Radiabolus: Notes on The Melodic Violence of Recruitment

[En anglais]

The large room of the Agora Hydro-Québec du Cœur des sciences de l’UQAM is dark, any semblance of natural light vanquished by the long heavy black curtains that wrap around the insides of the cavernous space. Opening the door feels as though one has stepped from the overly lit mundanity of everyday life into the hallucinatory DIY dystopia of a Shane Carruth film set.1 1  - Shane Carruth is the director of the celebrated 2004 science-fiction film Primer and 2013’s Upstream Color.   Half-recognizable sounds and images providing just enough sensory balance for the listener/viewer to experience the transferral from signal back to noise.2 2  - The sonic narrative of Upstream Color is strongly influenced by Michel Serres’ The Parasite (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), which partly concerns the implication of unavoidable noise within any communicative act between two or more parties.   Extending the parasitic metaphor, it feels as though the building we stand in — an academic architecture dedicated to the phenomenological pursuits of science — has been infected by the sonic fiction of Saucier & Heys’ new robotic installation Radiabolus. 

As our eyes slowly adjust to the shadowy logic of the scientifically fictive environment — appropriately situated in this vaguely dissonant outpost of Montréal’s second edition of the International Digital Arts Biennial entitled PHYSICAL/ITɳ 3 - The Biennial (BIAN), which occurred between May 1 and June 19, 2014 included the work of over forty-nine artists across thirty-one venues in Montréal. More information can be found at http://bianmontreal.ca (accessed October 4, 2014).  — it is the ears that start trying to make sense of the vocalized numbers being reflected around the room. They are not enveloping us though, as is the norm when frequencies are sent spilling from stereo speakers. With the visual coordinates of the work simultaneously anchored and scrambled by the robotic objects outlying the centralized temporary architecture, the audible mapping that occurs is also initially confusing given that the voice is beamed in straight Euclidean lines, a delineation of space that we more regularly associate with the gaze. Ultimately though, as in Saucier & Heys’ other large-scale installations produced over the past decade⁴ 4 - Saucier and Heys (previously known as The KIT Collaboration and Robert Saucier) are most readily identified with their two major sound installation projects, Infrasense and Virutorium, both of which developed narratives around the convergence of embodied and technological viruses. For more information, see the joint catalogue Infrasense/Virutorium: Viral Projects by The KIT Collaboration and Robert Saucier (Manchester: Thirdsound Press, 2010). For online documentation of Infrasense and Virutorium see https://eavm.uqam.ca/saucier-robert.html http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/theys/gallery  it is the disembodied utterance that will entice and disorient, and in the process chronicle a distorted history.