[Performance] This project 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.
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
Production : 14 lieux
Copyright © 2021 Martin Messier. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2021 Martin Messier. Tous droits réservés.