Mobile Focus: A day of discussions and presentations focusing on mobile technologies, followed by the launch of the web work Detours: Poetics of the City by Taien Ng-Chan :: March 24, 2012; 10:00 am Р5:00 pm :: Notman House (Home of the web in Montr̩al) 51, rue Sherbrooke West, Montr̩al.

In the wake of its digital arts explorations and as part of its ongoing digital art research, creation and dissemination activities with interdisciplinary approaches and digital platforms, Agence TOPO invites you to discover the worlds of 3 innovative Montréal creators and collectives, Jean Dubois, Taien Ng-Chan and the Audiotopie collective, who, each in their own way, explore mobile technologies, geolocation and the poetics of everyday life.

The day will close with the public launch of the work Detours: Poetics of the City created during an exploratory research and production residency undertaken by the artist Taien Ng-Chan and her collaborators at the Agence TOPO in 2011-2012. Accompanied by a wine reception.

Agence TOPO is a Montréal-based artist-run centre dedicated to the production, dissemination and distribution of multimedia works that explore new narrative modes within an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach.

Agence TOPO is proud to be associated with the Notman house for the presentation of this day that brings art and mobile technologies together. The House of the Web, which opened in 2010, supports the start up of young companies and hosts many network events which contribute to the creative dynamism of Montréal in the information technology sector.

Schedule:

10:15 am – A word of welcome
10:30 am – Presentation by Jean Dubois
12:00 am – Lunch at your leisure
1:30 pm – Presentation by Audiotopie
3:00 pm – Presentation by Taien Ng-Chan and his collaborators (Gordon Neil Allen, Lance Blomgren, Adrian Gorea, Emilie O’Brien, Samuel Thulin and by Donna Akrey)
4:15 pm – Launch of Detours: Poetics of the City

The presentations

Jean Dubois combines digital media, installation and public art. His artistic research critically and poetically explores the relationship between text, image and their spatial setting by involving spectators’ gestures, touch and breath. His work A portée de souffle will be linked to his previous works and a varied corpus of works by other artists who blend mobile telephony and electronic display. A portée de souffle is an interactive video installation created from 2008 to 2011 in collaboration with Chloé Lefebvre. The installation invites viewers to interact with the images shown on a giant video projection situated in public space. The projection shows two faces in profile joined by a bubblegum bubble, which they inflate and deflate in unison. After calling the number displayed on the screen, the viewer is invited to blow into his or her cell phone to trigger the breathing movement of the onscreen characters. Since 2008, this work has evolved and been presented in various public contexts in Québec and abroad (Australia, South Korea, France and Russia).

The founding members of Audiotopie, Yannick Guéguen, is a new media artist and landscape architect, and Étienne Legast, an electronic music composer, will discuss the collective’s approach. Through a reflection on the intersection of artistic, scientific, social and technical disciplines, particular attention will be given to the idea of contextualization. The notions of social interactions and situated environments, contextual sound art, location-based learning and representation will be introduced to question mobile and geolocation platforms. In what regard does geolocation provide contextual art with a supplementary dimension in this perspective?

Taien Ng-Chan is a writer and media artist who investigates the poetics of everyday urban life through experimental cinema and cartography. Her works include a poetry book/multimedia CD entitled Maps of Our Bodies and the Borders We Have Agreed Upon, and two anthologies, Ribsauce and Navigating Customs. She has written drama for stage, screen, and radio, and her videos have been shown across Canada, in the US, Korea, Sweden, and the UK. Her short film The Red Ribbon won the Location Michel Trudel Award at Concordia University, where she received her MFA, and where she is now pursuing her Ph.D. in the fields of Cinema and Urban Studies.

Detours: Poetics of the City invites you to explore the streets of Montreal through a series of reworked city transit maps, using photos, video, audio, drama, poetry and iconography to explore personal engagements with the city. The detour happens as a break from routine, an unexpected trip through the spaces of stories and small observations that are strewn across the everyday landscape. Detours is directed by Taien Ng-Chan, who also contributes two maps: City Transit, video-poems and stories about riding the bus and metro, and Streets of the Saints, a playful melding of geography, hagiography and poetry (with the help of Byzantine iconographer Adrian Gorea). Excerpts from Lance Blomgren’s Walkups: scènes de la vie Montréalaise are mapped out to Gord Allen’s sound explorations, finding stories and absurdities in the lives and dwellings of Montrealers. For City Ditties, Samuel Thulin creates mobile media music, using only sounds recorded on-site, and creating them on-site as well, on an iPhone. Emilie O’Brien’s Field Notes invokes Maguire Meadows, aka Le champ des possibles, with embroidery, textworks, images, and an interview with the creator of the Roerich Garden project. Donna Akrey maps the Desirelines that she encounters in her travels through the city – those paths made by people pursuing the shortest distance between two points.