Fragments: Poetics of Otherness

They present: Marc-Andre Cossette / Alexandre Saunier

Tuesday, May 25th 19:50 pm

Fragments: Poetics of Otherness is an audiovisual performance for human interpreters and autonomous computer processes that together generate a poetic experience. The work reflects on how Artificial Intelligence data processing systems anonymize and aestheticize human conflicts.
The 20-minute long performance creates an immersive journey guided by the alien behavior of computer-based forms of artificial intelligence. As they communicate with each other autonomously and self-organize, a set of Markov chains, spiking neural networks, machine learning, and optical flow modulate audio and video content curated by human performers.

In tandem, humans and algorithms collaborate to reveal the poetics that lie at the intersection of the social and the technological. As Poetics of Otherness unfolds, small bits of media are transformed and reconfigured to explore the aesthetics of algorithmic behavior and how humans can make sense of it in an increasingly AI-driven world. With this performance, ALMA invites the public to witness the poetics that emerge from a human-machine dance in real time.

Fragments is a series of ongoing audiovisual works that bring together multiple Montreal-based but nationally diverse collaborators in the fields of generative music, lighting design, audiovisual production, graphic design, and research-creation. Together they explore the complex feelings of living in a world driven by algorithms, of living far from their home countries, of meeting and sharing across cultural differences, and of maintaining social lives at a distance and across borders. As part of this series, Poetics of Otherness is an original creation directed by Alexandre Saunier and Marc-André Cossette as the duo ALMA.

Born and developed remotely in endless online traffic jams isolated in front of computer screens, ALMA (Alexandre Saunier & Marc-André Cossette) mixes cutting-edge AI and A-Life algorithms with drum machines, analog and virtual synthesizers, photogrammetry, procedural graphics and game engines.

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