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On Air - 2025
Michael Montanaro | Peter van Haaften | Garnet Willis The audience speaks into the bells of two French horns. Sound is inhaled into an alchemical apparatus. The collected voices become chaotically entangled within the tensile confines of an expanding latex balloon. Trapped inside the captured aether words collide, fragment, and recombine, modulating their contextual and phonetic arrangement. A soundscape of ricocheting voices is perceived, emerging from deep inside the balloon. Over time, the pressure becomes too great and like a sonic capacitor, sound is freed from its reservoir. The valves open. Airborne voices are forced through a series of reflective steel cornets towards an elastic membrane where mechanically induced friction compels the collected voices to incandesce. Behind the pulsating membrane, an iris opens, slowly releasing the luminous voices towards a series of glass lenses and mirrors. From here follows a five-part choral harmony of mirrors that builds into a final cacophonous performance of voice, rhythm and light. credits |
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AQUAPHONEIA - 2016
Michael Montanaro | Navid Navab Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter.A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.In one corner, voices bubbling inside a sphere of fire are brought to entropy and transmuted into a timeless concentration of spectral mist and phonetic vapour. An ouroboros chamber twists fermented vowels into distilled consonants to release a thin blade of prosody. This viscous alchemical matter lowers itself to the terra beneath where matter dances to its own affective tonality. Another module separates speech into vital elements a drop at a time: words into phonemes, into phono particles, and the invisible quanta of silence. exhibitions | credits |
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Einstein's Dreams - Blackbox Experiments in Time Conditioning - 2013
Montanaro | Navid Navab | Jerome Delapierre | Sha Xin Wei Einstein's Dream proposes to build time conditioning installations & techniques that create palpable alternatives to the everyday time that’s governed by calendars, universal clocks, and Internet services that never sleep. We’ll do this by building physical zones in which objects and fields of lighting, sound, and video change in concert with the inhabitants’ movement to create powerfully alternative senses of time, rhythm and pattern. We will thus develop a new architecture of kinetic material and digital media in which time becomes an elastic medium of expression, learning, and invention - a new art of time for the 21c. The floor of the space was covered with 13 metric tons of sand in order to provide an organic surface with which the body could interact. The ability to play with the material that one walks on and the ability to change the spaces architecture by moulding the sand provided a unique opportunity to interact with reality and its technologically augmented cousin at the same time. credits |
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Les Persiennes Et Les Sortilèges - 2013
responsive membrane / public intervention Goethe Institute: Nuit Blanche Michael Montanaro | Navid Navab | Jerome Delapierre Someone's behind those Venetian blinds. A finger slips over an edge and pulls them down. Two fingers, four. A pair of lips mouth your name. Then eyes appear from a darkened room, seeking to connect with those on the other side. Who is it? And how does he or she know you, standing at the window, if she's only a ghost of a ghost. A seductive, beguiling interactive work veiling and unveiling perceptions. Who is the seer, and who or what the seen? Come to the Goethe Institute / La Nuit blanche, when *Alkemie animates the windows with responsive video-performers haunting video-persiennes. Goethe Institute - Suite 100 1626 Boulevard Saint-Laurent Montréal, QC credits |
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Shadow Play
collaboration with "mere phantoms- October 2012 Maya Ersan | Jamie Robson | Michael Montanaro Navid Navab | Jerome Delapierre A two week workshop combining projection, shadow puppetry and animation techniques. "mere phantom" is a Montreal-based collaborative studio that uses light and motion to create spaces and experiences with ambiance, allure, spectacle and intimacy. Exploring the ephemeral qualities of time based media, the studio produces innovative installations, projects and workshops that employ a range of projection, shadow puppetry and animation techniques. credits |
Initial design of staging and installation
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Photos of Game Play
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The Project
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Alexander Wang - Fashion Night out - 2011 New York - Alkemie - Interactive Installation The three windows of the store were covered with framed screens of layered white and black projection material. A small camera was mounted on the centre screen focused on the activity outside. Three 20K lumen projectors were mounted on pillars inside the store and focused onto the screens in the windows. As people moved outside, their movement would created openings in the screen revealing electronically altered images of what was happening inside the store or time shifted reflections of themselves. credits |
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WunderKammer in process - prototype under construction - 2010 The installation stands about 60 x 150 x 45 centimeters high, about the size of an old steamer trunk. It refracts the geometries and materials of the age of iron and crystal, and combines the mechanical tropes of Victorian science, 19c theatre techniques (such as Pepper’s Ghost superposition) with 21c live computational video and sound processing. Upon approach, you see a miniature stage in an ornate box made of crystal, wood, and metal. You see yourself projected inside the WunderKammer stage, a mixture of real and projected objects, present people and historical personages, material and immaterial textures, all in concerted movement. Unlike its mechanical forebears, the action in this responsive time crucible changes according to a specific composition as well as the contingent movement of the visitors. It is a particular kind of time machine that travels from place to place, carrying doppelgangers, imprints, palimpsests, and ghosts of the people it meets. The WunderKammer is designed to serve as an apparatus within which we can explore some of the same themes of multiple senses of time, elastic and poetic modulations of people’s senses of rhythm, repetition, and corporeal memory, integrating five years of the Topological Media Lab’s media techniques and theatrical methods in the format of a miniature portable theatre. credits
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