For its 5th edition, the art and technology based festival, Sight & Sound, presents more than 30 local and international artists, 11 performances, 8 installations, 7 workshops, and 2 conferences at New Media Production & Exhibition Centre, Eastern Bloc. This edition of the festival is all the more unique because it is an occasion to celebrate Eastern Bloc’s fifth anniversary, five years in which more than 500 artists’ work have been presented at the centre.
Sight & Sound offers its audience the opportunity to live an intimate and unprecedented experience through a process-driven approach, critical of the fields of art and technology. This year, the festival proposes as its theme the “black market,” with a unique program of performances and installations, most of which are produced specially for the festival or presented as a North American or world premiere.
Artists and collectives featured in this year’s festival:
Jean-Baptiste Bayle (FR/PT), Steve Bates (CA), Jackson 2Bears (CA), Area C (US), Jennifer Chan (CA/US), Vincent Chevalier (CA), Paolo Cirio (IT/US), Melissa F. Clarke (US), Mario de Vega (DE/MX), Heather Dewey-Hagborg (US), Thomas Dexter (US), Bill Doran (IE/CA)
Constant Dullaart (NL), Future Archaeology (US), Émilie Gervais (CA/FR), Arthur Heist (DK), Garnet Hertz (CA/US), Ted Hiebert (CA), Brendan Howell (US/DE), Ellie Irons (US), Doug Jarvis (CA), Ryan Jordan (UK), Michelle Lacombe (CA), R. Lyon (US), Nicolas Maigret (FR), Victor Mazón Gardoqui (ES/DE), Joseph Moore (US), Noxious Sector Arts Collective (CA), Dan Phiffer (US), Matthew Radune (US), Tasman Richardson (CA), Nat Roe (US), Erin Sexton (CA)
For the full schedule: http://sightandsoundfestival.ca/
Theme: Black Market
Under the heading “Black Market,” this edition of Sight & Sound seeks to explore the rhizomatic and permeating structures of society’s concealed systems. We ask ourselves how we can demystify the black market and its perceived impenetrability. Whether we can actually succeed in unpacking the mechanisms embedded within global – and localized – clandestine networks. In today’s connected world, does the black market retain its (seemingly) dark aura?
We aim to shed light on these concerns through a carefully curated program of performances, installations, conferences, workshops, as well as on and offline interventions. In doing so, we have chosen to adopt a deconstructive process and applied it to the digital domain, exposing the mechanisms, both visible and invisible, which co-exist and are maintained by dominant economic and political power structures.
The festival:
Sight & Sound is an annual festival that brings together Canadian and international New Media artists. It displays the work of sound and video artists alongside other contemporary methods of digital production, with a focus on audiovisual performance, audiovisual installations and interactive practices. The thirty participating artists and theorists are representative of a new generation of practitioners in digital art.
This fifth edition of Sight & Sound promises to deliver our most exciting and extensive program of work that is not only stunning and engaging on an aesthetic level, but also critical of contemporary digital culture and decisive of our technological future.
Eastern Bloc is 5 years old !
This year, Eastern Bloc celebrates its fifth anniversary during Sight & Sound. Since its establishment, the organisation has presented the work of over 500 emerging and established artists. The centre has encouraged our Quebec-based audience to discover the work of internationally recognized digital artists and has offered innumerable local emerging artists fantastic opportunities to advance their artistic careers. Eastern Bloc is also a unique space that has an important history to contribute to Montreal’s cultural landscape and its industrial heritage. The centre’s building was built in the early 20th century for textile manufacturing, an industry which has now almost disappeared from our local milieu. Over the course of its 5 and half year history, Eastern Bloc has given itself the mandate to re-invest this industrial space with an entirely new life and purpose, all the while conserving its architectural value. Eastern Bloc has therefore been contributing for the past five years to local development as well as to the preservation of Montreal’s industrial heritage and post-industrial future through its innovative cultural and artistic programming.
