Champs Vagues (2023)
Audiovisual performance - 2023 - 30 minutes - Montreal, Canada
Champs Vagues is an A/V performance by musician and sound artist Joël Lavoie and experimental film/video maker Guillaume Vallée.
In numerous areas of the world, industrial complexes take a major part in urban and rural life. With their intricate and massive infrastructure they overlook us occupying our visual and sonic spaces. Yet we have a reciprocal relationship with them as they take a central part of the production cycle and sometimes even allow a whole community to function. Still these austere buildings and their oppressive impressions are seen as a nuisance to the landscape, without any aesthetic qualities, being a necessity that we had no word on its constitution or emplacement. With Champs Vagues we propose the audience to reconsider their gaze towards this infrastructural landscape enhancing its aesthetic beauty with a poetic and contemplative experience.
This performance unveils itself through a fluid transformation of a stark industrial scape to a shapeshifting abstraction which enhances its dynamics properties. The sonic material consists of field recordings of various machines and scenes of industrial workers which are orchestrated and played in real time. With minimal intervention to keep their agency intact and instead underline their temporality in enhancing some properties like timbre and pitch with various manipulations. It’s this minimalistic intervention in the sound that conveys this sentiment of deviation from the brutalistic nature of machinic soundscape to the sublime wonderings of the mind.
The visual elements are the result of a film/video hybrid process that uses both analog and digital technologies. A combination of AI generated industrial landscapes, hand-processed 16mm, hand-painted 35mm and analog video brings new visual perception to the viewer through an austere imagery where colorful blossoming occurs. This work is a constant dialogue between sound and image, analog and digital, harshness and beauty.
What we offer is an occasion for the audience to re-appropriate their environment through a slip of time, giving them the occasion to portray themselves in a blissful world and perhaps change their grasp of the relationship we all have with our living spaces.
Champs Vagues was created in August 2023 following a co-comission by MUTEK Montréal and Avatar Center (Québec city). It premiered during the 24th edition of MUTEK festival at the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal, Canada in 2023.
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©Joël Lavoie 2023