Sight + Sound 12th edition

Since 2009, SIGHT+SOUND International Digital Art Festival seeks out the best, most provocative and outstanding works of digital art currently being made by international and local emerging artists. The festival has become a point of convergence for artists, activists, theorists, and technologists. It embraces the fringe of contemporary digital art and culture through installations, performances, workshops, interventions, and discussions. SIGHT+SOUND is seeing the unseen and hearing the unheard. It’s experiencing the indescribable. It is where contemporary digital art meets its critical agenda. It’s a festival that invites the possibility of social change through art, music, and all-night dancing.

Exhibition Open Hours at Eastern Bloc Gallery - Thursday to Sunday - 12pm-7pm - Oct. 26-Nov.12

Dancing While Waiting (For the End of the World)

Bringing together works that play on a duality between festive and critical dimensions—whether they be performances, installations, augmented reality, sound or video works, Dancing While Waiting (For the End of the World) assembles explorations of reappropriating the social space that has been undermined over the past two years. While the hazards of our world and its occasional catastrophes can weaken what we take for granted, we can nevertheless take a step back, then another, review the sequence and reshape the movement, rethink the choreography that is ours: to dance again, together–to existence–and participate in the movement of the world.

This movement is presented as the passage of time with no coming back, through which new perspectives, and the hope for the emergence of a hybrid, transformed humanity arise; it is a back and forth from utopias to dystopias, anxiety about the current state of the world. This movement is also linked to our omniconnection, to our relationship to interfaces—our new mirrors, and to our dependence on the power structures that govern them. Sometimes, it takes the shape of loneliness, trapped in a (too) familiar environment, waiting for the end of the world, or else, a vacant space left to itself when we are no longer there.

The proposed program exacerbates a tension between a “before” characterized by a carefree attitude of which we were unaware and a “future” that may or may not live up to the name. It is this duality that is summoned here: behind the newly found festivity and the proximity that we have missed so much, there is the danger of denial, of dismissing pervasive critical issues may they be ecological, social, or political.

Curators:

Nathalie Bachand Sarah Ève Tousignant

Artists

Program

Credits

Alicia Turgeon - General Direction
Charles Harding - Project Manager & Administrative Coordinator
Malte Leander - Programming Coordination
Yannick Bédard - Lab Coordination
Camille Desjardins - Technical Coordination
Maria Bento - Sustainability and Cultural Logistics
Maia Harris - Communications Coordination

Michael Zajner - Content Creation
Robin Goodine - Administrative Assistant & Gallery Attendant
Philippe Fortier - Translator

Sarah Ève Tousignant & Nathalie Bachand - Curators
Rodrigo Ramírez Velasco - Graphic Identity
World Creation Network - Web Development

Partners