PN & Chromatic: Collectif Blackbox

Starting May 20, Collectif Blackbox is presenting its interactive installation Mémoire Collective at Festival Chromatic, which runs until Sunday, May 22 at Hangar 16 in the Old Port of Montréal. The team is made up of six members: Mathilde Joanny, Jean-Claude Macena, Xavier Tremblay, Mathieu Désilets, Salim Lounis and Alexandre Lustigman. I met Mathieu and Xavier tolearn

more about

Mémoire Collective. The installation’s aesthetic takes the theme of memory and builds it at full scale. The team creates many small and large fragments, a little like memory itself, which is fallible and missing pieces. Each fragment is connected to the others with small

aesthetic. The idea emerged during a

major brainstorming session.Salim proposed using memory as the basis for an installation, and everyone immediately liked it. The work is called Mémoire Collective because the team wants to use the memory

of the festival. The group

did not encounter major technical problems, but had many questions about the development of the screen. A first prototype involved making holes in a wall, but it was not feasible on a large scale. They therefore turned toward designing wooden pieces to create each part

of the screen. Chromatic

appealed to them because the festival is very present on social networks and does a great deal of promotion. Its call-for-projects process is simple: artists do not need to show the installation to submit a proposal, only to conceptualize

it. The visibility offered by

Chromatic is also very interesting. Behind the work, the team uses a Kinect for motion detection, TouchDesigner for

visuals and Max/MSP for sound creation. The visual and sound atmosphere is unusual and very effective. Viewers do not expect this type of atmosphere and are immediately carried into another world.