Opéra de Montréal, The Barber of Seville rehearsal, 18 September 2024

Voices achieve a new level of authority when they combine together in harmony.

I become consciously aware of this whenever I am witness to people singing together — in a choir, or as I was for a spirited rehearsal of The Opéra de Montréal’s forthcoming season opener, The Barber of Seville, staged for members of the press earlier this week.

Of course, operatic roles require powerful individual singers. But operas reach a whole nother plateau when they combine those dynamic individuals into an ensemble cast.

“The challenge,” explains OdeM’s artistic director Michel Beaulac, “is to find all the right pieces in the vocal puzzle. Once you have that puzzle together, you know you have the right production that will be pleasing to your audience.”

Pascale Girardin, Presence and Digressions, Projet Casa, 18 September – 8 October 2024

The ceramicist Pascale Girardin says that the physical gestures of maneuvering the large-scale terra cotta objects she created for her latest exhibition at Projet Casa bestowed upon her a feeling of belonging, “the sensation of embracing a comforting figure.”

Mankind is made of muscle, blood, and mud.

Jeremy Shaw, Localize Affect, 19 September – 2 November 2024, Bradley Ertaskiran

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. —Matthew 5:14-16.

The affective outcome of online interactions is no less affective than meatspace interactions. If someone “likes” you online, it sends the same pleasure chemicals to your brain as if they gave you a compliment in the real world; if someone insults you in the comments section, it makes your blood boil just as much as it would if they were to do it to your face.

It stands to reason that this would change our real-world interactions, too, beginning to act toward one another as if screens separated us. The screen is the most effective affective tool of communication, and affective manipulation is the most effective method of social control.

Simon Petepiece, Clearing Corridor Chamber Cave, Galerie Nicolas Robert, 13 September – 26 October 2024

“How do you know who your daddy is? Because your mama told you so.” –Bill Broussard, JFK (1991)

David Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ centers on Allegra Geller, a renowned designer of virtual reality video games who becomes the target of a group of terrorists seeking to destroy her latest creation, an immersive game called “eXistenZ.” In it, players slip seamlessly between the real and virtual worlds to such a degree that the borders between truth and simulation blur.

The terrorists who pursue Geller charge that her games and others like them are the root cause for a dangerous societal turn against reality.

The film is science fiction, to be sure. But it is an increasingly accurate metaphor for the state of media today: from behind a screen, it is almost impossible to tell whether or not we are “in the game.”

André Turpin & Léa-Valérie Létourneau, Clusters, Centre PHI, 20 September – 20 October 2024

We love to think, as human beings, that we are in total control. Of our situations, of our environment, of ourselves, and even of one another.

In classical cinema studies, there are two general approaches that have historically shaped film analysis.

One is auteur theory, which presupposes that directors possess some kind of rarefied genius and produce works of singular vision.

Consequently, filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or Martin Scorsese made movies that were manifestations of their own unique perspectives on reality.

It is true that these examples suggest some measure of authorial control. Hitchcock no doubt made Hitchcockian films. And there are certain aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of a Kubrick or a Scorsese production.

Another less popular approach, but which I believe is closer to the truth, is what the critic Thomas Schatz in his book The Genius of the System called “the whole equation of pictures.”

Schatz argued that movies were made efficiently and effectively by the well-oiled machinery of an entire studio system, especially in the early days of Hollywood. Everyone — from the director on down to the script supervisor, the costumer, even the electrician — played an integral role in the look and feel of every picture.

In philosophy, these collections of people, objects, and ideas are called assemblages. Assemblages exert their own sort of agency. They manifest situations and bring events into being.

Assemblage theory ascribes power to complexity, favouring collectivity over individual agency, recognizing the limitations of a purely anthropocentric worldview. Focussing upon assemblages also complicates the notion of temporality, making it impossible to circumscribe events within time.

A film may be finished in a manner of speaking when it reaches the end of its production schedule, when it leaves the editing room and is presented onscreen. But a film embarks upon another life when it enters into various discursive assemblages. A film changes with its historical context, for instance, or in relation to audiences, in relation to other films, other works of art, other things that are not art.

In this way, there is no such thing as pure completion. An auteur may have a singular vision, but that vision is never fully realized, because visions themselves continue evolving within novel agentic assemblages.

The team of filmmaker André Turpin and art director Léa-Valérie Létourneau invoke the assemblage’s inherent agency in Clusters, their collaborative photographic exhibition on view at Centre PHI. By examining and calling attention to multiplicity, they also acknowledge the potentially infinite possibility in creating works of art.

“It’s really like a film you’re editing,” Turpin says.

“In teamwork, there’s always one person who is more convinced than the other. We’re never totally sure when a picture is finished.”◼︎

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_{Cover image: Jeremy Shaw}