| Elektra, a digital arts festival held in Montreal, is the largest event of its genre in North America. Over the course of its seven editions, it has built a reputation as one of the international leaders in the diffusion of works that combine cutting-edge music and visual creation in a technological perspective. |  |
Sounds Sight and an Unlimited Horizon – Curator Alain Thibault
Elektra, a digital arts festival held in Montreal, is the largest event of its genre in North America. Over the course of its seven editions, it has built a reputation as one of the international leaders in the diffusion of works that combine cutting-edge music and visual creation in a technological perspective. This counter-culture festival stands out first and foremost because of the type of experience it promises its audiences every year.
Elektra was born in 1999, at the heart of an era marked with the growth of multimedia and its ever-increasing incursion into artistic creation in all of its forms. By way of the digital arts, many artists injected their works with elements from other disciplines. As proof, more and more electronic music composers associated a visual medium to their musical practice. It was in this cross-disciplinary profusion that Elektra came to life, making it a point of honour to present works stemming from this emerging trend. The creation of the event is the result of a basic observation. Few or no organizations had the mission or technical expertise to broadcast hybrid technology-based works. Elektra therefore became a unifying event, focusing its programming on works at the leading edge of technology which combined electronic music and other fields such as visual arts, video, film, dance, performances and installations. The distinctive feature of the event is sound, always treated as a priority inversely to many other festivals where image prevails. Artists the likes of internationally renowned choreographer Marie Chouinard and electro acoustical composer Jean Piché found in Elektra a tribune for their works where they could conjugate their usual practice and the media arts. Today, Elektra remains a unique opportunity to see works seldom presented in Montreal, among them a series of video music pieces for three screens which, in a sense, have become the signature pieces of the event.
Elektra has always refused to restrict its field of action to a specific aesthetic or style. The gathering aims to demonstrate an original and ambitious vision of how sound and image relate. Works of scale does not scare our team. For instance, we have never hesitated to present works for 12 screens or daunting robotic installations, presentations on a 50 foot screen, multi-channel sound system and HD projection. The whole point of Elektra is to spread works of digital art under optimum conditions that create an environment favourable to the just appreciation of the works. Alain Thibault, Art Director of the event, is inflexible in terms of production quality. As a composer, he is committed to presenting the selected pieces in the most favourable context possible. This is why he calls on a sensitive and competent production team. As well, Usine C, the location where most events are presented, is a recent and modular venue that provides for hosting ambitious works. In terms of production quality, Elektra has in fact built a solid reputation on the international scene. The artist comes out a winner since the spectator can truly appreciate the work at its full extent of scale.
The Festival is rooted in having its audiences experience unusual events. For instance, during the presentation of Modell 5 by Granular Synthesis in 2000, the sound levels were so powerful that the walls trembled, literally. The spectator not only heard but also physically experienced the sound waves. On the occasion of this 7th edition, many intense audiovisual experiences are on the menu. Among them, LSP, Laser Sound Performance, by Edwin van der Heide which combines laser projections on a screen of smoke and sound compositions. The sound sculpts the shape of the lasers and the bi-dimensional character of the image dampers sound spatial perception thereby generating a captivating global experience. Flüux:/Terminal by Montreal duo Skoltz and Kolgen, which proposes an extreme dialogue between image and sound with a powerful performance for two screens.
Elektra’s mission, to show all possible links between image and sound, is simple. The event has a very broad perspective and continuously adapts to current trends. For example, for the past two years, interactive works of art have been added to the program. As a result, in 2005, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer presented his installation, Frequency and Volume, where the body became an antenna of sorts capturing various radio and television frequencies. This year, the Netherlands duo made up of Marnix de Nijs and Edwin van der Heide will present Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h), where a speaker mounted on a robotic arm reacts to the presence of visitors by emitting a vast range of sounds and impressive effects, especially when the traffic in the room has it reach a 100-km/h rotation speed.
In the same spirit, Elektra focuses on the underground culture to extract some of its artistic expressions. For instance, VJing at Elektra is not a means of creating a vibe, but presents instead an outstanding aesthetic and conceptual quality inseparable from the music. The Festival’s team also keeps up to date with current trends in design. This interest reflected in 1024, design in motion, where designers present their work in terms of research and creative processes. This activity is designed to serve as a meeting ground between media design and media art, as the frontiers between these two forms of expression are blurring more each day. Professionals are invited to present their experimental, often never-before-seen pieces and to explain their creative process. This year, the architects and urban planners of Brussels collective LAb[au] will present their own way of exploring space in digital arts projects such as Man in e.Space, presented as the opening piece of the Festival. In addition, famed French illustrator Geneviève Gauckler will provide details on her artistic achievements and her contribution to Pleix, a creative collective lauded for their flavourful video concepts. This activity is a forum for fascinating meetings. For instance, last year, when Kevin Tod Haug and Richard Dr. Baily, two pioneers in visual effects for film, came to present their work, demystifying a step of cinematographic creation rarely unveiled to the public.
The event also lends to artists more famous in popular circles to present their artistic experimentations. This was the case of collective UVA which, in 2005, offered an astonishing audiovisual performance using artistic techniques they had developed over the years while designing artwork for icons of the music industry such as Massive Attack, Basement Jaxx, Oasis and more recently U2. In 2006, it is up to The Light Surgeons, recognized for their work with the Herbaliser, Amon Tobin, Propellerheads and Morcheeba to name only a few, to imprint the audiences with their rich visual universe with their performance, The Z-Axis, which proposes a new vision of cinematographic remixing while combining lo-fi techniques with more recent technologies.
Overall, Elektra offers a host of often intense digital arts experiences, which rarely leave audiences indifferent. At times festive and at others intellectual, this gathering expands the perception of electronic music and the digital arts for six days of forays in creation as it exists today.
