Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie will be hosting Nous sommes les fils et les filles de l’électricité (NSFFDE: We Are the Progeny of Electricity) on Friday, August 26, 2022, for two performances – one at 8 p.m. and the other at 9:30 p.m. – at Quai des arts in Carleton-sur-Mer. This radical interdisciplinary proposal combining performance, participative live show and digital arts is a creation of the collective Projet EVA.
Members of the audience are invited to take part in this singular experience, where, in a space plunged into darkness, their faces are lit by a set of pico-projectors. Each person’s head is “cut off” from his or her body and placed in such a way that the gaze of each person is focused on the other participant, seated directly opposite. In this environment, the faces of the spectator-participants are illuminated and modified by video projections. Behavioral instructions are transmitted to them through headsets, in order to allow the development of a narrative in which they become the members of this fictitious community. Playing their own role, the audience members will explore themes of personal and cultural identity, collective and political becoming through the filter of power dynamics.
Through an aesthetic and a technological deployment evoking the experiments of mental manipulation under psychotropic drugs set up by the CIA in the 1950s, NSFFDE involves its audience in a disconcerting staging in order to reprogram it.
Performances are free, but participants must reserve online (the seats are limited):
For a glimpse of NSFFDE:
About Projet EVA
The collective Projet EVA was born out of a desire to create critical, experimental and transgressive works. These explore relations established between humans, their environment and its mediation through technological systems. The collective focuses mainly on the subtractive effects of technology and media on human experience, as well as on how the virtual world is increasingly woven into the urban and social landscape, encroaching on physical reality. Underneath the collective’s custom-made applications, robots and assorted machines lies an inquiry into technology’s impact on the construction of our social and psychological realities as well as our living environment.
Formed by Etienne Grenier and Simon Laroche, Projet EVA is a collective that has been producing and disseminating digital artworks around the world since 2003. The installations and performances produced by the duo stand out through the reversal of paradigms common in the techno-cultural milieu and question the proximity that is often observed between the sphere of entertainment and that of digital art.
This project is made possible by the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Sporobole, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Information: projet-eva.org.
Credit (top image): Gridspace