New Website of Tanya St-Pierre & Philippe-Aubert Gauthier

www.st-pierre-gauthier.com

P(n,r) = n!/(n-r)!

P(n,r) = n!/(n-r)! (translation in english not available at this time)

Projet sonore conçu pour le Poste Audio du Centre Clark à Montréal - septembre 2015.

« Le nombre de permutations pour n=6 choix possibles et sélectionnés r=2 à la fois ». Avec cette installation sonore miniature qui revisite l'idée et la culture du poste d'écoute individuel, nous exposons les auditeurs et glaneurs à pas loin de 10 Gigaoctets de compositions et d'improvisations sonores. Pour un total d'environ 20 heures de matériel improvisé en duo via différents dispositifs électroniques et numériques plus ou moins maîtrisés. Écoute individuelle, écoute de groupe, combinaison des oreillettes. L'auditeur visite, recompose et spatialise notre disque dur. L'acte d'écoute, l'écoute esthétique, le pointillisme et la combinatoire se substituent au travail de composition.
 

Description détaillée

Intentions artistiques

Pour ce projet, nous travaillons sur l'idée de poste audio comme tel, c'est-à-dire le poste audio comme sujet. Ce projet s'inscrit donc dans la lignée des principaux sujets reliés à la démarche de Philippe-Aubert Gauthier, soit le sujet de l'espace et de la spatialisation/fragmentation du son en télécommunication [1], combiné à la pratique du collage de Tanya St-Pierre. L'idée de départ est de créer un poste-audio-installation, mais à échelle individuelle. Notre intention est de confondre le contenu audio avec l'objet même du poste.

Le résultat attendu est grandement influencé par notre propre façon de travailler les arts sonores, et parfois même la musique. Cette manière est une méthode plus proche de celle de l'auditeur que de celle du compositeur, un peu comme le précise Kim-Cohen au sujet des pratiques arts sonores en général [2]. Ainsi, puisque nous agissons plus comme des auditeurs que comme des compositeurs, nous voulons partager cette idée fondamentale avec les visiteurs et auditeurs du poste audio qui pourront écouter, explorer et combiner à leur guise leur propre agencement¹ via une recomposition, voire permutation, binaurale et individuelle des matières premières.

Description physique : les sonorités visées et assemblage

Dans la lignée de ce que nous faisons actuellement en improvisation avec des circuits analogiques et numériques : les sons comme tels sont constitués de matière plutôt brute sans référence au monde acoustique qui nous entoure, mais ils sont teintés par le contexte d'une approche d'assemblage de style « pointillisme » (tel que défini en musique [3], c'est-à-dire un peu éparse). Pour ce faire, des plages de silence ou de matière de niveau très faible sont intégrées à notre version du poste audio. À l'heure actuelle, nous pourrions définir ce projet comme un genre de poste de ré-assemblage de ce que nous produisons en improvisation libre. Et ce, sans début, sans fin, sans boucle, uniquement des clips brefs avec des listes de lecture aléatoires automatiques. Le but étant d'atteindre un maximum de variations avec une quantité fixe de matières premières, ce qui, évidemment, est aussi teinté d'une claire influence des pratiques combinatoires et procédurales.

Description physique : le dispositif

En pratique, nous fournissons trois lecteurs médias autonomes programmés (des « Raspberry Pi ») avec amplificateur casque. Ces lecteurs seront accompagnés d'écouteurs modifiés : des écouteurs à une seule oreille, de telle sorte que l'espace alloué serait couvert de 6 oreillettes. L'intérêt pour ce genre de dispositif réside essentiellement dans la possibilité d'effectuer de la composition spatiale individuelle ou collective lors de l'écoute.

Références

[1] Barry Blesser et Linda-Ruth Salter (2009), Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? MIT Press.
[2] Seth Kim-Cohen (2009), In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Bloomsbury Academic.

[3] « Pointillism/punctualism » http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctualism

1 Par exemple, avec six oreillettes et deux oreilles, on trouve P(6,2) = 6!/(6-2)! = 30 agencements possibles. Et ainsi de suite si on combine plus d'oreillettes.

Pantonalité - 2011

Sound Performance at Centre des Arts de la Scène Jean-Besré (CASJB), Espace (IM) Media /  Media Arts Biennial, Sherbrooke, Qc, 2011.

Here is a link to a 2 minutes excerpt of the 20 minutes performance.

https://vimeo.com/117678882

Collage Series / Women of Newfoundland and Labrador during the first and second World Wars

The project Collage Series / Women of Newfoundland & Labrador during the First and Second World Wars, started with an invitation from Mme Vicky Chainey Gagnon, Director Chief Curator of The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery Division, to travel to St-John's, NL, to make a research residency - on Newfoundland & Labrador Women at work during the First and Second World Wars - at The Rooms in the Archives Division. During the two weeks residency in august 2014, I carefully selected archived images to realize a series of 40 collages – from which 32 are presented at The Rooms in the Vitrines on Level 2, from January 15^th until September 13^th 2015.

Within the framework of this project I investigated the concept of collage along two principal axis in order to precise an aesthetic and procedural approach.

The first axis is related to the mechanical act of tearing asunder – i.e. the act of sampling – that is used in the collage process, no matter the medium, or even art discipline¹. Then comes the act of rethinking and recomposing the images to generate a new narrative (a new whole).

Since I was working with archived documents - already scanned by the Archives Division staff - the second axis is more related to notions of realism and supposedly objective visual culture, to question the notion of authenticity of historical archives in this Ubiquitous Computing/Media world we now live in. This brought me to work with digital format, using software tools to reach the blending quality that I was looking for. Since the archived photographs all come from different types of equipments, dates, and stills, a great deal of effort is invested into creating an aesthetically coherent combination of images of different sources. First, for each collage, I selected a background - or environment-like images - in most cases they were pictures of landscape - taken during either between 1914 and 1918 or between 1939 and 1945. The selected background became the starting point of the collage's construction and composition. The other elements that I selected, extracted and recontextualized had to be modified to match the color spectrum and the grain of the background picture, so that the quality of the foreground image was not alien to the background, for the act of collage and combination can be more subtle. This blending approach comes from the intention to make a new image (which is a false reality) that seems as real, or as credible, as the original, in order to question notions of authenticity and evoke the role of remembering through storytelling.

Although the material used for the collages are of a documentary nature, the treatment of the photographic document is not. It can sometimes have the look of a documentary photography, but it is totally constructed. Since most of the reconstructed document respects notions and markers of realism, it may induce ethical problems. That is to say the problem of falsifying reality.

Indeed, most of my collages give a result that is not necessarily looking as a collage at the first glimpse. This is one precise aesthetic moment that I was looking for in this project. Indeed, at this specific short time, there is a collapse between the fake and the apparently real, where our brains and minds have to spend some time to figure out the limits of the collage, its veracity, its ability to cheat reality. This opens many poetical and aesthetic potentials.

This also reminds some parts of my former interest in narration. But this time, the narration is actualized in a real historical framework instead of being inscribed in a purely fictitious and poetic lineage. Here, the narration is more similar to notions of transmission and interpretation of history, maybe as in the case of storytelling. Of course, the actual story is somehow visually told, but also bent and transformed by its complex mythological charge – such as in primitive civilizations where knowledge was orally transmitted but also charged with metaphorical content. Such as eschatology and cosmogony myths marking a transition of an age to another – i.e. the end of life as we know it and the beginning of a new age.

However, here, this is done with great care: I mean without the intention to tend toward a literal and factual history, or even to fall in the trap of the “grand narrative” discourses. This new research and creation project proposes a mythical and narrative constellation anchored in the visual and photographic iconography of that time but without grand narrative or teleological interpretation.

The acts of digital collage and cut-out operate, in themselves, like metaphorical and procedural representations of the despoliation that occurs during war times, and the lives torn in the context of these strong cultural tensions and social transitions. Transitions that were also aligned with a new phase of industrial modernity. Transitions accelerated by technological advances, both industrial and logistical, perfectly representative of the economical and political contexts created by these wars, that literally remodeled the workers' – both men and women - work culture.

Also informed of the most recent writings on cultural heritage in the digital revolution, this new project also plays with, and questions, the place and the culture of museums and archival institutions. Two institutional models that have to redefine and reposition themselves in this digitally-altered historical information-base in relation with the new generation (Cameron et Kenderdine, 2010)².

1- For example, the well known cut-up technique that William S. Burroughs translated from literature to sound (taped cut-ups), film and mixed media experiments.

2- Cameron F., Kenderdine, S. (Éd.) (2010), Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, Cambridge, MIT Press.

 

Underground

Underground is a sound installation in collaboration with Philippe-Aubert Gauthier developed specifically for FIMAV 2014. Along the bike ride, people could go through a projection and sound spatialization array consisting of powerful loudspeakers that have been sealed, buried underground, and connected to a system of flexible hoses. These hidden hoses act as acoustic wave guides that make it possible to distribute sound in an invisible apparatus. Beside the underground apparatus, two loudspeakers mounted on tripods and a sound system in a rack case covered with canvas tarps, stands out as sculptural forms.

Something is Happening / Quelque chose se produit

This project was supported by the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec within the framework of a grant for research and creation. A part of the project was realized during a residency at Centro Multi Media in Mexico City and will be presented at the A/B Galeria in October and November 2013.

The first experimentation and reflection started in 2010 and were tested during an artist residency at Centre Sagamie (specialized in digital print). 

This project fits in the lineage of our recent installation Télétoxie which investigated the techniques of realistic sound synthesis and physical modelling for the creation of Foley sounds in video games or in cinema.

Context: computer-generated images

Quietly but surely, computer-generated image continues its sneaky infiltration of visual pop cultures: cinema, 3D images, television, video games. This progressive and historical replacement of the painted, mechanically-reproduced, printed, photographed, and filmed images by a synthetic, digitally-generated, image is now anchored in our cathodic culture. But the synthetic images seem mainly, perhaps exclusively, made and thought for the screen's bright luminosity.

Consequently, for this project we worked on the encounter between the synthetic, computer-generated, image and the paper, its ink and its materiality. We proceeded so in order to remove the computer-generated image from its usual territory - the strong luminosities of screens - and to investigate its visual flaws and visual through its conceptual collision with paper-related technologies, in the historic lineage of visual representations and their techniques.

Computer-generated images and digital prints

Since the computer-generated image results from a calculation on computers, size and resolution are almost without limit. With this in mind, we investigated the production of these images within a tense relational network between the two limits of the digital printing: size and detail, i.e. high resolution. The objective was to push printers to their limits and create images with an emphasized material presence, solidified by the substratum of printing process, but also by the depth of the details, since printed resolution can go beyond the one found in HD screens ... no matter how big the screens are.

Description

Our generated images are based on physical modelling (gravity, wind, smoke, diffraction, particles, etc., as found in common CGI software) in order to create a series of images, yet simple but mystical at the same time. This work evolves around the visual culture of digital visual/special effects and, especially, the strange artificiality of computer-generated images in the aftermath of a longer quest for realism. Such a retroactive loop of infinite representations and generated images is targeted at the actual equipment, i.e. hardware, which is generally used for the fabrication, manufacture, of filmed or photographed images. And so, our compositions present portraits and landscapes which depict, and recast in a suggested grand narrative, some of the great yet anonymous characters and constructors of image history on the verge of their obsolescence: some studio lamps, an almost empty studio and a simple visual effects. 
 

This working axis is related to the popular association between increased resolution and increased realism. As Jonathan Sterne mentions: “that proposition hides a few other common assumptions: 1) that greater definition is the same thing as greater verisimilitude; 2) that increases in definition necessarily enhance end-users' experience;”¹. In fact, we tend to observe that an increased resolution and definition encourage a kind of hyper-realism that provides details beyond the senses' limits. These preconceive and cultural ideas, partly nurtured by the cinema industry and visual culture, about realism and verisimilitude (proximity of the reality) that we investigate and address.

Video installation

Besides the digital prints, “Something is Happening” is also a video and sound installation. From the computer models used for the prints, a slowly evolving video was generated. More precisely, we generated a simple visual effect in order to take typical CGI out of their common spectacular uses (such as in Hollywood movies) and to create a non-spectacular, kind of banal, video art installation to initiate a critical reflection on the appearance of this new medium, synthetic images and its relationship with realism and verisimilitude. How does it relate and emerge from previous film and studio technology? Why CGI graphics are obsessed by photo-realism as a marker of realism? For us the use of the CGI images is a way to look in a different way at hyper-realism.

You can see an excerpt of the video via: https://vimeo.com/120880632

The sound generated for the video is also referring to cinema or photography studios through the synthetic electrical humming of studio lamps. 

To conclude, in an installation context, the digital prints and the video are presented according to the tension described earlier with respect to the brightness of the digital images (i.e. TV screens and projectors) and the materiality of the printed image and it's inks.

1Sterne, MP3, The meaning of a format, Duke University Press, 2012, p. 4-6.

The pictures below were taken at Artspace artists-run centre, Peterborough, Ontario.

Drapés

Drapés is a recent visual and sound installation. This project was supported by the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec within the framework of a grant for research and creation. A part of the project was realized during a research and creation residency at Daïmon media art centre in Gatineau, Québec and presented at Centre d'exposition L'Imagier (also in Gatineau).

The starting point of the project was my recent work in digital prints, in painting, in performance and in sculpture, which are all inhabited by a specific element: the drape (le drapé).

The research and creation of images started in November 2010 during an artist residency at Centre Sagamie in Alma, Qc, specialized in large scale prints, with the financial support of Sherbrooke City.

Concept and ideas at the origin of the project

The drape is charged with historic, mythological references, or religious likened as symbols, more or less consciously, by the popular culture. I wish to open reflections on the appearance, the distribution and the transformation of stereotypes through popular imaginary. From the Greek statue, which engraved in the stone the artillery of beauty standards at that time, passing by the uncountable representations of the Saint-Marie, to the popular representations of Death (the Grim Reaper or a corpse lying under a sheet), the drape - predecessor of the sewn and assembled garment - takes place and hides bodies to protect them, to dress them, to mask them, but always by creating a certain mystery, what maintains also, paradoxically, a fascination for the destitution of the hidden body.

For Drapés, the intention is to evoke and to question the solidity and the origin of the current Occidental stereotypes where the drape, alone or near bodies, is the central visual element. How are the current stereotypes still bearers of original symbols? How does information propagation mediatized in masses influence these same simplified symbols? What are the parallels? How, and in which manner, can we reference cohabitation in the context of installation and remind the viewer of the generic variety of senses of an object and so by-pass the fields of influence and the syncretism of the large-scale medias?

With this project I look at fragments of the Occidental history of the drape and its representation. 

 

Physical description

The guiding axis of this project was the creation of a new series of digital images printed on fabrics, and it, to transform these images into long curtains, into flags, into banners, into shrouds (linceuls), etc. The large-scale soft images are blown by the wind produced by industrial ventilators (fans). To revitalize the temporality of interactions between the movements of the air and the drapes, ventilators are connected to a system of control in real time which allows to engage or to interrupt some of the ventilators. Through this windy landscape one finds some emergency vehicle revolving lights. The later being, with the video, the only light source in the installation.

Sound was approached as follows: composition is one of silences, acoustic sounds and light sonifications of the electric devices present in the installation. We wished to leave a place with the acoustic sounds: beating and banging of fabric, curtains and flags. Then, we used electromagnetic sensors to make slightly audible the humming from the sources of movement of the soft images, added to an irregular electroacoustic crackling of the revolving lights.

Finally, a digital stop motion video was created during an artist residency at Daïmon media art centre to be projected inside the installation.

Drapés relies on finding a balance between the coexistence of different types of representation within a global perspective. The project wants, above all, to be considered as a new research in installation in which the main objective is to create a whole ensemble which appears as a rich and opened evocation of symbols, references and positioning.

PIETA - A Mystery Unfolding

A video animation based on my research in performance, painting and digital photography dealing with popular representation modes of drapes across history.

Pieta is a video generated from my research in performance, in painting and in digital photography.

The video was created from a series of photographs taken in my studio. The photographed action relies on the presence of two bodies evoking an ancient statue with the intention to show a glimpse of mystic charge.

The action deployed itself on a two hours period and was documented such as we photograph a very stable performance.

The video ends on a static image … Freezing the two partially revealed bodies in a fixed reality. We could say that the video returns to it's original photographic form.

The esthetic research axis for "Pieta" were the mysticism, the sacred and the mythological representation of the body.

Pieta refers to a popular religious icon created by Michaelangelo Buonarroti in the 16th century.

My first interest in this sculpture was the generous presence of drapes (drapés).

In fact the "drapé" is frequently present in my work, as an esthetic proposition about the opaque body, the taboo and mysterious body, which comes from my interest in questioning notions of representation issued from grand archetypes of the apprehension of the world such as the scientific thought and the mystic thought, also called magical thought.

Drapés

"Drapés" is a photographic and sound installation by Tanya St-Pierre and Philippe-Aubert Gauthier. The project has received the support of the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec (CALQ) in Visual Arts. A part of the project was developed at Centre Sagamie (Alma, Qc, Canada) and was achieved during a residency at Daïmon media art centre in november 2012. (See full explination of the project in the other post intitled Drapés.)