Premiere exhibition of a new installation by internationally-recognized sound artists:
[The User]
Exhibition Dates September 12 – October 23, 2008
PAVED Arts presents: Coincidence Engines –an exhibition of new sound installation artwork commissioned from Montreal-based collective [The User]. Recognized around the world for their ground-breaking combinations of media, art and technology, [The User] have created a major new project that will re-open PAVED Arts’ renovated facilities in Saskatoon.
In the Main Gallery and Media Gallery:
Coincidence Engines is a series of sound installations conceived in homage to the Poème Symphonique of 20th Century Hungarian composer György Ligeti. Ligeti used metronomes not simply to keep musical time, but as a means for creating new forms of sonic expression. Extending and developing this approach, Coincidence Engines employs time-keeping devices to explore themes of regimentation, multiplicity, (im)perfection and entropy.
Coincidence Engines reinterprets the clock as a machine which has the capacity to transcend its workaday function of keeping time. The exhibition treats the seemingly mundane event of a clock’s tick as a building block for the construction of rich and complex acoustic structures, which are presented in an art gallery setting. Massed clock ticks, both freely drifting and rigorously synchronized, fill a series of environments that focus, stimulate and challenge the visitor’s visual and auditory perception. Coincidence Engines opens a space where the passage of time can be considered as both an abstract concept and as a sensuous, aesthetic experience.
[The User] is a contemporary art collective comprised of composer and sound artist Emmanuel Madan, and architect and installation artist Thomas McIntosh. This Canadian duo has attained worldwide recognition for their innovative projects Silophone and Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers, which re-imagine relationships between technological systems, culture and human experience in striking ways.
Coincidence Engines project web site:www.coincidence-engines.net
This web site contains detailed information about the project, and is updated with audio-visual documentation, press kits and other resources.
The creation of Coincidence Engines is supported by a significant investment from the Canada Council for the Arts’ Media Arts Commissioning Program, and by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
