ماثيو+بيدرمان

Event Horizon

source: highlike

Work: multichannel HD video, 4.1 audio, custom software, computers 2012 Commissioned for: 1st Biennial of Digital Art, Montreal Presented at: Salle McLaren, Cinematheque Quebecqoise May 3 – June 10, 2012 Kontraste, Krems, AT 2012 Sonic Acts, Amsterdam, NL 2013 Pixxelpoint, Nova Gorica, SI 2013.
Photographer: Matthew Biederman

Statement: “Biederman’s description of the ‘total synthesis’ of sound, image and the perception of the viewer is not hyperbole as the installation really is tightly executed. Event Horizon is a meditation on the digital sublime that can be neatly filed alongside projects like Ryoji Ikeda‘s The Transfinite (2011) and Carsten Nicolai‘s Projections (2012).” – Greg J. Smith. Synopsis The work metaphorically explores the phenomenon of the ‘event horizon’. Understood scientifically, the term refers to the space-time beyond which events cannot affect an observer. The most common situation where this occurs naturally are the edges of a black hole, where beyond the event horizon, no light escapes and can therefore not be observed. Taken metaphorically, the event horizon can be understood as the point of perception itself. Event Horizon reflects on the current discourse around ‘embodied perception’ where the act of perception cannot be separated based on sense (See Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads). We see, hear, and feel with all of our body, simultaneously as we navigate space. Following this line, the idea of the event horizon is the point at which we perceive phenomenon, and we can place ourselves at our own individual event horizons. The architecture itself has it own event horizon, the plane of scrims that not only delimit the space, but also serve as a projection plane that it both solid and porous allowing the projection to be caught and pass through, again reflection a point of contact, or horizon.

Several prominent currents run through the oeuvre of Montreal’s Matthew Biederman – data systems, politics, broadcast media, performance and the promotion of awareness of northern landscapes and cultures. Another interest that is evident across Biederman’s body of work is colour, a fascination that he demonstrates an almost painterly preoccupation with within several of the installations that he’s executed over the last decade. The latest such work is the ominously titled Event Horizon, an immersive, generative AV installation commissioned for the International Digital Arts Biennial (BIAN) in Montreal. Alluding to the unforgiving gravitational pull of a black hole, Event Horizon is an environment for contemplating perception, threshold and inevitability. Viewers entering Salle Norman McLaren within La Cinémathèque Québéquoise encounter an arrangement of fine mesh scrims that divide the space in two and serve as filters that the projection emanating from the back of the room pass through. These generative visuals (created with Quartz Composer) present an ever-evolving, dynamic array of banded colour fields that scroll horizontally at varying speeds. The ‘canvas’ is divided into upper and lower sections with a narrow wildcard zone in the middle that contains more diverse oscillating patterns. The modulating tempo of the colour bands is perfectly accompanied by foreboding Ligeti-like sound design that dissonantly drones along with the polychromatic flicker. An excerpt from Biederman’s artist statement contextualizes some of the technical implications of encountering the work: …I also see it as a hint towards the meeting point of the collapse of the technology supporting the work – namely display technology (in this case the data projector) and human perception. What occurs as we reach the technological horizon, and attempt to display more resolution than is available, is a breakdown of the technology itself, which produces moiré patterns. By forcing the projectors into states that they cannot reproduce – it does the only thing it can do – interpolate, creating an unpredictable pattern that we perceive perceives as a ‘third’ image, one that is seen, but is not seen for what it actually is it is … The same can be said for the audio track – using a multichannel environment (quad speaker arrangement + multiple subwoofers), and synthesizing particular tones – the physical sound waves in space create additional sounds that are only made through their interaction with each other and the physical space of the installation. Biederman’s description of the ‘total synthesis’ of sound, image and the perception of the viewer is not hyperbole as the installation really is tightly executed. Event Horizon is a meditation on the digital sublime that can be neatly filed alongside projects like Ryoji Ikeda‘s The Transfinite (2011) and Carsten Nicolai‘s Projections (2012). It should also be noted that the visual language of the piece is kind of a generative retrofit of the work of colour field painter Gene Davis, who spent decades working with vertical stripes. Davis once defended his longstanding obsession claiming ”for fifteen years they [stripes] have held my attention and, believe me, when the day arrives that they do not hold my attention, I will do something else, but, I’ve only begun to tap the surface.” Event Horizon demonstrates a similar reverence for pure visual language and excises that logic from the canvas and uses it to craft a dynamic, synaesthetic environment.
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source: mbiederman

b. 1972, Chicago Heights, IL, USA

Matthew Biederman has been performing, installing and exhibiting works, which explore themes of perception, media saturation, and data systems from a multiplicity of perspectives since the mid nineties. Biederman was the recipient of the Bay Area Artist Award in Video by New Langton Arts in 1999, First Place in the Visual Arts category of Slovenia’s Break21 festival, and has served as artist-in-residence at the Center for Experimental Television on numerous occasions, as well as receiving support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Counsel des Artes et Lettres du Québec (CALQ). He has served as artist-in-residence at a variety of institutions and institutes, including the Center for Experimental Television on numerous occasions, and continues to be a resident at CMU’s CREATE lab.

He cut his teeth in the past as a co-director of San Francisco’s Artist Television Access, a long standing community media access center and exhibition space in San Francisco. He has consulted for a number of independent, highly recognized new media artists (Lozano-Hemmer, Jim Campbell, Julia Scher, among others) and has served as the Technical Manager of the SFMOMA for several years working to install, conserve, and preserve one of the US’s most extensive media-arts collection.

He has since co-founded the Arctic Perspective Initiative, with Marko Peljhan, in 2007, a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations, whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. While working at the intersection of art, science and community, API also has been included in group exhibitions worldwide, as well as several European solo exhibitions, one of which was named as a ‘Top 10’ of 2010 by ARTFORUM magazine (Arctic Perspectives, HMKV Dortmund).

His works have been exhibited in the US, South America, and Europe, in a variety of festivals and venues such as 7 ATA Festival Internacional (Lima), the 11th Lyon Bienniale, the 2011 Quebec Trienniale (Musee des Arts Contemporain), Bienniale of Digital Art (BIAN, Montreal), Artissima (Turin, IT), TIAF (Toronto CA) and Sonic Acts (NASA, Amsterdam). As a film and video maker, his works have been included in the FILE festival (Sao Paulo), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Paris/Berlin International Meetings, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. His public works have been shown at the ZeroOne2006 Festival (San Jose US), the SCAPE Biennial in New Zealand as well as producing custom commissions. He has collaborated with musicians as a visual artist since 1999, performing at the historic Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, as well as Ars Electronica, AV Festival, Elektra, Mutek and many many more. His works are included in public, corporate and private collections in North America.

Biederman is currently represented by Art45 and lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

My work follows simultaneous, intertwined threads, creating a varied practice when examined traditionally. That is, if looked at it in a compartmentalized fashion, my practice would be situated within tactical media, radio, painting, design, performance, and art and technology. I choose, however, not to be restricted to any one of these mediums, but to, instead, allow for exchange and crossover between them through diverse combinations of engagements of media, place, content, and aim. I believe in the idea of the artist as artisan, the artist as provocateur and the necessity to present (and provoke) a vision of sublime emotion, one possible version of beauty that leads to new understandings and conceptions of the world, its systems, and potentials. In this way, the artist is an inventor, not in a conventional sense, but as one who serves as a beacon illuminating possibilities.
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source: visualmusic

He has been performing, installing and exhibiting works, which explore themes of perception, media saturation, and data systems from a multiplicity of perspectives since the mid nineties.

In his own words, his art
“follows simultaneous, intertwined threads, creating a varied practice when examined traditionally. That is, if looked at it in a compartmentalized fashion, my practice would be situated within tactical media, radio, painting, design, performance, and art and technology. I choose, however, not to be restricted to any one of these mediums, but to, instead, allow for exchange and crossover between them through diverse combinations of engagements of media, place, content, and aim. I believe in the idea of the artist as artisan, the artist as provocateur and the necessity to present (and provoke) a vision of sublime emotion, one possible version of beauty that leads to new understandings and conceptions of the world, its systems, and potentials. In this way, the artist is an inventor, not in a conventional sense, but as one who serves as a beacon illuminating possibilities.”
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source: forumdepariscasablancaround

Alain Thibault est entrepreneur et dirigeant d’entreprise. Il acquiert à Havas le groupe Bernard Julhiet en mars 2004. Son projet : bâtir le leader français du Capital Humain en redonnant ses lettres de noblesse à un groupe qui fût leader de son secteur au début des années 90. Il est membre de Croissance Plus.

Il a participé également en tant que compositeur et concepteur audio, à diverses productions multimédia, vidéographiques, chorégraphiques et théâtrales. Il travaille présentement avec l’artiste numérique Matthew Biederman dont la première version de la performance, Pulse, a été diffusée lors de l’événement Québec Numérique Francofffonies au théâtre du Châtelet à Paris en septembre 2006. Depuis, cette performance a été présentée à Rio de Janeiro, Rome et en Autriche. Il forme également un autre duo nommé PurForm avec l’artiste visuel Yan Breuleux. Ils ont obtenu une mention pour la vidéo-musique a-light au prix Ars Electronica 1998 (Linz, Autriche).