Myriam Boucher^CA/QC

Credit: Pierre Luc Lecours

Sound and image composer, and professor in digital/audiovisual music composition at the Université de Montréal (CA), Myriam Boucher merges the organic and the synthetic in her mesmerizing videomusic installations, immersive projects and audiovisual performances. Her sensitive and polymorphic work explores the intimate dialogue between music, sound and image, transforming everyday landscapes into fantastical, living phenomena. Elements in her skin-tingling pieces can move in synchronization with waves of sound, and very fluidly shift from solid to liquid, fragment to flood, plastic to plasmic. Her research in videomusic composition proposes a classification of image/sound relationships as a building block towards an eventual grammar of the genre. Boucher approaches video much in the same way as she did music composition, through a visual interface that sees her fleshing out digital timelines.

Her commission list is varied and distinguished and includes the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM), Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), Ars Nova, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM), Magnitude6, Collectif9, 5ilience and Architek Percussion. As VJ, she performed with many artists/DJ such as Mind Against (IT), Medasin (US), Deadboy (GB), POLE (GE), Ayesha (US), Automatisme (CA), Equiknoxx (JM) and DJ Lag (ZA). Her work has been presented at many international events and places, including Mutek (CA, AE, ES, JP, MX), Kontakte (DE), Igloofest (CA), Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (CA), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (FR), and Akousma (CA). Her research work is published by Routledge (UK).

Her research-creation activities integrate musical composition, improvisation, deep listening, sound ecology, site-specific creation and immersive experiences. Her research aims to understand and analyze the mechanisms of perception in audiovisual works and multidisciplinary concerts integrating sound, music, image, and performers, with the perspective that art is a practice capable of transforming reality and generating new forms of sensitive representations.

Myriam Boucher ^CA/QC — LITTORAL

LITTORAL is an audiovisual performance combining sculptural objects, sound and light. LITTORAL explores concepts concerned with rising sea levels by incorporating scientific data around coastal erosion, thermal expansion, sediment compaction, and the accelerating effects of climate change. Fusing the virtual and the real; the physical and the imaginary, they perform live with objects, field recordings, lights, lenses and water, to explore the refraction of sound and light integrated with digital abstractions and manipulations. This audiovisual piece seeks to explore boundaries and edges by inhabiting the spaces in between.