a Montreal multimedia-art duo renders the invisible in complex works

of interactive audiovisual originality

experiencing skoltz_kolgenBY TOBIAS C. VAN VEEN

hypnosısın a state of controlled

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rtists in the twenty-first century are beginning to realize the impact of computerization: that with digitization all is data, and all data is interchangeable. Sound and vision are digitally flattened, offering radical potential to a transactive aesthetics between particle and wave.

The interactive installations and live performances of Montreal duo Skoltz_Kolgen have pioneered the interweaving of the aural and the visual. Skoltz_Kolgen craft a fragile yet powerful negotia-tion between what is seen and what is heard. Whether exploring the space of quantum flux or the fleshiness of the body, they craft a world in which the interplay of particles dance before our eyes and shudder within our ears.

fragility in the wireframesDominique T. Skoltz and Herman W. Kolgen, charming yet elu-sive, pose against a cement wall in the basement of The Society for Arts and Technology in their home city of Montreal. They are Skoltz_Kolgen.

Beyond the elemental facts lies a universe—a body of work of some fifteen years, comprising all the intricate worlds the two artists have programmed into being.

Multimedia would be the old word to describe interdisciplinary approaches. Yet multimedia is insufficient here, for Skoltz_Kolgen appear to chart more a realm of the revised media than of mul-timedia. Old media are incorporated and remixed. At the same time, something of an esoteric or hermetic knowledge permeates these endeavours. Their live cinema performances and interactive audiovisual installations present an exoteric delicacy and fragility of image and sound, while inwards a conceptual enigma struggles to express itself. Experiencing Skoltz_Kolgen leads to a hypnotic love of the inexpressible, as it is manifested in the technologically complex. Opening oneself to seduction is perhaps the first moment in loving the machine as do Skoltz_Kolgen.

cirkus (1996) To begin at the beginning it is necessary to refer to a still uncom-pleted work. CIRKUS (1996) focuses on the “corrosive effect of time on objects and human beings.” Chemical processes act through time on this work-in-progress, as film and various recording media are immersed in corrosive baths. This unshown work explores the degradation of media hidden from the public, calling for a time line that, as the prospectus hints, coincides with the artists’ lifespans themselves. The corrosive effects of chemicals on media parallel the corrosion of the body in space and time. We are led to contemplate the mediatization of the physical and the metaphysical: the way in which both the real and the surreal are expressed in strange media, the framework wherein the organic becomes real and thus surreal in the digital medium.

Like organic growth in all directions, like a mathematical equa-tion, thinking and writing on Skoltz_Kolgen demands a certain immersion in their processes. To meditate on Skoltz_Kolgen calls for isomorphic reflection.

each track is an audio universe, from which Phonofictions emerge.

askaa

—KOdwO EShuN, More Brilliant than the Sun

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askaa (2005)The motif of growth permeates asKaa, an “interactive ecosystem inspired by vegetation,” first shown at the Musée d’Art Contempo-rain in Montreal at Mutek in 2005. Two gigantic screens project the slow evolution of virtual plants, while genetically patterned sounds modify the organisms’ development, i.e., the sound changes and flows in a way similar to generational modification of genetic elements over time: as the sounds change and morph into new patterns, the plants grow in different ways. Thus, sound played into the installation in real time acts as a further catalyst and modifier of the ecosystem's growth, which responds in turn, not only visu-ally but sonically, by regulating the rhythm of its perpetual evolu-tion. A series of performances by guest microsound artists during the installation stimulate this environmental feed-back system. Skoltz_Kolgen request that the artists respect the breath of the ecosystem as it responds to the influx of live sound. By working with the sonic rhythms of silence that govern the cybernetic instal-lation, one can emphasize the growth potential of the botanical environment. asKaa is not only an inter-active, ever-evolving interplay of sound and light represented as a vegetative ecosystem, but a meeting point of human to digital evolution—a new con-ceptualization of cybernetics. We enter the space of a possible coexistence with the ecodigital. At the same time, the space and time of performance as well as the technics of the instrument are reconfigured. asKaa is both installation and instrument, an evolving digital life form and lifeless algorithmic code, which is to say it is neither fully one nor the other, but the sign of strange media. In asKaa, the technobotani-cal plants are watered by virtual sounds generated in turn by fleshy humans in concert with computers.

ovskii (2002)The technological components required for such organic inter-activity are to be found in Skoltz_Kolgen’s craft with software and programming. The digital tool LoeeFrek (2002) was created by Skoltz_Kolgen in order to exhibit such performative audiovi-sual works as Ovskii. The software “manipulate[s] and translate[s] sound sources into a visual bitmap matrix, in real time,” but also simultaneously interacts with the audiovisual field, “imprinting the

representations on a matrix” as it implements creative decisions by the artists and random patterns from the software. Dubbed a tem-poral triptych, Ovskii marks the moment wherein the installation and the performance blend into the programming and creation of a piece of software which produces a cybernetic environment. Self-programmed software such as Ovskii provides the framework for Skoltz_Kolgen’s larger and more complex projects.

elf2b-alpha (2002)The same year as Ovskii was developed, the ElF2B_Alpha instal-lation raised ethico-political questions concerning the techno-organic complex under investigation. Both a performance and an installation for headphones and video monitors, ElF2B_Alpha explores the ethics of genetic manipulation. As an audiovisual installation, the non-interactive twenty-two-minute piece details

each track is an audio universe, from which Phonofictions emerge.

—KOdwO EShuN, More Brilliant than the Sun

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the transaction of sound to image as, on screen, the piece docu-ments how various sonic processes disintegrate x-ray images of the body. A “freeflowing contemplation with no scientific preten-sions,” ElF2B_Alpha poses a lurking question about technologies that entice us to program the organic through genetic code.

Each of Skoltz_Kolgen’s audiovisual projects present the viewer—and listener—with vast worlds that reveal intimate and delicate relations between otherwise imperceptible objects. We dive into the skin of the body to play in its smallest organic recesses and cellular operations, as in Epiderm (2004), or we explore the world of particles and the flux of symbols, as with [Flüux :/ Terminal] (2003). In the artists’ words, their work dives into a series of con-ceptual enigmas that demand perpetual innovation of tools and

strategies. Tactics of film, video, animation, sound, installation, and performance come into play. At the focal point of each project is an enigma—hypnotic, hermetic, esoteric—that, through the con-struction of an environment, invites exploration. In their extensive works Epiderm and [Flüux :/ Terminal] Skoltz_Kolgen turn to noth-ing less than the inner particles of the outer universe—quantum or human—and the thin skins that scarcely separate fragile beings. Here, art invades life as its computer-aided imaginary processes blend with science.

in heaven everything is fine filamentIsolating their work in the sonic registers, Skoltz_Kolgen focus on minute displacements of glitches and microtones, granular synthe-sis, and pulses at low volumes. PostPiano 07.05 (2003, 12k limited edition) and Hyalin (2003, LINE_014) align their undertaking with something of the microsound strategy. Although microsound as a digital strategy of splintering sound into its smallest elements arose in the 1970s through the work of Curtis Roads, and was developed into the tools of granular synthesis by Canadian com-poser Barry Truax in the '80s. it was around the millenium that electronic music composers outside the academy began explor-ing the compositional strategies and tools of microsound. Gran-ular synthesis became widely available as a software plug-in and the flowing clouds produced by micrograins of sound became a favoured production technique. While the new microsound aes-thetic renewed interest in extreme forms of minimalism that bor-dered on silence, it also explored its converse in the complex rear-rangements of micrograins in a kind of maximalism of the minute. In microsound, the pursuit of the tension between minimalism and complexity is accomplished through ample use of silence inter-spersed with challenging and sustained frequencies that plumb the depths of the subsonic at the highest pitches of human hear-ing. Artists negotiate between barely audible tones and clouds of sound that irrupt into the realm of the scarcely audible. In contrast to institutional avant-garde music, in microsound the rhythms of house and techno—the drum patternings of Afrodiasporic cultures turned alien through electronic means—are widespread and put to infectious use. Microsound became not only the sound of a move-ment but a tool to be put to use in the turntablist's arsenal. Record labels such as 12k, Mille Plateaux and Trente Oiseaux catered to the development of the microsound aesthetic—from beats to de-structured soundscapes—while the Web site <microsound.org>

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hosted an e-mail list, as well as a community of musicians and their projects. It is from this milieu that Skoltz_Kolgen intervene in the microsound aesthetic. Skoltz_Kolgen intensify the aesthetic by resampling various sources and rendering their structure as skeletal as their visual realms. Small slivers of sound are attached to evolv-ing rhythmic structures that disintegrate and rebuild according to greater patterns that are then subject to greater dissolutions. While they connect these sound strategies to visual material, they establish a reference point beyond both audio and visual registers in which both are at play. It is this ability to outline a conceptual enigma that could be translated into either sound or vision—but nonetheless requires the symbiosis of both—that renders their work as fragile as it is powerful.

The aforementioned album Hyalin feels akin to Epiderm, insofar as it consists of increasingly pervasive levels of micropitched tones, not unlike the standing-wave work of New York's godfather of microtonal composition (and massive drones) Phill Niblock, or the just intonation of American minimalist and Fluxus heretic La Monte Young (himself a summer student of Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt). Whereas Niblock and Young demand an eternity of listening commitment, composing works lasting hours, if not years, which meditate on the depth of a particular moment, Skoltz_Kol-gen seek infrastructure, finding new complementarities in warp and woof to pry open and traverse. It is this conceptual enigma of a greater framework, or wireframe, that is reflected in their modus operandi. Whereas Hyalin is laser-sharp and amplifies the unset-tling and uncanny (a feeling found reflected in Epiderm), Postpiano 07.05 amplifies all the gentle characteristics of Skoltz_Kolgen’s approach. Postpiano is compiled or assembled by NYC-based Tay-lor Deupree, the label’s curator and a contemporary microsound composer (as well as ex-techno producer, suggesting something of the movement’s origin in the ashes of alternative technoculture, a meditative respite after the madness of rave culture’s ecstatic drive to burnout). The work consists of a series of remixes by Skoltz_Kol-gen of NYC composer Kenneth Kirschner on piano, but selected by Deupree from a body of reintrepretations too great for a single recording. Skoltz_Kolgen note that the remixes were completed shortly after the London terrorist attacks of 2005 (a UK perfor-mance was scheduled for the same fateful July day). Hand-num-bered in a limited edition of 500, Postpiano 07.05 is not listed in the 12k catalogue (whereas one may find Post Piano and Post Piano 2 by Deupree and Kirschner), and remains as enigmatic as the work itself. Skoltz_Kolgen themselves were unable to narrow their con-

tribution, as if they couldn’t bear to cut sorrow into a single frag-ment. Or as if their enigmatic remix process of creating music is greater than the contemporary limit of an eighty-minute compact disc. Loss is palpable as 07.05 marks its date through the gentle recontextualization of Kirschner’s piano playing, itself reminis-cent of twentieth-century composer Morton Feldman, lending the work an ethereal hum of moody ambiance and glitch texture. The work’s softness reflects the kindness of Skoltz_Kolgen’s strategy of the scalpel. What is enigmatic concerning the album’s production is nonetheless concretized in its palette of sound. By resampling Kirschner, who uncannily sounds like Feldman, Skoltz_Kolgen bring to the forefront the debt microsound owes to the traditional instrumentation and compositional minimalism of Feldman. The deliberate yet meditative pacing of Kirschner (as possessed almost in spirit by Feldman) is reflected in the stillness of Skoltz_Kolgen’s attentive remixes, as they focus on each note played in its tempo, succession, weight, and dampness. Then this reflection is refracted as each piano note is transposed and then fragmented into splin-ters of sound that reassemble themselves in skeletal frameworks of bits and particles that slowly begin to evolve, speak to each other, and move alive as if one. Skoltz_Kolgen’s solution to minimalism's austerity, its tendency to fall into abstraction or mindlessness, is to project another possible path, beyond all formalism, that acceler-

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ates, deliberately and delicately, the evolution of sound to the level of an ecosystem in which it evolves in concert with the world. Skoltz_Kolgen take the human piano assemblage, now digitized, and make its numerical data sing in the languages of its code and programming, languages which retain their organic trace, and the mark of the date of death.

digital performance and the mediums: the tarot of the terminal flux

Like a techno track or software release, [Flüux :/ Terminal] has evolved through several versions, the latest of which is 5.4, completed in 2006. The standard version is described by the artists, on their Web site, as “Performance image/sound—diPtyc rétinal for two screens”—in capitals (and with diptyc so spelt), as if deter-mining by sheer force—and not unlike a Futurist manifesto—the monumental impact of their endeavour. The piece is named a dip-tych in the classical sense, being projected on two screens, split yet hinged. The hinge suspends, in a tense arrangement, flexibility and dissociation between sound and image in a bipolar retinal, with stereophonic sound corresponding—or non-corresponding—to luminous particles on the left and right screens. At times, the two screens conjoin into the widescreen panorama one expects of film; otherwise, the image and sound dissassemble to pursue different paths. As Skoltz_Kolgen point out in their artist’s statement for the piece, “The image is distorted, bearing the marks that the sound imprints upon it, and becomes the fossil of the sound.”

[Flüux :/ Terminal] appears a delicate representation of the quan-tum world of flux. In this evocative, black space, nanobits circulate and flock in uncannily organic patterns, displaying quirky per-sonalities and traits of eerie tenderness. Circling clouds of sign-symbols (numbers, letters, scientific and mathematic symbols) add an ambiguity to the quantum level: is this the fabric of the uni-verse, or the algorithms of a software program? Genetics or code? Skoltz_Kolgen seem to suggest the complicity of the two, placing us in between man and machine. We are drawn along a narrative of quantum events as they enigmatically delve into the very wireframe of time and space.

As the artists state on their Web site (see <www.skoltzkolgen.com/fluux.html>:

A BIPOLAR EXPERIENCE IS THEREFORE BUILT BY CATALYZING THE LINES OF TENSION BETWEEN TWO INDEPENDENT BUT RELATED AUDIO AND VISUAL WORLDS. THEIR DISSOCIATION IN ONE INSTANCE AND THEIR SYNCHRONY OR SYMMETRY IN ANOTHER ESTABLISH SPACE–TIMES THAT FAIRLY FLOAT IN WEIGHTLESSNESS. THESE SUSPENDED MOMENTS ARE SUCCEEDED BY FRESH CHARGES OF ENERGY THAT ARE MASSIVE AND INTENSE. A NEW GENERATION OF MEANING ESCAPES: ATTRACTION AND REPULSION, INTERDEPENDENCE AT TIMES, FOLLOWED BY STRUGGLE AND CONFLICT AT OTHERS.

Skoltz_Kolgen leave us imagining universal subatomic levels and the quantum-level dance of strangely expressive quirks and quarks. [Flüux :/ Terminal]’s popularity among diverse, worldwide audi-ences attests to its success in rendering the invisible an elusive and hypnotic experience.

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Neither film nor performance, neither audiowork nor sound-work, [Flüux :/ Terminal] demonstrates its force through its ambi-guity and its affect. Skoltz_Kolgen express a love with their work that hints at the labour involved in its production. Sometimes this involves troubleshooting technical blockages such as how to com-pose sound in professional 3D-animation software such as Maya, or overcoming multichannel difficulties of audiovisual interaction with two or more projectors and joystick controllers. But this is not to demonstrate the overcoming of technical barriers: it is to move through a puzzle that hinders as well as reveals an elusive enigma that only marks itself through its labyrinthine forces, and to grant that hindrance the time to play itself out as it leaves traces—distor-tions—upon screen and sound.

from sound to skin: epidermIn this world of the infinitely small, if a human stood one nanome-tre tall, a red blood cell would appear to be 1,759 stories high.

On the day they wrap up their Epiderm installation at Mutek 2006, Herman tells me their work is “not about technology.” Dom-inique says they simply wouldn’t know what to say about the tools themselves. It is the world that we cannot see that fascinates them. In Epiderm, their obsessions turns to the microkinetic relationships that make up the epidermis of the skin. Although the work pre-miered at the Elektra Festival in 2004, it has come into its own with version 2. Lying on our backs in a circle, immersed in a two-storey blackened chamber with 5.1 surround-sound, we look upward at a twenty-foot circular screen hanging from the ceiling. Later, Skoltz_Kolgen tell me that they want the audience to “feel the oxygen,” and so Epiderm begins in the blood, in the bloodstream, with convincing animations of cells. Slowly, the world shrinks, as Skoltz_Kolgen begin to pursue their elusive nanoparticles. At a certain point beyond measure, what is organic and what is electric or quantum becomes indistinguishable. Boundaries between cells become permeable and Euclidean dimensions collapse. While we witness the physics of a world we can mathematically describe and thus animate, this world remains, despite residing in the innermost being of ourselves, utterly foreign (and hypothetical—thus, art). Skoltz_Kolgen de-compose a mirror of the self that exhibits an unnerving and uncanny alterity (the state or quality of being other).

An aesthetics already found in the universe of [Flüux :/ Terminal]—this wireframe galaxy of blurred distinctions between the organic and inorganic—is now discovered as the foreign world already inside us, so uncanny and yet so essential to our very being. As it digs into the microscopy of cellular operations, Epiderm emphasizes how the wireframe aesthetics of the subatomic is the prosthesis already inside the enigma of the self: us fleshy things of flux, of the network, of the electrical charge.

Wrought in fine, washed and wispy reds, greens, blues, and flesh tones, Epiderm is as colourful as it is unsettling. In a soundbyte (an explanation of this new term of mine will follow immedi-ately), Skoltz_Kolgen have achieved the difficult task of animating the organic (a word of explanation about that will also follow). A soundbyte (an intentional play on the commonly known sound bite) merges the ability of media to encapsulate communication

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into the briefest of utterances with the capacity of computing tech-nologies to reduce information to a digital assembly of ones and zeroes. Writing and reading an encoded language draws closer to how Skoltz_Kolgen animate the organic. In all of their works, the artists take on the task of making the machine appear before us as organic process, not only in its sonic and visual representation—by animating, through animation software, organic growth, botanical or cellular—but in the machine’s anima as uncanny process of soft-ware (language code) and hardware (electric and magnetic parts). Skoltz_Kolgen’s imaginative realism strikes at every level, from sticky blood globules to the electrical impulses between DNA genes, until the impulse inwards and onwards leads to an expanse of emptiness. Strange that a meditation on the body should lead to its Zenlike flicker as an attachment; strange that, as in the work of American minimalist composer Philip Glass, one feels the Satya-graha, the introduction of truth and gentleness in the rhythms of the body politic, as it dissolves in the moment of its deepest penetra-tion. As the performance ends, not a few viewers have passed into a meditative somnabulance. A few are asleep. Skoltz_Kolgen tell me that a few have slept through several performances, only to awake hours later, disoriented by their inner travels, emerging into a dif-ferent day (or night).

The sonic environment of Epiderm is interlaced with the visual register. Wispy sound clouds are generated through granular synthe-sis as one second is divided by 44,100 sonic grains. A rumbling sub-bass signals tectonic shifts in scale and the passing of microcellular beings. The spatial arrangement of sound in 5.1 draws attention to the essential role that listening plays in Skoltz_Kolgen's work.

sculpting in timeReleased on the Mutek Fabric sublabel, unaccompanied by its image, [Flüux :/ Terminal], the CD, presents something of a problem in realization, of which the artists are all too aware: how does one disconnect the audio from the visual registers when the two are so closely entwined? This problem has arrested the release of a [Flüux :/ Terminal] DVD for similar reasons. Yet a CD of the sonic register, risking the impression of being a soundtrack to the work, has been released.

While the 12k and LINE releases accomplish a gravity of sound that compels their solo attention and solitude, something of the weightlessness of [Flüux :/ Terminal] withholds the same experience. While the imagination fills in the gaps and the piece is a fine craft-ing of microsound composition, one reaches out for a disconnected acoustic signifier, as if numb to a phantom limb of its own body. Conversely, would the visual screens of [Flüux :/ Terminal] reverber-ate so strongly without their sonic reinforcement? The movement and a-synchronicity of the whole piece appear to be worth more than the sum of its parts. Because the audio proactively anticipates, and in flux of motion, distorts and displaces the visual axes of the Euclidean dimensions—dimensions that introduce depth to the limitless black of projected nothingness—its force is dissipated without its visual counterpoint.

One feels there is something spontaneous in the totality of [Flüux :/ Terminal] that eclipses the movie magic of film and the composi-tion of sound. While the environment of [Flüux :/ Terminal] has been programmed, it is so only in the sense that we can overde-termine a painting as a form of pre-programmed movement. As turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in L’Évolution Créatice in 1907, the movement of the artist’s gesture is a so-called and contradictory “unity”—the unity of an enigma. Likewise, Skoltz_Kolgen’s audio, a sonic palette of sorts, as it invis-ibly brushes its tip against the geometrical nodes, hovering over the visualization of flocks of bird-like formations that spell permutation after permutation of mutation singularity, is not a film soundtrack.

Thus the work is not perfect, nor completely under control; oth-erwise Skoltz_Kolgen would have proved the mastering impulses of humanity to be correct. If humanity could program a perfect, computerized art, Skoltz_Kolgen's work would be nothing less than the absolute calculation of the future. The concrete realization of cybernetics and totalizing mathematics, if not all of metaphysics and

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systems theory, as it is expressed in the attempt to compute life and death itself, would be true. With the perfect predictability of all pos-sible interactions in a system, the mysteries of art, the very enigmatic visions of the oracle, would be reduced to the banal operations of a glorified calculator. Life would not be worth dying for—and death would not be worth living for. There would be no future under the perfect realization of the mastering impulses latent in computer technology—and there would be no art.

Thus, their work glitches. It lacks from itself when disassociated from itself (the audio misses its visual twin), and even in its whole, it points beyond itself, and breaks down.

Thank the fine filaments.And thus it’s tempting to say that the work elucidates the enigma

of complexity to minimalism that marks the music of the spheres in the twenty-first century.

rather than a story line . . . (this chamber cinema of light and shadow)

Streaming on the retina, ethereal fire poking in through pinpoints left by holes in the black. And the furious sound, recombinated.—from my notebook, after experiencing Epiderm, 2006

Skoltz_Kolgen emphasize, when they speak to me, their efforts on a work yet to come, a work from the past which still seeks its housing, and with talk of which we depart.

A work requiring more time and space than earthbound print can implicate, the feature-length film-poem Silent Room, which was first released in 2003 and has seen various permutations since, has yet to see its full installation. Silent Room is a cross-section of the lives of sixteen people, sixteen rooms, sixteen subjects, sixteen envi-ronments, a tableaux vivant. Back-to-back, this intimate portraiture, reminiscent of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) for its darkness, fan-tastic otherworlds and obscure characters, totals approximately one hour and twenty-five minutes when viewed linearly. Recut to its original length, untold simultaneous experiences unfold over many hours, as the making of the flowing image itself features over 7,000 digital photographs from a battery of cameras placed in “confron-tations of various vantange points” which have been reanimated and stitched together in a fotocinétique process. (The photograph

of Skoltz_Kolgen by Tanya Goehring, recomposed from distinct and separate digital stills, echoes this process.) Likewise—and this enigmatic isomorphism that risks discordia has been my thesis and thus marked my efforts here—the soundtrack is generative of imag-istic fluxes and organisms. Unlike the work of Lynch, “There is no dialogue to foster understanding or any reassurances for the viewer. Instead we remain in a state of controlled hypnosis.” The Gesam-kunstwerk—Wagner’s term for total art work—of Silent Room calls for nothing less than an actual structure, a building or house, with each of sixteen rooms built, arranged and designed with objects and architecture to each subject, with the film of each of sixteen subjects playing simultaneously in each of the sixteen rooms. Noth-ing less than an architectonic structure of audiovisual navigation, a techno-organic, cybernetic environment unto itself. Neither exhi-bition nor installation matches the demands of Silent Room’s instal-lation-to-come, an installation that undoubtedly would call for a further, transformative media ecology. Here, in the moment of the arkhe—archi-tecture and archi-tectonic—at the threshhold of the home, oikos, Skoltz_Kolgen attempt to draw us into the technoge-netic process of life and death. Like this work-to-come, the words that would capture Skoltz_Kolgen remain in the future. Sometimes the expansive oversight of attempting to read it all misses the mark of these uncategorizable forays in which seduction lies.

Tobias C. van Veen is a renegade theorist, a doctoral candidate in philoso-phy and communication studies at McGill University, and a practitioner of the technology arts. He is a contributing editor at Fuse <fusemagazine.org> and Concept Engineer at La Société des arts technologiques (SAT), where he curates Upgrade Montréal <upgrademtl.org>. Since 1993 he has wrought strange art in sound, radio, and net art, performing and intervening with laptop and turntables, renegade sound systems, and interventions of inscription <controltochaos.ca>, <thisistheonlyart.com>. His writings on the philosophy of technology, AfroFuturism and technoculture have been disseminated worldwide.

fyi David Rokeby’s work, also involving generative installations, is covered in Musicworks 87.

Les artistes du XXIe siècle commencent à réaliser l’impact de l’informatisation : avec la numérisation, tout devient data ou information et l’information est interchangeable. Le son et la vision sont aplatis ou nivelés numériquement, offrant un potentiel radical à une esthétique transactive entre la particule et l’onde. Avec ses installations interactives et ses performances en direct, le duo montréalais Skoltz_Kolgen fait figure de pionnier dans l’entrecroisement du sonore et du visuel, menant une négociation fragile, mais puissante entre ce qui est vu et ce qui est entendu. Qu’ils explorent l’espace quantique ou celui de la chair et du corps, ils créent un monde où le jeu des particules apparaît comme une danse sous nos yeux et un frémissement pour les oreilles.

résumé français