
Philippe-Aubert
Gauthier : sound components
For the creation of the
soundscape, sound effect synthesis techniques and algorithms used for Foley sound of video and interactive games were solicited and
altered. The aim was to transform and combine these techniques to
create a generative and spatialized sound composition. A composition
that combined stereotyped sounds (fire, riffles, machines, robots,
etc.) in an artificial sound constellation: loud and critic
soundtrack of a popular mythology of video game and of the associated
virtual representation.
The sound piece is
generated in real time and was created such as a new sound symbolic
or iconography, and as much in the choice of the primary sound
materials, as in the generative composition method which reminds a
progressive temporal construction of a sign system with
hieratics evocations.
The sound work oscillates between this symbolic dimension and a
soundscape.
The
soundscape is also spatialized in real time. P.-A. Gauthier worked on
the sound spatialization with the intention of bringing the Foley
sound of video games to a human scale, literally creating a complete
militarized sound environment, as mysterious and poetic as
disturbing, to accentuate the scale and the aberrations and inherent
excess, such as a schizophrenic temple of video game.
Tanya St-Pierre :
visual aspect
The
anonymous notion present in some forms of virtual worlds, as in FPS
(First Person Shooter) video games, implicates the disappearance of
the first real person, ironically, to the profit of a first unique
person: the principal character, unique, but shared by isolated
players.
Right
from the first proto-FPS, the camera becomes the players (character)
eyes. Character often represented by a simple armed hand, bizarrely
anonymous and simplified. An armed hand alone in a space and context
which is constantly renewed from game to game but which, nonetheless,
uniformize itself through apparition and proliferation of a
mythological constellation of stereotypes.
This
anonymous notion inspired the anonymous figure repeated and multiplied
within the images of the installation, in the same way that the
players of some video games share a unique avatar. The black drape
which essentially constitutes the anonymous figure, is a direct
reference to the grim reaper, occidental popular representation of
death. Death evocation as for interest to open a reflection
around extreme violence stereotyped representation banalized within
the video game universe.
The
anonymous figure also comes from the popular image of the corpse lying
underneath a white drape at the morgue. That corpse usually lying in
a horizontal position is placed vertically in the photomontages
suggesting that the characters in
the video games axed on massacre are essentially potential corpse,
they are only there to be killed.
Physical description
In
the exhibition space one can find a mock-up (replica of the
installation). The photomontages used in the video are also presented
as publicity panels mounted on wood structures. But here there is
nothing to sell, except critical thinking.
The
wood pieces displaced on the gallery floor along the walls and the sporadic smoke projected within the installation refers to the
« faux-terrains » earlier created to augment panoramic fresco realistic effect, at an era where painting was the hi-tech
media of the time to represent military and epic scenes. The later
being also representations of combat, victory and death.
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