MONOM, Chris Salter, Alexandre Saunier, and Takashi Ikegami together with MUTEK 2020 - Hybrid (Montreal) are pleased to present: SNN #3: Forms of the Living, world premiere on September 11th, 2020. This performance will take place live for one night only simultaneously in four distant locations: live in Montréal, Berlin, and Tokyo and online on Mozilla Hubs.
Using light, video, sound, VR, and artificial life algorithms and neural networks, Salter, Saunier, and Ikegami together with a group of international collaborators orchestrate a global experience that while internationally shared, is impossible to grasp in its entirety. Source material produced during the COVID pandemic is employed to physically and algorithmically generate a schizophrenic combination lying somewhere between a wild and disjointed Jean-Luc Godard-like collage of news feeds, epidemiological data and statistical models and a slow, meditative and almost hypnotic feeling of a new science-fiction-like world one marked by the entangling of human experience with viral proliferation and machine tracing and forecasting.
In Montreal, Alex Saunier uses video, special analog lenses, and optical modulators to manipulate images taken from hundreds of hours of news media responding to the pandemic condition, visualizations, and simulations of the pandemic outbreak, and video archives of human, machine, and wildlife activity around the world. In Berlin, Chris Salter in collaboration with MONOM’s sound artist Ro Stambuk uses MONOM’s world-renowned 4DSOUND system to create a massive 57 channel spatial sound environment that plunges a live audience (restricted to 50 people) into experiencing the shifting acoustic conditions of the world since March 2020 – where the stoppage of the world economy resulted in a 50% reduction of human-made sound. In Tokyo, physicist and artificial life expert Takashi Ikegami manipulates the audio stream from Berlin, turning the pounding sounds of world cities into the sound of natural landscapes that have re-emerged since the pandemic and sending the stream back to Montreal. Finally, the online audience can experience yet another version of the performance in online VR in three specially designed Mozilla Hubs rooms that transform the media content created in Montreal, Berlin and Tokyo – where, contrary to the belief that the Internet is a new free space for social gathering, social distancing will also need to be practiced since only 25 visitors will be allowed in at any one time.
EVENT SCHEDULE AND DETAILS
MONOM Lounge with sounds curated by Chris Salter: 21:00 - 3:00
Late-night performance SNN #3: Forms of the Living : 00:00 - 1 :00
Ticket price: 20 EUR
Limited capacity of 50 people
MORE ABOUT FORMS OF LIVING
FOTL explores the challenge of sharing our individual experiences with the experiences of strangers around the world while also having to rethink our ways of sharing a world with non-living others - viruses and machines. This combined sense of wonder and utter confusion and uncertainty that seems to intensify daily in the face of current worldwide events is re-materialized in FOTL. The performance thus transforms media content in real-time, back and forth across time zones and continents in a shared experience that is nonetheless impossible to fully grasp by every audience.