Myriam Boucher (Canadá) - Presentation of an environment-oriented audiovisual approach

Descripción | Abstract

Nature has always represented an invaluable material world with which and within which human beings have a complex relationship. Throughout the ages, composers have sought to imitate, reproduce and represent nature, often choosing a realistic or idealistic expression of their models. They have also sought to get closer to it and to relate to it, by making nature the metaphor of their feelings and emotions. Today, climate change puts us in a completely different position, inviting us, as artists, to redefine our relationship with a world we used to take for granted. The aim here is to present an audiovisual practice in which the capture of matter from the natural environment is at the heart of the creative process. Because to capture is to observe, to listen, to feel the world which surrounds us. It is especially to keep in memory the physical and aesthetic experience that we make of it.

Myriam Boucher

Inspired by natural phenomena, 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. A keyboardist turned visual artist working on the real-time dialogue between music and images, Boucher initially gravitated towards classical piano, jazz and then post-rock, before learning about, and then academically pursuing electroacoustics. 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 and Architek Percussion. As VJ, she performed with many artists/DJ such as Mind Against (IT), Medasin (US), Deadboy (GB), The Zenker Brothers (GE), Nina Las Vegas (AU), Automatisme (CA), Equiknoxx (JM) and DJ Lag (ZA). Her work has won prizes in the 2015 and 2016 (first prize) JTTP awards, the LUFF 2017 (best experimental short-movie award), the 2015 JIM Electroacoustic Compositions Competition and the Bourse Euterke 2015, and has been presented at many international events and places, including Mutek (CA, AE), Kontakte (DE), Igloofest (CA), Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois (CA), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (FR), and Akousma (CA). Involved in her community, she has participated in numerous juries and has been a member of the CEC’s board of directors since 2017, the CA / CART of Code d’accès (2017-19), and has directed several artistic events including the first videomusic festival in Montreal (2015). She is President of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community since 2019. She is adjoint professor in composition and digital music at the Faculté de musique of Université de Montréal.