ECHO CHAMBER

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ECHO CHAMBER

An audiovisual performance in several tableaus, Echo Chamber takes its inspiration from technologies that let us probe inside the body, such as ultrasound and acupuncture, generating a sound composition in which the idea of resonance predominates.

In creating a modular interface of three panels allowing multiple manipulations, Messier has determined the boundaries of the possibilities for the performance of a choreography of sound and light.

He wields long needles as if they were notes from an instrument, piercing through an audio-reactive plate that sets off sound sequences.

Like the ultrasound needle palpating the body to reveal what might be in its interior – a living yet invisible presence? – Messier’s performative gestures are the sources of images in which the body eventually appears, magnified as a transported shadow.

The Echo Chamber device is continually transformed during the performance: by a series of movements and position shifts, an entire scenography unfolds before our eyes. The panels increase in number; the light sources appear, disappear, multiply, and mutate.

Cut-outs of light cause visual elements to materialize in response to the sound echoes, to the magnetic resonances of the body left in shadow, now turned into a shadow.

The panels then become screens in which we see the body’s interior, where scintillating cells are in motion. Window to the interior, the function of the device is reversed: Messier takes us through to the other side, under the invisible skin.

The interface-membrane becomes a passageway, a porous surface through which time is transposed and transforms the living matter.

Carrier of an electric charge, the matter of the body itself is a vehicle, a vector. This is what the final sequence of EchoChamber suggests: the link between the world and the self, between the outside and the inside – remanence emanating from the echo chamber.

Concept, audiovisual composition, programming and performance :
Martin Messier 

Hardware Design
Maxime Damecour, Robocut, Martin Messier

Technicians
Francis Vaillancourt-Martin, Gabriel Duquette, Pierre-Antoine Poirier Guay, Jean-François Piché, Alice Germain, Francis-Olivier Métras

Creative advisors
Olivier Girouard, Thomas Payette, Patrick Lamothe, Briana Lombardo

Photos+videos credits
Martin Messier

Production : 14 lieux