-And-

(2021)

You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, part 2 – And

12-hour online event organized by Christof Migone.

LINK TO YOUTUBE LIVESTREAM HERE.

The second in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from noon to midnight EST (9-9 PST, 11-11 CST, 17-05 GMT, 18-06 CET, 1-13 CST, 2-14 KST).

Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase you and I are water earth fire air of life and death and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.

This year the word is ‘and’, consequently the focus is on repetitions, conjunctions, and duos. Last year it started with ‘you’, this year we connect you to anything and everything, we connect you to what you are together-with. Or, we get stuck in the very act that ‘and’ opens up, into the enormity that the so-what-next that ‘and’ implies.

‘And’ is all possibilities in a nutshell. A secular litany that follows pi into infinity.

LINEUP

-AND- HOUR 1 (12 EST)
Fado (Toronto) PRESENTS Erika DeFreitas (Toronto) and Adrian Piper (Berlin)

-AND- HOUR 2 (13 EST)
Radius (Chicago) PRESENTS Anna Friz (Santa Cruz) and Jeff Kolar (Chicago)

-AND- HOUR 3 (14 EST)
Zone Sound Creative (Taipei) PRESENTS Po-Hao Chi (Taipei)

-AND- HOUR 4 (15 EST)
Resonance Extra (London UK) PRESENTS James Greer & Neil Luck, Merlin Nova, and Milo Thesiger-Meacham

-AND- HOUR 5 (16 EST)
LOOP (Seoul) PRESENTS Byungjun Kwon (Seoul)

-AND- HOUR 6 (17 EST)
CRiSAP (London UK) PRESENTS They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it (Anna Barham & Irene Revell) (London UK)

-AND- HOUR 7 (18 EST)
squint press (Québec/Toronto) PRESENTS Different From The One You Are In Now with: Mary Walling Blackburn, Allison Cameron, Barbara Campbell, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Darren Copeland, Renato Grieco, Michaela Grill, Sarah Hennies, Marla Hlady, Seth Kim-Cohen, Francisco Meirino, Salomé Voegelin.

-AND- HOUR 8 (19 EST)
Array (Toronto) PRESENTS Renée Lear (Toronto) and Christof Migone (Toronto)

-AND- HOUR 9 (20 EST)
Western University (London ON) PRESENTS Ellen Moffat (London ON) and Eeva Siivonen (London ON)

-AND- HOUR 10 (21 EST)
Avatar (Québec) PRESENTS Béchard Hudon (Montréal)

-AND- HOUR 11 (22 EST)
Wave Farm (New York) PRESENTS LoVid (New York)

-AND- HOUR 12 (23 EST)
Errant Bodies Press (Berlin) PRESENTS undo (Christof Migone (Toronto)  & Alexandre St-Onge (Québec))

LINKS

– Link to main info page on the 12-year project here.

– Link to project site here.

– Link to project page for the 2021 edition here.

ALL EDITIONS

YOU
1st edition, December 12, 2020
– Link to archive of YouTube livestream here.

AND
2nd edition, December 12, 2021
– Link to archive of YouTube livestream here.

I
3rd edition, December 12, 2022
– Link to archive of YouTube livestream here.

ARE
4th edition, December 12, 2023
– Link to archive of YouTube livestream here.

WATER
5th edition, December 12, 2024

 

Thanks to: Jennifer Martin and Sam Wagter (graphic design), David Schotzko and Dan Tapper (Arraymusic), Myriam Lambert (Avatar), Milo Thesiger-Meacham and James Dunn (Resonance Extra), Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe (Wave Farm), Shannon Cochrane (Fado), Jeff Kolar (Radius), Ji Yoon Yang (LOOP), Brandon LaBelle (Errant Bodies).


PROGRAMME


-AND- HOUR 1 (9 PST, 11 CST, 12 EST, 17 GMT, 18 CET, 1 CST, 2 KST)
Fado (Toronto) PRESENTS Erika DeFreitas (Toronto) and Adrian Piper (Berlin)

Seriation #2: Now (1968) 18:00

Seriation #2a: _and (with thoughts of Adrian Piper) (2021) 38:30

The original Seriation #2: Now consists in 18 minutes of Adrian Piper uttering the word ‘now’, in a measured tone, at shorter and shorter intervals, from one minute to every second. DeFreitas was given permission by Piper to perform the piece for this event. Accompanying the audio are visuals created by DeFreitas to question our presence in the ‘now’.

Seriation #2a: _and (with thoughts of Adrian Piper) is inspired by Piper’s soundwork Seriation #2: Now, DeFreitas creates a score based on Piper’s essay “Passing for White, Passing for Black” by isolating the word ‘and’ on the pages it appears. DeFreitas then performs this score, reciting the word ‘and’ evenly spaced within the timeframe of 1 minute per page.

Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. She is a recipient of the 2016 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award.

Adrian Piper (b. 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She began exhibiting her artwork internationally at the age of twenty, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. While continuing to produce and exhibit her artwork, she received a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. Adrian Piper produces artwork in a variety of traditional and nontraditional media, including photo-text collage, drawing on pre- printed paper, video installation, site-specific sculptural installation, digital imagery, performance and sound works. Piper’s works locate the viewer in a direct, unmediated and indexical relation to the concrete specificity of the object of awareness. They consistently explore the nature of subjecthood and agency, the limits of the self, and the continuities and discontinuities of individual identity in the metaphysical, social and political contexts. In 1968 Piper’s Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds introduced explicit political content into Minimalism. In 1970-73, her Catalysis and Mythic Being series introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. In 2000 her Color Wheel series introduced Vedic philosophical concepts into political art. Her mixed media installation + participatory group performance, The Probable Trust Registry (2013-15), won the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist in the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. From March to July of 2018, her seventh traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016, was hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the largest retrospective ever for a living artist. Her essays in art and art theory, collected in the two-volume Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Essays in Meta-Art and Art Criticism (MIT Press,1996), have remained continuously in print. Since 2005 she has lived and worked in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin.

 


-AND- HOUR 2 (10 PST, 12 CST, 13 EST, 18 GMT, 19 CET, 2 CST, 3 KST)
Radius (Chicago) PRESENTS Anna Friz (Santa Cruz) and Jeff Kolar (Chicago)

The end is pretend

Time does not pass, it accumulates. A series of gestures, repetitions, and refrains; human loops which may not last but do linger.

Anna and Jeff have collaborated together for more than a decade on various musical and radiophonic projects around the world, most often in the form of live improvisatory performances and broadcasts. In early March 2020, we met in Chicago to perform and to record new sound work. That week together was the last before the lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic began, so we were studiobound in that very uneasy moment before the many changes to come. We each created small sonic loops from a very limited palette of instruments or devices, including a radio scanner to pick up local two-way radio frequencies from shortwave to police talk. We are returning to these sonic moments 18 months later, passing them between us over greater distances this time, up to three exchanges of accumulating layers. This is a process of navigating public and personal crises buoyed by our artistic friendship.

A gesture, and a gesture, and a gesture. And another. And an other. And each other.

Anna Friz creates media art, sound works and self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation and performance. Her compositions reflect upon media ecologies, land use and infrastructure (human and extra-human, acoustic and electro-magnetic), time perception, and critical fictions. She is currently Assistant Professor in Film and Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz.

Jeff Kolar is a composer, sound artist, and founder of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work has been exhibited internationally at The Kitchen, Museum of Arts and Design, CTM Festival for Adventurous Music, and reviewed in The New York Times, The Wire Magazine, Red Bull Music Academy.


-AND- HOUR 3 (11 PST, 13 CST, 14 EST, 19 GMT, 20 CET, 3 CST, 4 KST)
Zone Sound Creative (Taipei) PRESENTS Po-Hao Chi (Taipei)

Plantfluencer Gazing

How to build up a symbiotic relationship with evolving entities constituted of information patterns? Is decentralization only an illusion in terms of existing infrastructure? In this project, I dove deep into the fields of the Internet and gathered the most popular hashtags of instagrammable plants through algorithms to explore connectivity and collectivity. With WebVR and sonification programs, I created a multichannel installation that links physical and virtual entities, public and private spaces, digital and analogous experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic has made people more eager to build up the ideal home life when social interactions are constrained, but is there a normalized common for such a spectacle beyond the limits of time and space? We simultaneously see others and ourselves when scrolling down newsfeeds on pervasive screens, which creates an enviable imagined network that emphasizes the concept of “similarity breeds connection.” Particular species from predominantly and variously subtropical origin, for instance, Monstera Deliciosa, has become symbolic of a certain kind of lifestyle. Plants can stay invisible within contemporary indoor environments while being eye-catching on social media. It parallels the fact that connectivity is an exotic term and represents homophily with digitality.

From Taipei, Taiwan, Chi Po-Hao (b.1989), is an interdisciplinary practitioner working across music, technology and arts. He holds a Master of Music Degree from Goldsmiths, University of London and a Bachelors Degree in Economics from National Taiwan University. His practice stems from the fascination of boundaries and guidelines, usually implemented by designing methods to associate relevance from observing the diversities. He is particularly attracted by rule-based and technology-oriented practice because it allows more innovative thinking and discussion while trembling the existing system. His recent research is about the agencies of networked entities and how human and non-human co-constituted each other on the Web. He was granted residencies at V2_Institute of Unstable Media (Rotterdam, 2014), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2015-16), Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong, 2016), Laboral Centro de Arte (Gijon, 2016), FACT (Liverpool, 2018), National Theater and Concert Hall (Taipei, 2019), and has presented works in many international events, conferences, and venues.


-AND- HOUR 4 (12 PST, 14 CST, 15 EST, 20 GMT, 21 CET, 4 CST, 5 KST)
Resonance Extra (London UK) PRESENTS James Greer & Neil Luck, Merlin Nova, and Milo Thesiger-Meacham

Ghost Hotel by James Greer & Neil Luck

Video with sound, showing poltergeist activity I captured in Chinese hotel rooms. Absent interactions with a distant other. The embodied memory of another person superimposed in space and time.

Video by Neil Luck, using sounds from Field Recordist James Greer.

i can’t do anything about it now, it’s too late by Merlin Nova

Who are you talking to? What did you do? What are you not going to do? Time feels finite. It all feels too late. There is variety in repetition. You do the math.

The Secret Set by Milo Thesiger-Meacham

A multimedia project featuring an original text, soundtrack and set; field recordings and video found on the SD cards of second-hand cameras; digital photography, handheld, webcam and drone footage; and CGI. Narrated by Kadence Neill.

Currently based in Tokyo, James Greer is a field recordist and composer whose work often responds to people and the built environment.

Neil Luck is a composer, performer, and director based in London. His music engages the physical and fallible nature of live performance in multimedia contexts, and attempts to frame the act of music making itself as something strange, useful, or spectacular in and of itself.

Merlin Nova is a performance and sound artist. Nova released her ‘creepy, funny and all out terrifying’ (The Wire) debut album BOO! last year and her energetic choral EP Big Heart, long time love was released at the beginning of this year. She has worked with Slow Dance, NTS, Young Turks, Café Oto and BBC Radio 6 Late Junction and has performed across the UK and Europe.

Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, writer and composer based in London.


-AND- HOUR 5 (13 PST, 15 CST, 16 EST, 21 GMT, 22 CET, 5 CST, 6 KST)
LOOP (Seoul) PRESENTS Byungjun Kwon (Seoul)


Lyrics of Cheap Android 2 (Robot Nocturne)

Machines that resemble humans scramble along the lines of light that are reduced to shadows. The rugged, clunky movement of the deformed one-armed robot out of symmetry raises the illusion of ‘human familiarity’ to us through the process of overlapping, distorting and composing shadows. Robots that operate as automated stage equipment and characters evoke an unstable future, such as the restraint of a machine not far from the future, but in reality they are constrained machines in human control. Designed with the memory of colleagues in the 90s club scene and the alienated people in the streets, these robots dance and sing to each other in limited gestures. Developed with five members of the creative team, this play explores the possibilities of a new genre of robotic mechanical theater.

Written and Directed by Byungjun Kwon
Robot design, Music: Byungjun Kwon
Creative team: Doosung Moon, Taeho Park, Orominkyung, Minkyoung Lee, ABJ
Graphic Design: Kangwon Lee, ABJ
Technical support: Gunho Kim, Dayoung Lee
Costume design: Yujin Kwak (Working Class Hero)
Sponsored by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
Organized by Loop

ByungJun Kwon (b. 1971, Seoul) started his career as a singer-songwriter in the early 1990s. Kwon’s oeuvre consists not only of six music albums whose genre range from alternative rock to minimal house, but musical operations and performative acts in diverse platforms of movie soundtracks, theatre, fashion show, and modern dance. He spent the late 2000s in the Netherlands studying art-science and working as a hardware engineer at STEIM, a research center for new musical instruments in the electronic performing arts. Since returning to Korea in 2011, he has developed and secured a certain niche in contemporary (visual) art by employing his characteristic sound and media.


-AND- HOUR 6 (14 PST, 16 CST, 17 EST, 22 GMT, 23 CET, 6 CST, 7 KST)
CRiSAP (London UK) PRESENTS They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it (Anna Barham & Irene Revell) (London UK)

Stein in Island Gardens again

Some are thinking, some are feeling, some are thinking and feeling, some are thinking some one is feeling, some are thinking some one is thinking, some are thinking some one is feeling and thinking, some are feeling some one is thinking, some are feeling some one is thinking and feeling, some are feeling some one is feeling. A continuous static shot captures a small group reading from Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in a park by the river Thames. The soundtrack combines close recordings of each voice within the surrounding soundscape: wind, distant traffic, passing boats, dogs, cyclists, voices. The readers take turns, passing to the person on their left at the end of each page. The reading is unrehearsed. These are so very many ways of thinking and feeling connecting, not connecting, of being existing, of not being existing, there are so many ways of realising and not realising thinking thinking and feeling being, thinking being, feeling being, feeling not being, thinking not being, thinking and feeling not being, some kind of thinking, some kind of feeling not being in some one.

Readers: Cathy Lane, Miranda Clow, Sarah Chatwin, Sarbina Fuller, Julia Calver, Irene Revell and Anna Barham.

They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it is a reading-aloud group organised by artist Anna Barham and curator Irene Revell. After an initial reading in Island Gardens for Longplayer Day 2019, the group formed to read Gertrude Stein’s 925-page The Making of Americans (1925) over the course of 2020, slowing down the ‘marathon’ tradition of 52-hour readings of the novel initiated by Alison Knowles, Annea Lockwood, Jean Rigg & Ruth Anderson over New Years Eve 1974/5 in NYC. The group is continuing with other authors chosen for their sonic qualities including Elfriede Jelinek and Clarice Lispector.


-AND- HOUR 7 (15 PST, 17 CST, 18 EST, 23 GMT, 24 CET, 7 CST, 8 KST)
squint press (Québec/Toronto) PRESENTS Different From The One You Are In Now with: Mary Walling Blackburn, Allison Cameron, Barbara Campbell, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Darren Copeland, Renato Grieco, Michaela Grill, Sarah Hennies, Marla Hlady, Seth Kim-Cohen, Francisco Meirino, Salomé Voegelin

Different From The One You Are In Now

For Alvin Lucier. 12×12 rooms we are not in. For 12 years, every year 12 minute recordings of 12 rooms by 12 artists. Unoccupied and obscured. Room tones, thin walls. Faint glimmers, light leaks. Located nothings. The present of non-presence.

The grid is arranged alphabetically by last name. The order of appearance reflects the order in which the recordings were received.

Anyone interested in contributing to future editions please contact me (cm at christofmigone dot com).


-AND- HOUR 8 (16 PST, 18 CST, 19 EST, 24 GMT, 1 CET, 8 CST, 9 KST)
Array (Toronto) PRESENTS Renée Lear (Toronto) and Christof Migone (Toronto)

Psycho Flicker by Renée Lear

My most recent body of work has been in response to my desire to watch more than one film at once. I’ve been intercutting related films like gunfights in Sergio Leone’s Westerns and the killer’s point-of-view scenes from Dario Argento’s giallos. This time I wondered about combining two very different films. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: two psychological thrillers together at last! Watch as the dominant, mainstream narrative Psycho becomes playfully subordinate to the pulsing demands of the avant-garde, structural procedures at work in The Flicker—flashing frequencies riding alpha waves, unconcerned with story lines and bringing viewers into a semi-hypnotic visual realm.

The HyphenationOf Americans by Christof Migone

The Hyphenation (15:00) is part 1 of a 2-part set of videos which are based on Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. The video takes the appearance of hyphens at the end of lines in Stein’s mammoth tome (3107 occurrences over the span of 925 pages) as main structural device. The vertical lines indicate a page, some pages have no hyphens, some have up to twelve. Part 2 is titled Of Americans (15:00); it takes the appearance of words a referencing colour in the book (294 occurrences in 925 pages) as main structural device. The longer vertical lines denote chapter breaks. The smaller vertical lines move through the book from left to right of the frame. An earlier text-based work The Hyphenation of Americans kickstarted these videos.

Renée Lear is an experimental video artist, performer, photographer and filmmaker. Her practice engages both playfully and critically with the material, instruments and processes that produce moving images. Her recent work includes video, video installation, video performance, video mixing in live environments, animation and GIF montage. She works both solo and in collaboration with other artists, musicians, DJ’s, chefs and dancers. Her work has been shown in art galleries, festivals, underground cinemas, performance spaces, dance clubs, music venues, ad hoc public spaces and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Renée Lear lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Christof Migone‘s research delves into language & voice, bodies & performance, intimacy & complicity, sound & silence, rhythmics & kinetics, translation & referentiality, stillness & imperceptibility, structure & improvisation, play & pathos, pedagogy & unlearning, failure & endurance. Current and ongoing investigations: microphone hitting, book flipping, tongue extruding, record releasing, word hyphenating, para-pedagogical positioning, careless curating, noise making, sequitur following, paper passing, interval counting, rhythm repeating, phone licking, machine fingering, playlist compiling, silence listening, dozens of dozens, strobosonoscopics and stroboscopsonics.


-AND- HOUR 9 (17 PST, 19 CST, 20 EST, 1 GMT, 2 CET, 9 CST, 10 KST)
Western University (London ON) PRESENTS Ellen Moffat (London ON) and Eeva Siivonen (London ON)

a rested development

a rested development is a timespace of image and sound that intersect and diverge as autonomous entities in motion. A constellation of images expands and contracts within the undulations and oscillations of sound. As emerging entities, these components are in a suspended state of betweenness in which otherness and difference exist simultaneously. They become other than what they were while remaining what they are.

Ellen Moffat is an installation and performance artist who constructs sonic environments from material experiments, field recordings, and generative processes. Her interest in the tonalities and temporalities of small sounds is an engagement with the sense and nonsense of sound as multiple subjectivities and pluralities of the un(der)heard and their (in)audible dimensions.

Eeva Siivonen creates moving image environments that amplify states of in-betweenness, resisting separations between self and other, human and nonhuman, and interior and exterior. Her practice engages with the inherent failure to gain knowledge of ourselves and others as the space from which ethics emerge and evolve.


-AND- HOUR 10 (18 PST, 20 CST, 21 EST, 2 GMT, 3 CET, 10 CST, 11 KST)
Avatar (Québec) PRESENTS Béchard Hudon (Montréal)

And, the Coexistence of Temporalities

And, the Coexistence of Temporalities is a video created from recordings captured by the Université de Montréal webcams. The sound composition is a mix of field recordings from various places in Quebec and digital processing.

Inspired by the thoughts of Donna J. Haraway, in these troubled and confusing times, we felt the need to connect with a couple of Peregrine falcons that were nesting at the top of the Roger-Gaudry tower at the Université de Montréal. Using three webcams installed near their nest, we observed and recorded them from our computer almost every day from early March to late May, then occasionally until late October, 2021. The video recordings became a point of contact with these birds saved from the threat of extinction thanks to the ban on the use of DDT (in Canada and elsewhere). We were captivated by the life of these urban birds of prey, their unique space-time, and how they live in their temporary habitat. One of our main interests was to observe how they survive in this anthropogenic place devoid of vegetation. Their nesting area with the city as backdrop, in a place saturated with human expansion, formed a strange and reassuring image all at once. Their presence in this place emphasized the tension between different temporalities: a production-oriented human time and a rhythm specific to falcons. This temporal interlacement made us pay particular attention to the ‘dead’ time that took up a significant part of the Peregrine falcons’ daily life. They spent long periods of time in the same spot, in a state of observation or silent waiting, offering a striking contrast to our hyperconnected pace and collective allergy to unproductive time. And, the Coexistence of Temporalities focuses on the interactions between human and non-human animals in order to glimpse other ways of inhabiting the world and to infuse our imaginaries with an inclusive and sensitive multispecies energy.

Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon are based in Montreal and form an interdisciplinary artistic duo since 1999. They are interested in lines of encounter, grey areas or simultaneity curves that shape our experience of the world and motivate their creation of kinetic and sound installations, silent motile sculptures, audio piece, public artworks and sometimes makes video. They have exhibited widely, notably at the Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, the Triennale Banlieue at la Maison des arts de Laval, the Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine in Trois-Rivières, at the MA Musée d’art in Rouyn-Noranda, the Centre d’exposition Lethbridge and Ellephant Gallery as part of the International Digital Art Biennial in Montreal, the Mois Multi in Quebec city, the Knockdown Center in Brooklyn, in the context of the event Quebec Digital Art in NYC, at the Device Art Triennal in Zagreb and at the National art Museum of China during the exhibition ThingWorld: International Triennal of New Media Art.


-AND- HOUR 11 (19 PST, 21 CST, 22 EST, 3 GMT, 4 CET, 11 CST, 12 KST)
Wave Farm (New York) PRESENTS LoVid (New York)

SwitchesSwatches

LoVid’s work centers around the juxtaposition of media and material, physicality and virtuality. Our practice incorporates a wide range of techniques and processes, from DIY electrical engineering to textile design and stained glass. Throughout multiple projects, we maintain a signature visual and sonic aesthetic of color, pattern, and texture density, incorporating glitch and noise. Our process: navigating between the handmade and the machine-produced, highlights the challenges and possibilities of the networked age, particularly a sense of the world that intermixes virtual and physical, materials and simulations, fantasy and reality, hope and despair, connectivity and isolation.

LoVid, the NY based artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, has worked together since 2001. LoVid’s work has been exhibited, performed, screened, and presented internationally at venues including: Postmasters Gallery, Marquee Projects, Pixel Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, And/Or Gallery, Parrish Museum, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Real Art Ways, Good Children Gallery, BRIC, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Issue Project Room, Mixed Greens Gallery, The Science Gallery Dublin, The Jewish Museum, MoMA, Tectonics Festival TLV, The Kitchen, Moving Image Art Fair, Daejeon Museum, Smack Mellon, Netherland Media Art Institute (Netherlands), New Museum, ICA (London), and International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands). LoVid’s projects have received support from organizations including: Wave Hill, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Graham Foundation, UC Santa Barbara, Signal Culture, Cue Art Foundation, Eyebeam, Harvestworks, Wave Farm, Rhizome, Franklin Furnace, Turbulence.org, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Experimental TV Center, NY State Council of the Arts, and Greenwall Foundation. LoVid’s videos are distributed by EAI and NFTS are represented by Postmasters Gallery.


-AND- HOUR 12 (20 PST, 22 CST, 23 EST, 4 GMT, 5 CET, 12 CST, 13 KST)
Errant Bodies Press (Berlin) PRESENTS undo (Christof Migone (Toronto) & Alexandre St-Onge (Québec))

seize me by the horns (2000) 10:57
Disclosure (2001) 14:04
Vito Acconci’s undoing (2001) 11:00
l’étranglement (2000) 23:57

Four never before seen video documents of performative gestures by undo (Christof Migone & Alexandre St-Onge) centered on orality in its blunt physiology, contingent spatiality, tense viscosity, and emergent animality. Performed twenty years ago, digitized and edited in the summer of 2021.

seize me by the horns (2000) consists of stuffing canned snails into our mouths, ears, noses. We mined our bucal cavities for fluid sonorities, we deranged our electronics. The recording of the performance in a kitchen in Montréal appeared on the last track of the inaugural release on squint fucker press in the same year, un sperme qui meurt de froid en agitant faiblement sa petite queue dans les draps d’un gamin. Also the same year we performed the piece in front of a live audience at the No Music Festival in London, Ontario. The contorted textual component is from the performative presentation titled “Turn, turn, turn: undo’s dizzy tactics in des tournages” presented at the first Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic conference, November 1-2, 2013, at Arraymusic in Toronto.

Disclosure (2001) was performed four times over three days for the PUBLIC SPACES/PRIVATE PLACES series curated by Paul Couillard for FADO, June 28-30, 2001 at 228 1/2 Parliament Street, Toronto, Canada. Audio/text/visual documentation published in Surface Tension: Problematics of Site, edited by Brandon LaBelle and Ken Ehrlich, Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2003. The performance consisted of three parts in three different locations of the apartment: lie, close, hold. Review by Lucie Sparham (Lola, fall 2001 issue): “It began getting very boring. Nothing happened. I felt like I was in a trance. I looked again. They seemed to exist outside of time. Then I became acutely aware I had observed them earlier as specimens, but now felt their humanity.”

Vito Acconci’s undoing (2001) is based on and inspired by the video Waterways: 4 Saliva Studies (1971) by Vito Acconci. Used by permission. The soundtrack to the original piece by Vito Acconci as well as the ‘undone’ version were published on a CD by squint fucker press. Features Spit (1996-1998).

l’étranglement (2000), feat. André-Éric Létourneau. Performed at Casa del Popolo in Montréal. Strangling the love out of each other while Éric checks his pulse. Glitches courtesy of mismatched codecs. Audio documentation appeared on the CD accompanying Christof Migone’s Sound Voice Perform (Errant Bodies Press, 2005).

undo is a duo which, since its inception in 1997, explores the barely perceptible, the unacceptable and the forgettable. We are not often active but when we are we are passive. Passion plays a part. We are where nowhere is where it’s at. undo. delete. efface. do not.

Christof Migone is an artist, teacher, curator, and writer. He often works with language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, and endurance. He co-edited the books Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and Volumes (Blackwood Gallery, 2015). His writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, Performance Research, Sound Art (ZKM/MIT), etc. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007. He has released nine solo audio cds on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral). He has curated a number of exhibitions and events: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), Double Site (1998), stuttermouthface (2002), Disquiet (2005), START (2007), STOP.(2008), and Should I Stay or Should I Go (Nuit Blanche 2010), and numerous others for the Blackwood Gallery between 2008 and 2013. He has performed at Beyond Music Sound Festival (Los Angeles), kaaistudios (Brussels), Resonance FM (London), Nouvelles Scènes (Dijon), On the Air (Innsbruck), Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Mois Multi (Québec), Images Festival (Toronto), Send+Receive (Winnipeg), Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee), Liquid Architecture (Melbourne), Mutek, Victoriaville Festival, Casa del Popolo, Théâtre La Chapelle, DHCArt, CAFKA, Museum Leuven, Whitney Museum, LUFF, Cave 12, Ftarri, Borderline Festival (Athens), etc. His installations have been exhibited at the Banff Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, Gallery 101, Art Lab, eyelevelgallery, Forest City Gallery, Studio 5 Beekman, Mercer Union, CCS Bard, Optica, Oboro. He has collaborated with Marla Hlady, Lynda Gaudreau, Martin Tétreault, Michel F. Côté, Gregory Whitehead, Set Fire To Flames, and Fly Pan Am. A monograph on his work, Sound Voice Perform, was published in 2005. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal presented a mid-career survey of his work accompanied by a catalog and a DVD entitled Trou. A book compiling his writings on sound art, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body was published in 2012 by Errant Bodies Press. He has been the recipient of commissions from the Tate Modern, Dazibao, Kunstradio, Centre for Art Tapes, New Adventures in Sound Art, Radio Canada, New American Radio. He is a founding member of Avatar (Québec City). He currently lives in Toronto and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University in London, Ontario.

Alexandre St-Onge is an interdisciplinary artist and a sonic performer exploring the mutation of the performative body through its sonic, textual and visual mediations. Philosophiae doctor (PhD) in art (UQAM, 2015) and assistant professor at l’École d’art of Laval University, he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable and he has published over twenty works including A.A.G.G.’s OBSESSIONS de A.A.G.G. (Rara Avis), Jet du bas dit AA l’eau guet avec l’invisible (éditions|squint|press), NommeBeurre µ La lubrification du verbe Les vies innombrables des Tie Wraps (Grillage Absolu), Créatures hermétiques dans mon char bb des otages inaperçus (Archée/PDF/Grillage Absolu), Cône en tête C Ça KC l’arme chaude de l’ivresse (Grillage Absolu), Nude de chose de même (Le laps), VUEIEN (Errant Bodies Press), Semblances (Avatar), viorupeeeeihean (Oral) and Kasi Naigo (squintfuckerpress) amongst others. He presented his work at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal, at Sporobole in Sherbrooke, at Latitude 53 in Edmonton, at the Tsonami festival in Valparaiso, at Paved Arts in Saskatoon, at Eastern Bloc and at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal, at Avatar and at Mois Multi in Quebec City, at L’Écart in Rouyn-Noranda, at Action Art Actuel at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, at the Errant Bodies Space in Berlin, at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto, at the festival Send and Receive in Winnipeg and at the Disturbance festival in Copenhagen to name a few places and events. Co-founder of éditions|squint|press with Christof Migone, he is also creating with collectives and artists such as: Simon Brown, Et Sans, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Klaxon Gueule, L’Ensemble SuperMusique, Pink Saliva, Obsolète, mineminemine, Shalabi Effect, Suzanne Leblanc, undo and Unzip Violence. As a composer he has worked for interdisciplinary company kondition pluriel, as well as composing for artists such as Marie Brassard, Karine Denault, Lynda Gaudreau, Line Nault, Jérémie Niel, Maryse Poulin, and Mariko Tanabe.