101 reasons to stay online…
For Art POP 2009, Michelle Lacombe and Sheena Hoszko, two dynamic Montréalers with a plethora of interesting relationships with the visual arts (as coordinators, outreach workers, educators, conceptual artists in their own rights and much more) came together to do a visually incredible, conceptually witty, poignant and wise piece for the first time as a collaborative pair.
Entitled 101 Song Scores, this interview with them about their project and process speaks enough for itself that my introduction can hererby be sent straight to the guillotines like so many other overly flowerly representations that the Jacques Louis Davids’ of the past have spout forth.
But! Just to highlight that as part of this years’ Atelier Portes Ouvertes, this fascinating duo will be giving an artist talk at Agence Topo at 2 p.m. this Sunday the 18th. More info to follow.
1. Could you explain a little about this project?
Sheena: 101 Song Scores is a project that stems from the 2009 Art Pop call for submissions, which really got us thinking about our art practices in relation to music. We decided to base our proposal on lyrics, and pull scores/text-based performance directions from songs.
The results of this ended up taking two specific forms: The first was a series of images or “ads” that list the score, song title, year, and length of the song (we did not include the band name to avoid any immediate associations with genres).
Pop Montréal graciously gave us access to the festival design files, so the scores themselves look like Pop content, despite the vague/oblique text. These scores were placed within the Art Pop and Pop Montreal websites/publications, in spaces usually reserved for advertising. We then began working with Agence TOPO, a Montreal-based new media artist-run-centre, and together created an amazing online database of all the 101 Song Scores content from our scrappy (but effective) google docs spreadsheet.
2. How did it come to light?
Michelle: Having followed each others’ practices since university, we had an interest in working together but lacked a context. Art Pop, an initiative we both wanted to submit work to, provided that context. Over yucca fries and beer we brainstormed areas in which music and art overlapped. We wanted to work within the content of the festival but in an indirect or conceptual fashion. Performance scores, text-based instructions developed through experimental music compositions but quickly adopted by visual artists, were selected as the starting point of our project.
Engaging with song lyrics as instructions seemed like a simple proposal to work with, but one that could shift away from the music towards larger issues such as the subjective interpretation of meaning, collective memory, and the role of music in social action/identity. There was also a playful “can-you-guess-that-song” element to the work that we felt would suit the diverse public of the festival.
3. Have you worked collaboratively before? What has the process been like?
Sheena: We’ve worked together on art-related coordination before, but this is our first time collaborating on a work. It went really well, especially for a process-based project that required many fast and on-the-fly decisions - always the ultimate test! I think it solidified the fact that certain elements of our practices - mainly the conceptual framing of our individual performance and intervention work, which often deals with the body, language, and emotion - overlap in ways that make collaboration quite seamless.
4. What are some of the thematics you are touching on the most with 101 song scores?
Michelle: The project is primarily about the subjective way in which we engage with “popular” western music. It is only through experience that we develop a relationship both individually and collectively with music, its lyrics and its meaning. Think of the way music often creates a brief intimate moment of connection to something also simultaneously being proposed to countless other anonymous listeners. The project however also became about how those experiences are mediated by language, action and time.
5. What do you think poses challenges for participants? I mean specifically around issues of engagement. If you could discuss this decision to make the website durational and what it represents for you that would be great.
Sheena: As we don’t have tons of experience in web-based work, we agreed keeping the site simple would be key. One thing we kept going back to was ensuring the site would highlight the, “I want all the info, and I want it all now” culture of the web. Thus the database was setup in a way that would provide access to only one score at a time, and each score would stay visible for the entire duration of the song. At the beginning the song title, artist, album, and year appears, and that info fades out about 10 seconds later. Besides that moment of contextual framing, there is no way to find more info, skip ahead, refresh, or see the database content as a whole.
Thus it sets up a decision making process for the viewer: to choose if they are going to engage, wait for the next score, or move to another site altogether. Some people have let us know that they access the work by keeping 101 Song Scores open in another tab and continuously checking back.
This is an unexpected but really interesting way of negotiating the idea of duration, as the project then exists in relation to all the other content being viewed at that moment. So the project asks if the audience will to give over their time in a way that is generally avoided online, and accept a certain lack of interactivity. I find this poignant if in relation to the minutes and hours spent tirelessly checking email, viewing status updates, searching for torrents online, etc.
6. Is this your first web-based project? What considerations did you have when constructing concepts and aesthetics within this site specific space and time?
Michelle: Yes this is the first web-based project for both of us. Sheena however, has integrated social media sites (myspace, email, etc) into previous projects.
The durational quality of the internet was something we wanted the web page to consider as it was the only space of the numerous sites 101 Song Scores occupied offering the possibility to play with time. Up until that point, the duration of the scores was proposed but never imposed. Because of the possibility of linking action to duration in a direct way, it was decided that the web page would host our database in its entirety (over 170 scores).
To keep with the conceptual concerns of the work, we wanted the database to be accessed only one action at a time, requiring that the visitor wait the time it takes to experience the proposed action before seeing the next one. To highlight this, the design was chosen to make the time-lapse or duration of each score a prominent element of the site. It was also a sort of shout out to the culture of webtime such as “death clocks”.
It was a logistical challenge to create a web space that required waiting, (ie. no refresh possibilities, no scrolling forward, no opening numerous pages to access more scores) as it goes against what the internet strives to be (interactive, immediate, controlled, etc.) We worked with Vincent Archambault who found a way to program a database of actions that are continually counting down, whether there is a public present or not.
Similar to how one might experience a video installation, the viewer comes in at a specific time but has no control (aside from waiting) as to what content they are accessing. If someone else comes in, they see the same thing and are also faced with the choice to wait and see the content or leave. Although this element of the project can be overlooked, it is to us the most successful and exciting part of the work.
7. What are the plans for the website once Pop Montréal is over?
Michelle: The project will be presented as part of Agence Topo’s open studio on Sunday, October 18th at 2 p.m. There we will be giving an artist talk and discussing 101 Song Scores. Vincent, the programmer, will also be present to answer the more technical questions.
Although the web page will remain online forever, a very generous act on the part of Agence Topo, we have yet to decided if we will continue to promote it or further develop the databases’ content. We are giving ourselves the time to get some distance and get back to our respective practices before making any final decisions.
8. What next?
Sheena: I would suggest to anyone reading this to try out creating some song scores of their own, be it by listening to their music collection, via youtube, via the radio. The whole process has really changed how I engage with lyrics, and has setup an ongoing space where I reflect on what actions I focus on, and why.
In secret places the art lies.
In the Notman House, an historically significant and pretty amazing space (architecturally as well as culturally) lots of things don’t happen. It is for the most part, unloved, neglected and unused. It is also for sale, and I am terrified of the people I don’t know yet who might buy it, demolish it, or change its inherent character and energy. For despite all of its loneliness and peeling walls, it is perhaps one of my favourite buildings in Montreal, if not of all time.
Which is why it is so amazing to see art in all of its rooms and secret places during the Pop Montreal Festival for the Art POP segment. I will go into each project here in more detail, but these are some of the fabulous artists and their works that graced the spaces the Notman House offers to us all.
There is something that I used to never understand about site specific work (years ago, when I was much, much younger and things were firmly in place on many levels) as I was a pencil-and-paper kind, and could do so anywhere. So for me the idea of people creating work in relation seemed odd somehow. Now, years and years later, with lots firmly not-in-place, I feel that even paper and pencil respond to their environments and that site specific work is inevitable in some ways, so to be conscious of it and consider its meanings is the least one can do.
The Notman House is a gorgeous example of how the smell + feeling + peeling + stains + stories + damp all change and amplify whatever it is that you do there, and most definitely the art that was growing from its walls the past week.
Here’s to the folks who did the work that carefully and thoughtfully contemplated their processes in relation to the house. That some of what they did will stay for the next folks to feel through the paint.
Below find some amazing photos of 2 of the artworks that inhabited Notman for Pop Montreal this year…more to follow…
Dominique Sirois, Ring My Alarm, Art POP/Notman House 2009
Bridget Moser & Jessica Campbell, Art POP Notman House 2009
Filed under artists, festival, installation, local, video | Tags: art pop, Bridget Moser & Jessica Campbell, Dominique Sirois, the notman house | Comment (0)
En Masse @ Art POP
One of the co-presentations of Art POP this year is a collaboration with En Masse, a pretty amazing troupe of over 40 artists that get together from time to time to do inspiring and fairly mind-blowing murals, collaboratively. For the entire month of October, they are going to be at the Red Bird Studio gallery for their latest project which combines 6 of their artists with a whole whackload of awesome artistic teenagers from various schools in the English Montreal School Board network. Together, they will create a mural the likes of which you’ve never seen, guaranteed.
The vernissage is this coming Sunday (the 4th) at 5pm, going until 9pm or even later, pretty crazy for a Sunday me thinks!! The gallery is at 135 rue Van Horne, and it’s going to be awesome. If you don’t get a chance to make it out, then swing by the studio every day from 12-6pm on weekdays to see what the gaggle of creative folks are doing there and watch their project develop.
One of the masterminds of the whole scenario and one of the Frozen Mammoth’s favourite people-of-this-fine-city, Jason Botkin, recently let us in on some of the deep dark secrets of his group. We can’t wait to see how this whole thing develops, and we’ll let you in on it all as it goes along….
1. Where did En Masse emerge? What was the impetus? If you could give a bit of background info on its initial coming together, that would be great.
En Masse was conceived one glorious evening in December of 2008, the ‘love-child’ of Tim Barnard and myself.
At the time, I was exhibiting a solo show at Galerie Pangee. As luck would have it, the gallery had an opening in their post-Christmas schedule, a little window that Tim and I eagerly imposed upon. Originally, our design was to ‘curate’ an enormous group show, packed mad salon style with everyone we knew and wanted to know. Seconds later, the idea was dashed upon the rocks, as we landed upon the En Masse concept, or specifically, the idea of gathering together those same cats to do a gigantic collaborative drawing of some sort. For both Tim and I, collaborative drawing/art making parties have been an important part of our practice, so the idea stuck!
En Masse was thus born in February of this year (2009), at the Galerie Pangee, with 28 artists engaged in 28 days of ecstatic mark making. We timed the ‘finissage’ to coincide with Montreal’s all-night Nuit Blanche festivities, thus inviting all to join us in celebration of one of the very biggest, most incredible drawing experiments most of us had ever seen in our tender young lives!
(Jason and Mural at Oshega Festival, Photo courtesy of Fred Caron’s awesome hands)
2. Has it changed much since you guys first began doing it? If so, how?
Tim, hot n’ heavy off on other projects, has been replaced by Rupert Bottenberg. Rupert brings an amazing skill set to the table, having established the Montreal Comix Jams, while juggling duties as the music editor at the Montreal Mirror newsweekly.
While the approach to the drawing itself is always the same at core—black and white, big, and involving as many artists as logistically possible (the more the merrier), our biggest step forward has been the creation of an ‘educational’ element to our project, through the introduction of a mentorship project involving local high school kids.
3. What is the creative process like in terms of choosing people to be involved? I know there are 28 members now, so are you guys officially a “team” or is the roster more fluid than that?
At this point, we’ve worked with nearly 40 artists on various projects, so in that sense, “Team EM” is better looked upon as a flexible and ever-changing ‘collective’ of emerging artists, whose work has been categorically defined as ‘underground’ and/or ‘lowbrow” art.
Refreshing and expanding the ranks is a key factor in breathing new and constant life into the project. Choosing the artists…that’s a tough question…SO MUCH amazing talent out there, so little time!
4. Many of the artists in En Masse work in somewhat alternative mediums (street art, grafitti). Was this a conscious decision, or organic? What does this type of background bring to the project?
This was a very conscious decision on our part. We wanted to include a wide range of artistic practices/pedigrees, especially exploring these cats whose voice has been largely excluded from the mainstream galleries and museums, institutions that seem to be somewhat unsure of the relationship between the fine and lowbrow arts.
We want a real grab-bag of styles, all flowing into one enormous web of ideas, thoughts, jokes, and general fun, one in which we can all freely participate in the chance to expand our potential as creators, while developing collective social and professional networks with each other.
5. How has doing this kind of massive collaborative work affected your own personal practice, if at all?
Collaborating with these incredible artists leaves me very inspired, and challenged to free up my own approach towards art making. Ego melts away during these events. So, my time in the studio, or at the sketchbook (when it comes), is now much more spontaneous, improvisational, playful. I like this.
6. Can you tell me a bit about why you guys have decided to do an educational thing? Is there a decisive angle to creating En Masse in a plethora of arenas, or does it happen more naturally than that?
The educational thing came as the natural ‘next’ step. I would have killed for a project like this as a kid, so now, with two wee ones of my own, and in working with Rupert who has produced many educationally directed events in the past, the mentoring program for kids came about very organically through personal interest.
This is a way for us to contribute socially, in a direction we feel good about. Artistic kids rarely get the chance to explore and express themselves within the school systems, as they exist, so if we can lend this hand to the schools, their teachers, and the teens, everybody gets happy. And perhaps the doors to heaven open a little wider.
7. What are some of the thrills and challenges with working with such a big group?
Cover your ears kids; this could get a little gory! I’ll spare the details, but suffice to say, it’s a bit of an administrative roller coaster at times…
With practice, the organizational drama gets a little more predictable, and easier to manage when it rears its ugly head. A steady diet of emails, ear often glued to phone, and a whole lotta labour of love keeps me going. Fortunately, I get more sleep in the weeks leading up to an event these days.
8. What most excites you about the project En Masse will be doing with ESBM, Redbird & art POP?
So many things excite me about this project! This particular avenue of the En Masse project has huge potential! I can’t wait to see what kind of work comes out of this thing, as we get this chance to collaborate directly with artists who are young in years and practice, but demonstrating real passion and huge talent in the crafting of their voice. What a mutual privilege and pleasure for us all!
For the kids, this is a great chance to gain practical tips about how to work in the mediums they are interested in, improve upon their own sense of self-worth as artists, and potentially form long-lasting creative partnerships they wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise.
9. What can you see in store for En Masse? If this goes really well, would you guys be into doing more educational/mentoring stuff?
Without question! We’re very excited with the educational stuff, and have received enormously positive response from everyone who has come into contact with the project. This event could be considered to be the pilot for many great things to come, especially as we gear into provincial, national, and international En Masse expansion in the coming year!
Filed under artists, festival, interviews, local, profiles | Tags: art pop, En Masse, jason botkin | Comment (0)
Let’s build a giant room-sized theremin with 16 antennas!
We would like to invite the tag-team of artist/engineers David Beaulieu and Christian Pelletier to this year’s Pop Montreal International Music Festival (September 30 - October 4) and see them build a Theremin room in our special Art Pop and POP Symposium headquarters.
The duo was last seen breaking musical boundaries with their loud-speaker suits worn by Patrick Watson and his musicians at this year’s Festival de Jazz de Montréal.
The installation of massive proportions we want them to build will invite festival-goers to participate (alone, or in groups!) in the creation of on-site, mind-blowing, improvised music as they interact in a room with 16 antennas suspended above and around them. As they are activated, the antennas trigger psychedelic sounds that are bound to excite and solicit interest from all sorts of human beings
It’s gonna be spontaneous, it’s gonna be an immediate and visceral experience, it’s gonna be communally created art instantly diffused, IT’S GONNA BE SO COOL! We’re asking all lovers of theremins, lovers of art, lovers of interactive experiences, lovers of electricity, lovers of music and lovers of the world everywhere to help us make this project happen. Your money will be used to pay for David & Christian’s hard work and the equipment they will need to make this happen.
Check out our kickstarter page, where you’ll see all the amazing REWARDS we’re offering to people that back this project. Among those, you’ll find:
- a limited edition DVD of animations made by local animators
- a DIY theremin kit
- a hand silk-screened limited edition t-shirt with a theremin on it
- an mp3 of an exclusive track from Gentleman Reg or Dishwasher
- a FULL PAGE photo of you in the Pop Montreal segment program
- a VIP Festival Pass to the Pop Montreal International Music Festival
- a personal festival friend and a cozy bed to sleep in
- a musical about you and 3 of your friends, written and performed by us. we will tape it in Montreal in front of a live audience, and send it to you.
- a custom-made Loudspeaker Suit built by Beaulieu and Pelletier
Donate to Art Pop, Receive a Drawing, Win Life
So let’s talk about this visual arts festival. It’s Art Pop, and it’s a segment of the amazing international Music Festival, Pop Montreal. Although it is affiliated to Pop Montreal, they are a non-profit organization, and as such, segments are basically responsible for their own individual funding.
So here’s the deal: sweet drawings like the ones seen in this post (but on paper), will be sent to Frozen Mammoth readers by mail, for donations of $10 CAD and more. The drawings can be mailed either to you or to anyone of your choice. Drawings will be shipped anywhere in the world, with normal shipping, without any extra cost to you.
Thank you so much for your love and support, and for contributing to a young and relevant free arts festival!
Filed under events, illustration, local | Tags: art pop, Donation, Drawing, Julien Ceccaldi | Comment (0)Updatan’ You Alls.
1) Don’t forget the deadline for applying to Art Pop 2009 is March 5th at midnight, please pass the word and this link around: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4140023/ArtPOP-Call-for-Submissions
2) This Thursday (the 26th), make sure you make sure you show up at the Art Matters Opening Party! The Art Pop squadron is curating part of the exhibition, but that’s not all: the venue (bain mathieu .ca) is crazy, you’ll be dancing all night in an empty pool and the bands/djs are insanely radical. + there will be surprises and props of the kind you’ll want to photograph all night long so you never forget. check the facebook event page for more info: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=52365303557
3) Coming up on the 26th of March - An awesome art education project in collaboration with DHC/ART, articule and Art Pop, more details coming up soon!
Participants will be given a blank white album cover containing a record that has been removed from its original cover. They will be asked to listen to their album and create an album cover for the record they received. This project challenges participants to reflect on the visual representation of sound and music and find inspiration in a randomly selected record.
Of even more shameless promotion-type things….
That’s right kids and pappies and babies and ados and all in- betweeners alike: Art Pop, the visual arts segment of Pop Montreal, is asking all of you and your kind to apply for this year’s festival. The deadline is the 26th of February, so get cracking.
We’re going to be focusing on art that is immersive-based/heavily reliant on crystals. Well, the crystals part is less important, and perhaps not even really necessary, we just have a crush on them in that way you do when you reach for your spring jacket and realize that the unidentifiable lumpy thing in one of the pockets is in fact, a giant crystal, and you don’t know how it got there. One-night stands with crystals everywhere.
So forward this link out to the folks who would want to see it, and think about the possibilities for your fine selves as well. It’s going to be an awesome festival this year, and we’re very much looking forward to reading your amazing projects while slowly realizing that you, in fact, and you alone, are our very own human-crystal, shining through the night with a will that won’t give up.
Or something like that.
Filed under art calls/appels, immersive art | Tags: art pop, crystals, immersive art | Comment (0)
