Myriam Bleau is a composer, digital artist and performer based in Montreal. Using music and sound as a point of departure, she creates audiovisual performances, video works, installations and interactive interfaces that articulate sound, light and movement. She’s interested in the performative, both as a codified cultural manifestation, and as an embodied reenactment of symbolic systems through human and non-human agencies, including machine learning. Her hybrid practice explores porous spaces between the physical and the virtual world, between the natural and the synthetic. 

Nien-Tzu Weng is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary dance artist and lighting designer based in Montreal. She aims to build bridges between disciplines, pursuing an experimental approach to contemporary performance, and a laboratory based approach to lighting design. As both choreographer and lighting designer, Weng is curious about the relationship between movement and new media practices, and plays with the balance between reality and fantasy. She uses light and multimedia in order to play with perspective, perceiving performance as a process of transmitting dialogues between inner and outer space, where presence and image builds multiple, overlapping conceptions of time.

In the project Second Self, the artists have created LED touchscreens of custom shapes to be worn on different places of the body: the face, the hands, the chest. These interfaces evoke masks, cellphones, prosthetic devices that either augment or obstruct, allowing the artists to explore the theme of the feminist cyborg, different communication systems including sign language and the notion of the mirror and the gaze relating to online experiences.

This project is made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and Recto-Verso Productions.

Nien Tzu Weng: choreography, concept, performance
Myriam Bleau: programming, music, video, concept, performance
Max D. : electronic design, fabrication
Marie Audrey Jacques: costumes / prototype velcro suits
Martin Marier: fabrication
Mark Lowe: fabrication