UPHONIAS: SOUNDS AND FUTURE ENVIRONMENTS

In response to Montréal Nouvelles Musiques’ 2015 festival theme “Surroundings and New Technology”, matralab hosts a one-day symposium focused on utopian ideas about sound art in landscape contexts.

Invited artists and theorists present posters of utopian environmental sound art projects and discuss the possibilities of art practices that insert sound into environmental settings. Ten posters will be presented and discussed around the following themes: Les Grands Uphonias, Uphonian Sanctuaries, Irksome Uphonias and Poetics of Uphonia. See the detailed schedule below.

The symposium also includes a keynote by Walter Boudreau and a performance of matralab guest artist Julian Klein’s piece “Interpreters IV” by The Montréal Sound.

Schedule

9:00h Arrival of participants (Tea, Coffee, Croissants); Opening of Poster Exhibition
9:30h Greetings and Introduction (Adam, Sandeep)
9:45h Les Grands Uphonias

9:45 Grande Symphonie Portuaire (Keynote: Walter Boudreau)
10:10 Tectonic Harp (Nicolas Reeves)
10:35 The Breath of the Earth (Lorella Abenavoli)

11:00 Break. Poster Exhibition
11:15 Uphonian Sanctuaries

11:15 Green Corridor Pocket (Gustavo + Gaelyn Aguilar)
11:40 Untitled (Ariel Bustamante)
12:05 Dix Travaux (Steve Giasson)

12:30 Lunch (we will go to a restaurant or food court nearby)
13:45 Irksome Uphonias

13:45 Border Blasters (Jason Charney)

14:10 Risveglio di un Pianeta (Sandeep Bhagwati)

14:35 The Total Sonic Immersion (Jean François Primeau)

15:00 Break. Poster Exhibition
15:15 PERFORMANCE Julian Klein: Interpreters IV The Montréal Sound
15:40 Poetics of Uphonia

15:40 The Voiceover (Anastasya Koshkin)
16:05 Dessins d’enregistrement (Mario Côté)

16:30 Final Discussion until 17:00

Uphonias

To Invited Participants and the Audience

This is not a normal colloquium, where presentation follows upon presentation, with a few questions in between. Such a format is simply not possible, because a number of the posters submitted will be presented without their authors.

Rather, the timetable of the day and the names attached to these times indicate zones of engagement with the poster: The poster in question will be projected onto the wall, and we take a few minutes to read or absorb it and then shift our discussion to it. Authors of the currently active poster, if present, may say a few words of explanation, but are not required to defend it.

The moderators Adam Basanta and Sandeep Bhagwati will try to keep the discussion on topic (i.e. the poster at hand) and manage the flow of speakers. But ideally, we would aim for a conversational format where one thought leads to another and wild speculations, imaginations and sudden inspirations and are as welcome as scientific observations, practical considerations and political/cultural realities.

While the speakers invited and the authors, if present, should feel the responsibility of doing their share to keep the conversation going, everyone in the room is invited to contribute. On such existential topics as our future in uphonias, intellectual hierarchies make no sense.