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.

Télétoxie Remix

Télétoxie Remix is a second version of the project Télétoxie. We redesigned the installation, and explored new ideas, so it could be adapted to the gallery space of L'Écart, lieu d'art actuel, Rouyn-Noranda, Qc, 2011.

TÉLÉTOXIE

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.

Concept and ideas at the origin of the project

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.

TÉLÉTOXIE

"Télétoxie" is such an aggravated concretion of subtle cultural changes which live in the explosion of military video game. As a poison, a sneaky weapon, which operates at distance, as a télétoxie.

Media Art Installation at the Studio d'essai in Quebec City with the support of Les Productions Recto-Verso, 2009.

This project was supported by the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec (new media).