The Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) and Moment Factory have jointly designed technological devices that mark a small revolution in the entertainment industry. Their prototypes, which they will demonstrate on Wednesday at the professional section of the MUTEK festival, aim to produce “hybrid” or “telepresence” concerts, where artists do not necessarily perform in the same room as the audience.
The two organizations also imagine events where spectators could find themselves in several different places while attending the same concert. This would, according to them, respond to financial or environmental constraints. Consider, for example, the launch of an album by an international star who would perform in several cities around the world at the same time.
However, technology does not yet allow for very sophisticated variations of this, particularly due to the instability of current Internet networks. This is one of the reasons why the SAT and Moment Factory will present, in turn, on Wednesday, a demo of an electro music concert in two different rooms of the same complex, the Monument-National. They will then publish an online guide to allow other organizations to draw inspiration from their research.
“Emotional connection”
Concretely, Moment Factory invited DJ Lunice to perform in one of the two rooms, let’s say room A. The concert will however take place simultaneously in rooms A and B. “The problem we are trying to explore is how to create an emotional connection between the artist in space A and the audience in space B,” summarizes Julien Bigeault, innovation producer at Moment Factory.
“We definitely didn’t want to present a simple live broadcast, on a screen, in the other room,” he explains. Thus, sensors and cameras will be installed around the artist so that, in room B, “he is materialized in different forms, in lights and particles.” In return, cameras will film the audience in room B so that the artist, known for his interactions with his audience, can see the spectators on his side and react as if he were with them.
For its part, the SAT will present a demo where artists Myriam Boucher and Simon Chioini, each in a different room, will contribute to the same interconnected concert. “We want to be able to send audio and video streams from one space to another while creating an organic experience,” says Manuel Bolduc, researcher-developer.
The SAT prototype is deployed “with different levels of interactions,” he explains. “We first create a kind of improvisation session, where the two artists work at the same time, on the same software. And we have a whole system of connected objects in the two rooms, with which the public can interact to send audio, video and light signals from one side to the other,” thus reinforcing the public’s contribution to the experience.
“The choice of artists largely inspired our approach,” explains Alexandra Marin, manager of research and development services at the SAT. “Myriam is a professor at the Faculty of Music at the Université de Montréal, and Simon, one of her doctoral students in digital music, founded the label Humidex. They join our mission of creating tools to serve researchers and artists here.
“Increase the experience”
It was the Society for Arts and Technology that launched the project and invited Moment Factory to join. “Most studios don’t have the resources to do research like we do,” says Alexandra Marin. “So we see ourselves as a testing ground for ‘prototyping’ ideas. And Moment Factory, a large studio with an innovation office, better embodies the practical outcomes of our approach.”
Julien Bigeault believes that the technologies they are developing here could be of interest to their current clients: “In addition to artist tours, we already work with amusement parks that offer shows. These controlled environments are ideal for presenting the same concert in several locations, for example between their different restaurants, bars and hotels.”
And beyond its own activities, Moment Factory observes “a general trend in the industry, driven by economic and environmental concerns, to move toward this type of technology,” says Anne-Célia Waddell, innovation project coordinator at the Montreal studio.
For her part, Alexandra Marin believes that “events that create such a feeling of co-presence can allow distant audiences to come together, to feel close to each other around the same experience or an artist they admire.” “It also promises great progress in terms of accessibility to culture in remote regions,” she adds.
Manuel Bolduc, who has wondered about the future of the entertainment industry over the course of his experiments, refers to the “NFL football games” he watches on television. “On TV, the camera angles, the pace of the editing and the sound ambiance together create the best possible experience, whereas in the stadium, the vision is often limited. So we could augment the on-site experience with technology, without replacing it completely.”
The event SYMPOSIUM iX | Connected Spaces: Exploring the Future of Collaborative Performance (Demo) is presented Wednesday afternoon at the Monument-National.