The driving questions of Artengine

June 13th, 2014

Should we ask ourselves how much comfort our productions and programming offer? How much support to an existing social and political structure to we provide? Or perhaps the inverse question, can we ask of our projects how much disruption or revolution or even democracy do they make possible? Even those projects that successfully create a mystique of discomfort or even terror provide this wrapped in the idea that the artist is in control or at least that the artist is in control of the machine…

4 days of magic in the dark/ ELEKTRA & the BIAN

May 14th, 2012

What ELEKTRA has left me with is a sense of warning. New media can be harnessed by creatives and technologists and then pushed to new potential, but overall I’m uncomfortable, in some instances, with using it to produce aggressive works. The world is volatile and I feel the artists role within this situation is to reveal truths and to decode data in order for the public to see it in new ways. If we relay aggression in our work we may perpetuate existing problems and ultimately have difficulty with accessibility to our work.

Elektra Highlight #2

May 4th, 2012

A full day of presentations, vernisages and performances certainly leaves one feeling overloaded, but not so much that I am not looking forward to another day full of information and art. I will choose just one highlight from yesterday and leave the others to digest more fully. Yan Breuleux presented La Tempête during the AV presentation […]

Elektra – Day 1

May 3rd, 2012

This year the Elektra festival has expanded beyond its usual 6 day scale into a month long digital art bienniale with work everywhere around the core of the city and at all kinds of scales. We will post a number of reflections on the projects we experience here on the blog, and I wanted to start with quick mention of the first work I saw yesterday.

Elektra 12: The dubious liveness of laptop performance

June 11th, 2011

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” – Walter Benjamin Frank Bretschneider EXP (Raster-notion) Photo courtesy of Elektra The majority of Elektra 12 performances were characterised by pulsing, glitching, looping, […]

Elektra 12: Playing with your senses

May 18th, 2011

The Elektra 12 festival, presented in Montreal from 4 to 8 May 2011, followed a similar pattern to previous years. During the day was the “international marketplace”: a series of short presentations by artists and administrative types talking about their work. In the late afternoon were openings of exhibitions dotted around town. Then from 9pm […]

Bass Maker Elektra Pow wow – Day 4 recap!

November 7th, 2010

Things are winding down but yesterday was très big so allons-y! Started things off with a talk on BASS by PhD candidate and DJ Paul Jasen. In about 90 minutes, Paul covered the use of bass and its impact on the body from the earliest incarnations of the pipe organ in 300 B.C. right to […]

Elektra sur le spot durant Champs électriques

November 1st, 2010

Pour la dernière soirée de Champs électriques, Elektra, le festival d’arts numériques de Montréal, présente 3 performances/présentations.  Parce les descriptions de projets AV c’est pas toujours sexy, voici quelques mots sur chacunes des pièces tirés du programme puis des liens pour voir des extrais. Ensuite, vous viendrez voir ça en vrai. This Is Not Design, trame00… un […]

Elektra Digest

May 17th, 2010

Last week, I headed to Montréal for the 11th incarnation of the Elektra International Digital Arts Festival in Montréal. The five day event attracted artists and industry professionals from as far away as Dakar, Seoul, Istanbul and Shanghai, as well as various countries across Europe and North America, to the cosmopolitan Québeqois city, which is […]

Blogging at the speed of dial up

May 9th, 2010

Elektra is over, and I’m left cold. Not just because it snowed on the last day of the festival, (leaving me no choice but to wear every single article of clothing I had brought with me to MTL at once,)  but because last night’s finale, sadly, fell short of what I was hoping for. We were […]