SOUND WINDOW 2015 / ROUND TABLE AND ARTIST RESIDENCIES
Sporobole launched a new program that provides a curator the opportunity to gather sound artists around a curatorial approach and concepts about the Sound Wall diffusion device. During a three-week residency, each artist has unlimited access to the sound laboratory and develops a project which will be broadcast and discussed during the round table.
The Sound Wall is a permanent system for sound projection on the façade of Sporobole, along the sidewalk on Albert Street. Made up of sixteen loudspeakers, it makes it possible to enter into direct contact with passers-by making their way to the above-ground parking garage next door to Sporoble on city’s main street, Wellington. The linear arrangement of the sixteen speakers and their position at the geometrical interface between Sporobole and the thoroughfare make this new outdoor sound gallery a singular platform for sound spatialisation and the projection of works of sound art.
Text by curator Hélène Prévost
Sporobole’s outdoor space offers a very discreet installation on its façade when it is not given too much attention. When walking, when moving between two activities, two places, mechanically, walking is often just for that, often a mode of transport. We can believe that it is an original cornice, designed by an architect with a free spirit. Do we even look up? Eyes and ears fixed to the ground.
Then artists place the body at the centre of the listening. Inject a language, words, trigger a movement, which is not known to the wind, or traffic, or steps around you. Stop, listen, continue. Maybe talk about it. Come back tomorrow. All day and part of the evening, almost at night, non-stop, non-stop, an auditory life goes by. Comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Faceless, discreet, it sticks to the brick front. “The listener can then experience a double crossing: the space of the work and the space of the citizen. ” (Chantale Laplante)
Although the word work does not fully apply.
It is not strictly speaking the broadcasting of a sound work on a loudspeaker. But rather the fusion of a broadcasting system with a listening to the world. The random or non-random movements that manage the very long partition will amplify the non-place and accompany, without head or tail, the wandering. The sound work revealing itself to the rhythm of the march, of the hour, according to the pace of time and the sky. Heat, rain, hail, shade, dry wind, hot paving stones.
The challenge of integrating into an urban fabric, tired, flat, without any apparent contour, fluid, without object.
A minimal gesture sculpts the sound space. So small and it takes such a place. It redraws the architecture of habits. Take this street, turn right then left. Go back in time. Extend your arm or ear.
“We all have the ability to ignore the space we need to use to get to our destination” (France Jobin)
The Sound Wall fragments and stretches time, draws a discreet labyrinth where curiosity, the need to connect with what is foreign to us, to push the door without knocking since the path belongs only to the one who will cross space, will approach walking in line, along 16 paths.
Chantale Laplante: artist-in-residence – May 18 to June 7 and August 5 to 8
assi/terre[working title]
The work assi/terre[working title] is woven from two languages: Innu and French. Innu, language on the border of disappearing/appearing, and French, the language of translation. It is a back and forth between the song and the meaning that crosses the soundtrack. Through the links of words and rustle, and at the bend of a walk, the listener can then experience a double crossing: the space of the work and the space of the citizen.
assi/terre[working title] takes advantage of the eminently ambulatory diffusion system of the Sporobole artist centre by multiplying the number of crossings and by multiplying, by the effect of seizure, our perceptive capacity of the world.
Innu Reading: Alexsa KcKenzie
Max-MSP Programming: Julian Stein
France Jobin: artist-in-residence – June 9 to 20 and July 30 to August 4
und transit
We all have a capacity to ignore the space we must use to get to our destination. Like most passage ways, they are a means to an end, and rarely are treated as an end in itself. Upon being introduced to minoritenplatz, I was immediately struck by the loneliness and practicality of this passage way.
Inspired by the solitary and functional aspects of the Sound Window location, I plan to collect a number of field recordings from in and around its emplacement, in order to create a series of soundscapes based on the sound of emptiness in this space.
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INVITATION TO THE SOUND WINDOW ROUND-TABLE
Saturday, September 26, from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Sporobole is pleased to invite you to listen to the works and meet the artists that have taken part in Sound Window 2015. The round-table will be hosted by the curator, Hélène Prévost, and will be comprised of composers France Jobin and Chantale Laplante, as well as special guests Chantal Dumas (who created the first work for Sound Window) and Nicolas Bernier, curator of the 2016 edition. The event will include a visit of the spatialisation laboratory, a presentation of the diffusion device by Frédéric Dutertre, and artist talks by the artists-in-residence. Free admission.
Sporobole launched a new program that provides a curator the opportunity to gather sound artists around a curatorial approach and concepts about the Sound Window diffusion device. During a three-week residency, each artist has unlimited access to the sound laboratory and develops a project which will be broadcast and discussed during the round table.