Always an outward-looking, globally-tuned organization, MUTEK was initiated to connect Montréal with international creators and to encourage creativity at home by giving local artists a quality platform for expression and development.
The festival’s commitments to networks, interconnectivity and exchange culminate in another strong showing by Canadian and Québec artists at MUTEK Japan, December 11-15.
Thanks to the support of Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) a total of 10 artists will perform during the festival.
Installations
Vincent Morisset CA/QC pres. Vast Body
Vincent Morisset is a director known for his artful use of technology and interactivity. He’s also the founder of the studio AATOAA (pronounced "à toi," meanings "yours"). Vincent has been celebrated worldwide for his music videos, video games, album artwork, films and virtual reality. Morisset collaborated artistically with Arcade Fire for twelve years—the groups Neon Bible is considered the first interactive music video, while Just a Reflektor won the Primetime Emmy Award. With Icelandic band Sigur Rós, Morisset directed their groundbreaking live-experience INNI. With the NFB, he created BLA BLA and Way to Go. Both won the Webby in the Net Art category. Morisset’s work has been featured at a myriad of museums and festivals, including SXSW, SIGGRAPH, Sonar, TIFF, Japan Media Arts Festival, GDC, MoMA, la Gaité Lyrique and the Cooper Hewitt.
Sabrina Ratte CA/QC pres. Alpenglow
Sabrina Ratté is a Québec artist whose practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances and prints. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation techniques, her work focuses on the creation of architectures, abstract compositions and surreal landscapes.
In 2019 she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (CAN).
Previous exhibitions: Laforet Museum (Japan), Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, Thoma Foundation (Santa Fe), Dolby (San Francisco), Young Project Gallery (Los Angeles), Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Galerie Charlot (Paris), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), HEK (Basel), Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Ellephant Gallery (Montreal).
Performances
Alexis Langevin-Tétrault CA/QC
Interférence (String Network) is a 20 minutes audiovisual performance that explores the possibilities of embodiment of an electroacoustic work in real time through gestural interaction with a unique device.
On stage, an audioreactive play of light unfolds gradually: Alexis Langevin-Tétrault builds a network of strings with which he interacts to create a sound universe between the industrial noise, electronica and acousmatic music. Through the staging of corporality and the dialectical relationship between the human and the machine, the work presents an allegory of the globalized and interconnected modern world in which the individual seeks to derive meaning from his experience and attempts to preserve its freedom of action.
Falaises CA/QC
The audiovisual performance project Falaises combines the musical practices of composers Guillaume Côté and Alexis Langevin-Tétrault with the work of visual artist Dave Gagnon.
Standing halfway between artistic installation and video art, the collective offers a performance using digital audio tools and modular synthesizers, which disrupt in real-time the video projections and light presented on a unique multi-support device. The aesthetics of the work exploits the sound dichotomy between noise and tonality, as well as the effects of moirures, shadows and visual anomalies. The result is a fascinating work, structured but live, evoking the contemplation of a luminous storm at the edge of the abyss.
Line Katcho CA/QC pres. Immortelle
Line Katcho is a Montréal composer and audio-visual artist who is meticulous, rigorous and passionate.
Primarily interested in sound and image as demonstrations of kinetic matter, gestures, forces or motion, she distinguishes herself by her experimental approach and affinity for perceptual games. She leans towards a mixing of styles, genres and applied methods and aims at creating a cathartic, whole experience rooted in expression and authenticity. Her work has been presented internationally at festivals such as MUTEK Montréal, MUTEK.AR, MUTEK.MX, MUTEK.ES, Scopitone, Transart, Intonal, MA/IN Matera Intermedia, and Currents new media. She actively collaborates with contemporary choreographer and dancer James Viveiros and performs as a VJ under the moniker La Hyèna.
Myriam Bleau CA/QC pres. Ballistics
Myriam Bleau is a composer, digital artist and performer based in Montreal. She creates audiovisual systems that go beyond the screen, such as sound installations and performance-specific musical interfaces. Her hybrid electronic practice investigates music performance as a codified cultural manifestation and recontextualizes pop culture elements and music history tropes. Her work has been recognized and presented internationally : Prix Ars Electronica (AT), Sónar (ES) and Sónar Hong Kong, Sonic Arts Award (IT), Elektra (CA), MUTEK (CA-MX-JP), ISEA (CA-KR), Transmediale (DE), ACT (KR), Laboral + Lev (ES), Scopitone (FR) and Cafe Oto (UK), to name a few.
Ballistics (2019) is an audiovisual performance for pendulum interfaces drawing inspiration from popular science fiction and mysticism. The wireless luminous objects are equipped with motion sensors allowing for handheld manipulations, oscillations, spins and high momentum trajectories. An exercise in sonifying sharp movements and pendulum physics, this performance uses digital modular synthesis to reveal a corroded and textural landscape of uneven rhythms.
Push 1 stop & Wiklow CA/QC pres. Membrane
Push 1 stop (Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules) and Wiklow (Michael Dean) are two Québec artists working between generative processes and live performance. Their output captures a close relationship between sound and image, producing intense and organic audio-visual experiences. With an enthusiasm for minimalism, they combine illusion with physicality, celebrating pure frequencies as much as the visual beauty of waveforms.
Push 1 stop & Wiklow’s Membrane merges audio-visual performance with installation art. Three-dimensional, volumetric shapes hover between the performers, caught in a haze of rising smoke. Through live manipulations, the performers engage in a playful exchange with their generative system. The work represents an alternative form of projection art, bringing digital forms into physical space.
RAMZi CA/QC
Phoebé Guillemot’s parallel autonomous sci-fi RAMZi world is at once utopian and dystopian in the most wondrous, wide and red-eyed way, and these digital vine cutting expeditions span a vast and varied section of her own CGI’ed imaginary world of disorientating, bouncy hybrid genre experiments, heavily filtered samples, inverted dancehall rhythms, shredded jungle, distroid-vibed atmospheres and super weird, melodic repetitions.
Guillemot’s voyages have always been deeply rhythmic but the heavy psilocybic zones on Houti Kush step through from the frenetic/maximalist potencies of her previous BÉBiTES release into restrained but equally imagistic investigations into warm but unknown atmospheres, always humid and wavy with delirium. Even the actual field recordings of frogs at night on planet earth sound like the furthest out, web-footed cosmic creatures from her Houti realm.
Locking into very listenable but extremely twisted grooves and sort of magical-realist tones while retaining her specifically crazed, cluttered vibe throughout, Guillemot locates herself as the “Houti princess” of an album that actively seeks a new voice and distinct type of beauty. There’s a constant feeling that the dualities in her tracks could push them too far into the ever-present canopy of polyrhythms, but RAMZi somehow restrains it just at just the right level of their mutations.
