Performance announcement of SIGHT+SOUND Festival. 🔜 12th edition at Eastern Bloc – Starting October 26

The International Digital Art Festival will be held from October 26th to 30th, 2022 

The SIGHT+SOUND Festival has announced the sound and artistic performance component of its 12th edition. Featuring notably Florence To, Sabrina RattĂ© + Roger Tellier Craig, ou encore Chloe Alexandra Thompson & Brenna Murphy. The performance evenings take place from Thursday, October 27 to Saturday, October 29 at the WIP and White Wall Studio. Established in 2009 by the Eastern Bloc artist-run center, the SIGHT+SOUND festival presents remarkable and critical digital artworks from around the world, with each year’s installment growing in scope. Details of the public exhibition, which runs from October 26 to November 12 and is curated by Nathalie Bachand and Sarah Ève Tousignant, were recently unveiled for this 12th edition on the theme of Dancing While Waiting [the end of the world]. For the opening of the exhibition, a floral and musical evening will be held with a performance by David Szanto, installations by Maxime Giroux and a DJ set by Saudade. Other activities details, such as thematic discussions and workshops, will be announced shortly.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

The opening cocktail event of the festival, available to passholders and invitĂ©es, and taking place on Wednesday, October 26th, will be an evocative, multi-sensory experience blending sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, all drawing upon this year’s pleasurable but apocalyptic theme of Dancing While Waiting [for the end of the world]. This inaugural celebration will be well met with the elemental, festival themed participatory cocktail performance by David Szanto, optional bitters infused with brilliant botanicals (the potential of ecosystems), and custom designed floral installations by Maxime Giroux, a decorative display to beckon some strange energy in the wake of a strange future in which ecology attacks. The auditory scene will be defined through the curated waves of a DJ set by Saudade, a duo made up of Nela Paki and Marilou Lyonnais Archambault. Moving through many faces from the milieux, passholders and invitĂ©es will be able to explore the local/international work of exhibiting artists in the gallery as well as enjoy the vibrancy of the community in a dedicated cocktail room

WIP/Thursday, October 27th, 8 PM – The festival will open its performance program with “AVICENNA”, the premiere of Rehab Hazgui‘s new Live performance. Inspired by Avicenna’s analysis of motion and certain purported necessary conditions needed if there is to be motion, such as place, void, time, and the continuum. she.phase & Golpesar will follow with an intriguing proposition–“HOSPITAL”. Described with words such as clinical, sick, sterile, sound, “HOSPITAL” is not a place of refuge, but a place to pool our ailments. Inspired by the performative tradition that combines electronic sound and video art, visual artist Sabrina Ratté and electronic music composer Roger Tellier-Craig will come together to close the night and present Other Spaces, an idiosyncratic audio-visual performance bringing together revisited existing works as well as new material.

White Wall Studio/Friday, October 28th, 8 PM – The fragmented sequences of a digital synthesizer will rub shoulders with the raw experiments of a DIY machine, in a performance by Fumerolles. Hazy Montagne Mystique & Pulsatilla & Guillaume VallĂ©e will then take the stage to present “Explorer le son de l’eau et la vague des Ă©toiles”, a performance that highlights the possibilities of direct interaction between the voice and the flute in relation to video, by making the latter reactive to sound waves. The night will then close with a unique experience composed by Chloe Alexandra Thompson & Brenna Murphy.

WIP/Saturday, October 29th, 8 PM – Florence To will open the night with Aluciin, a hypnotizing variation of moving images and textures that examines the relationship between movement and time. Referencing ‘scarred landscapes’, the piece echoes the rhythmic alchemy of harmonics and intertwining hallucinatory disjointed scenes through live modular synthesis. Victoria Keddie & Rose Kallal will follow with an analog video and live modular synth performance. Acting as agents within a synthetic ecosystem, MSHR seals its return in the SIGHT+SOUND programming with a performance showcasing evolutionary live electronics practice consisting of improvisation with cybernetic systems through a sequence of unique gestural interfaces. 

Following the last artistic performance, the night will feature a DJ set by Dj Hagalaz (alias Rémi Boudrias-Dussault) lasting from 11 PM until the early hours of the morning under a pay-what-you-can formula, capping off the final major event of this festival edition with even more dancing. 

*All events doors open at 7 PM
*Attendees can register by purchasing our affordable event pass or single-night tickets*.
*Special offers and discounts available for groups, and thought partners’ affiliated codes or original combo offers to be announced soon on social media.

FREE ADMISSION EXHIBITION

As part of this edition, the Eastern Bloc gallery will house a multi-sensorial, digital art exhibition.

Calling upon ghostly digital appearances that touch the physical space, nonchalantly caressing its surfaces, the AR intervention “calling upon the digital touch”, by Marie-Ève Levasseur will offer the participant a moment of tenderness in the midst of the information flood that our screens make us experience daily. On the other hand, “ROSS 128 (exoparty)” by Elisa Gleize & Thomas Lopez, is a meta-fictional and VR interactive experience in which aliens incarnated as avatars on a platform will invite the user to participate in their trans-species party. In this sense, the future is often described as a toxic breakdown of the human. Thus, for Johanna Bruckner, the hybridization of the nonhuman and human is rather a starting point for the indeterminacy and queerness of being. A concept they explore in “Molecular Sex” a video installation. 

Through the installation “Behind These Strange Sensations are Hidden Structures”, Max Lester prefers to weave through built environments (cityscapes and cyberscapes) and systems of control (political and economic) that regulate and command the spaces we inhabit. Also reflecting on the moment when nearly all human interaction and life was collapsing onto technology–even funerals – ”Detumescence” by Faith Holland acts as a memorial to lives lost. As a re-staging of a classic memento mori tableau, it is updated to include technologies at different ‘life’ stages: functional, obsolete, and reimagined as plushies. 

Finally, the installation “Mort au Bureau”, by Pascale LeBlanc Lavigne is the result of an intensive creative residency carried out at Sporobole, whose premises emerge from a feeling oscillating between joy and despair raised by the potential return to work in the office. Through a staging with festive colours, various sculptures cobbled together from objects and furniture emblematic of workspaces test their resistance under the sudden repetitions of motorized movements. 

The exhibition will also feature a video program regrouping the work of international artists and filmmakers. 

  • Do u think ur better off alone – by Laneya Billingsley
  • M.I.T.M. (Man in the Mirror) – by Raphel Moreira Goncalves
  • u$aar v3.0 – by S4RA (alias Sandra AraĂșjo)
  • Doom Simulator : BILLAR EL COMETA –  by Santiago Tamayo Soler
  • Oceanic Theremin (a Triptych) – by Steven Sych

Opening hours : 12 – 7 pm (thurs-fri-sat-sun)
@ the Eastern Bloc Gallery, 53-55 de Louvain O, Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal, H2N 1A4

PANELS AND WORKSHOPS

From October 27th to October 30th, 2022 a series of free panels and affordables workshops will be offered at Eastern Bloc’s laboratory and experimentation spaces.

Amongst other things, the public will be able to register for some introductory workshops to the Metaverse by Kiran Bhumber and Alanna Ho, and a hands-on experience around DIY Azki Punk Consoles by the performing artist Rehab Hazgui. The latter will guide the participant through the necessary processes of building their own console from a festival provided starter kit. The result will be a new take-home tool for generating unique sounds.

Furthermore, a panel series will offer reflective discussion on apocalypse notions such as “What being could be?” and “After the end, what is next”. The soon to be announced speakers will talk through notions of posthumanism, possible/speculative futures; environmental issues; hybrid and interspecies bodies; digitized sexualities; feminist science-fiction and future intimacies.
The attendees will be invited to envision with them the notions of ‘living’ and identities in the age of the dissolution of the boundaries between virtual and physical, synthetic and organic, absence and presence. If an end is only a beginning: what can we project onto this uncertain future? How to envision a transformation of the world, a mutation of values, a sustainable renewal? By contributing to our vision of everything around us, art participates – thereby – to the movement of the world.