boîte noire

boîte noire

In his installation, BOÎTE NOIRE, Martin Messier is interested in rendering in sound and movement a light beam projected into a large prism.

Seeking to define the contours of this ephemeral medium, Messier materializes the amplitude of its forms and decomposes their frequencies. Light transformed into sound becomes a double language.

In the darkened room, the audience listens to and watches the progress of this white spectre: its contractions and dilations, its curves and tracings, its appearances and disappearances.

The light beam becomes the improbable instrument for the deployment of a sound composition. Here, sound and light are one and the same element. They evolve in space in a single movement issuing from the same source.

As conveyed by the work’s title, we find ourselves in a dark, enclosed space: a box, a cube. The Black Box could be the theatre space – an empty, neutral, transformable room, or a place where travel data are entered and whose internal function remains opaque. Martin Messier raises both possibilities.

In an embedding or mise-en-abyme effect, it seems that the black box can only be understood from the inside. In the dark room, signals emit phantom information through the transparent cube. The installation deals with the very principle of the black box, whose internal workings are hidden from us.

Does this activity have a link with a certain kind of cinema? The beam transmits no more than its own light, yet it evokes a movie projection containing all the imaginary possibility of film. Invited to walk around this cube demarcated by light, spectators assume a meta-position with respect to the reified projection, a flow of light that has become an object. 

Artistic Director, Concept, Music, Photo credit
Martin Messier

Visual
Étienne Després

Setup technician
Dominique Hawry

Technical design
Maxime Bouchard, Thomas Payette

Electronics
Nathanaël Lécaudé

Production
14 lieux

Support
Conseil des arts du Canada