Tag Archives: Biennale Elektra

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The Love of The Game

Vincent Larouche, Le tympan, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 7 November 2026

Abstract painting featuring geometric shapes in various shades of blue, green, brown, and a prominent yellow section.
Gallery views of Vincent Larouche at Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“If even the smallest and most personal stirrings of the individual psyche — so insignificant in themselves — remain as unconscious and unrecognized as they have hitherto, they will go on accumulating and produce mass groupings and mass movements which cannot be subjected to reasonable control or manipulated to a good end.”
—Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Dreams are only really coincidental to the dreamer. If you have ever tried to explain a dream to someone else, you will have inevitably encountered a facial expression that distinctly signifies a combination of bewilderment and disinterest in your listener. Nobody really cares about our dreams. And it is useless to attempt to relate what is meaningful about them to anyone other, perhaps, than a psychoanalyst.

Nevertheless, there are certain threads that run through all of our dreams, archetypes that link us through themes like flying, panicking, falling, and other more common dream scenarios. The commonality of these themes is a reminder that we are not as unique as we would like to believe. Beneath each platform is the same basic operating system that is just as susceptible to malfunction as the next.

Fedor Rudin and Selim Mazari, Spotlight on Strings, Bourgie Hall, 2 October 2026

Two men in formal attire on stage at a concert, with a grand piano and audience visible in the background.
Fedor Rudin and Selim Mazari congratulate each other after their performance at Bourgie Hall. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“A sound is symbolic when it stirs in us emotions or thoughts beyond its mechanical sensations or signaling function, when it has a numinosity or reverberation that rings through the deeper recesses of the psyche.”
—R. Murray Schafer, “Symbolism,” in The Soundscape: the tuning of the world

Every game sounds ridiculous when its rules are described to an unknowing or unsuspecting spectator. In the 1953 Andy Griffith routine, “What it was, was football,” the famed comedian and raconteur delivers an hilarious monologue as told through the eyes of a backwoods rube that makes one of America’s most popular sports seem absurd. The joke rests on the audience gradually recognizing what Griffith is describing as something ubiquitous in contemporaneous culture. But to today’s listener, Griffith’s monologue sounds positively alien.

F(R)ICTION, Art et jeux, ELEKTRA, Arsenal Art Contemporain, Until 15 November 2026

A person sitting in a futuristic computer setup with a glowing frame, colorful lights, and a monitor displaying green matrix code.
A patron at Arsenal engages with an installation at the ELEKTRA Biennale. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“Between command and control, as between the systems implanting and perpetuating them, there can be no mediation, only resonation and automatic readjustment.”
—Brian Massumi, “Requiem for our Prospective Dead”

Human beings devise complicated systems of rules in order to regulate behaviours that rarely conform to predictable outcomes.

In the seventeenth episode of the Sci-Fi T.V. series Star Trek’s second season, entitled “A Piece of the Action,” Captain Kirk and crew arrive at a planet called Sigma Iotia II which has fashioned its society after early 20th century American mafia culture. Effectively, the planet’s inhabitants act like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in Angels with Dirty Faces, speaking in film noir-style dialogue and using violence as a mode of social control.

The only way for Kirk and the Starship Enterprise’s crew to escape Sigma Iotia II is to gamble at playing cards. And so, Kirk invents a game that he calls “Fizzbin,” making it up as he goes along. The rules become so arcane that the Iotians concede and Kirk, McCoy, and Spock assume power.

The rules of the game — how many cards each player receives, the weight of each card, and the end goal — are part of the symbolic order that structures and governs and the relationships of the game. The imaginary realm of Fizzbin is something akin to Poker, a game similar enough in form but different enough in outcome to constitute recognition. The Real realm of Fizzbin, however, is not only the players of the game, but also the authority that Captain Kirk asserts by inventing the rules to suit his own incentives.

You can’t lose in the symbolic or imaginary orders if you literally construct reality on the fly.

Turandot, Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, 29 September 2026

A theatrical performance featuring a cast of actors on stage, with a backdrop of structured scaffolding and stage lights, as they take a bow after the show.
The company of Turandot at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“I’m a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I’m so sick I think everybody else is sick and I’m the only healthy person. That’s pretty bad off, isn’t it?”
— Ted Bentley in Solar Lottery

Because of the recent conference dedicated to his incredible and prolific body of filmmaking, I have spent the past few months chasing Adam Curtis’s dragon, binge-watching documentaries that I had never seen and revisiting some that I have. In the 2007 BBC series entitled The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, Curtis spends a significant amount of time devoted to Game Theory and its vast implementation in British politics and economic policy throughout the mid-20th century.

Game theory posits that individuals in modern society are always essentially “gaming” — strategizing social relations for incremental personal gain. One of the theory’s most influential proponents was an American mathematician called John Nash, who also suffered from debilitating schizophrenic paranoia and was convinced that his colleagues were constantly conspiring against him. People, Nash believed, acted in their own self-interest, and the fact that Nash’s schizophrenia reinforced this belief is a curious case of self-negating verification.

No expert in Game Theory could legitimately disprove Nash’s hypotheses; but no one in the psychiatric profession could prove his sanity.

Diane Borsato, A Clean Place to Swim, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Alberta), Until 13 December 2026

Two large screens displaying underwater footage, one showing a person swimming while the other captures a playful scene with two individuals submerged in a pool.
Installation view of Diane Borsato at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The transcendent is not the transcendental.”
—Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence, A life…”

Nature is supreme intelligence, the manifestation of the unknowable. The sublime that we experience in the presence of nature is a restorative sensation that resets us in both scale and time. The sheer magnitude of forests or mountains puts into perspective our physical size, and their geological formation over millennia reminds us of our insignificance in time. To be in the presence of mature matter, that which will still exist long after we have ceased to, is a reminder of our responsibilities to stop strategically gaming the earth, our relationships, and ourselves.

Separation from God is the definition of hell. Reconnecting with nature heals the wounds of separation and replaces us directly within God’s midst.◼︎

Come to NicheMTL’s Glitch Issue launch party October 1st 2026 at the SAT. Featuring live performances by Courant Zéro, HRT, and Seulement. Get tickets here.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Installation view of Diane Borsato at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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999 Words

One Weird Trick

“A cool tool is …
Anything useful that increases learning, empowers individuals, does work that matters, is either the best, or the cheapest, or the only thing that works.”
—Cool Tools: A Catalogue of Possibilities, Kevin Kelly

The 2013 directory entitled Cool Tools is a compendium of technological objects that promises to help its readers, for example, put on a house concert, design a logo, rear an optimistic child, replace bulbs with LEDs, bypass real estate agents, and scores more apparently useful activities.

The tools clearly do not accomplish the tasks themselves. But they facilitate the work with machinery designed to economize jobs that have become commonplace time occupiers in modern life. According to Kelly, machines like the pineapple slicer/corer, the pocket chainsaw, the TUSA hyperdry snorkel, and the Matterform 3D scanner are the coolest tools.

Intelligent machines don’t just surround us. We seamlessly integrate them, most often unconsciously, into our daily lives. From the mobile phones to which we are eternally tethered, to the terminals that dispense and take our money, to the vehicles that transport us, to the boxes in our homes that we use to keep our food frozen, wash our clothes, warm our soup, condition our air, watch movies, and listen to music, technology is everywhere, ubiquitous, invisible. We really only notice technology when it doesn’t work as intended.

An illuminated projection on a curved surface displaying text about vibrant user experiences and sound elements, with a light point in the background.
Rough realtime translation of Lucas Paris’s Q&A following Vibrant User.Online at the Satosphère, 16 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A spate of recent musico-technological events including the ELEKTRA biennale and the Society for Arts and Technology’s 30th anniversary has again placed technology at the focal center of local cultural production. Montreal is known for its techno-predilection. The MUTEK festival in particular has since 2003 positioned Montreal as a vital international destination for digital arts. The LUMINO festival, Cité Mémoire, Oasis Immersion, and current and past public artworks like Utopie by Jonathan Villeneuve and 21 Balançoires by Daily tous les jours signal Montreal’s municipal commitment to technological innovation in the service of art.

This begs the question: does technology make better art? Does it make our artists better? The tools artists use no doubt shape the works they create. But do modern technological advancements actually stimulate creativity?

Currently, the hottest debate revolves around creative Artificial Intelligence. Should artists use A.I.? And if so, does this toolbox simplify art-making processes like, say, a pineapple slicer/corer might simplify making fruit salad? Should art be innovative, as if it were a technology?

It is helpful to recall Joseph Weizenbaum’s influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason in which the computer scientist and ELIZA programmer proclaimed that computers lack the capacity for moral judgement. Computer Power’s most famous anecdote recounts how Weizenbaum’s secretary became so engaged with ELIZA, his benign computer programme designed to mimic a psychoanalyst’s routine, that his secretary asked him to vacate the room.

It might be tempting to maintain that machines don’t require moral judgement when human users can steer and, when necessary, override A.I.’s deficiencies. Yet, ELIZA’s inability to judge seemingly interfered with Weizenbaum’s secretary’s judgement, as if the evolution of the machine precipitated the devolution of our own. The fact that his secretary knew full-well how ELIZA worked is what prompted Weizenbaum to issue dire warnings about A.I.’s dangerously seductive allure.

A performer in a stylish outfit singing into a microphone on stage, with blue lighting and a DJ behind a covered table.
Xela Edna performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The intelligent tool that still fascinates me most is MIDI, or the Musical Instrument Digital Interface — so much so that I wrote a book, Mad Skills, about its cultural history. Ostensibly, MIDI is the protocol that enables digital musical instruments to “talk” to one another, as if exercising judgement. But what it really is, is a mechanism for technological control, not only of one technology over another, but also of music technology over analogue music making, of corporate control over maker culture — ultimately, the tyranny of the binary.

Circuitry is not the technology most essential to MIDI. Curiously, MIDI’s intelligence has nothing to do with computers. It goes much further back than that. Indeed, the clock may be the first artificial intelligence.

“The clock,” wrote Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization, “is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.” There would be no techno music were it not for clocks. The clock measures and regulates and quantifies and values time, the medium within which all of existence unfolds.

Like ELIZA, the clock itself is incapable of moral judgement. Rather, the clock reshaped the erratic immorality of chaos into a strict moral code of stability: “under the rule of the order,” Mumford contended, “surprise and doubt and caprice and irregularity were put at bay.” Clocks did not just produce synchronization. They also created the concept of asynchrony.

A performer interacts with electronic equipment on a table while a visual projection of circular patterns is displayed behind them in a dimly lit space.
Myriam Bleau performs with the ELEKTRA festival at Centre PHI, 18 June 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The MIDI clock was always off by a hair’s breadth. And this reintroduced a degree of chaos into the digital musical order, kicking events, in a manner of speaking, off the grid. Montreal artists — like Myriam Bleau, who performed a skittering set on 19 June at Centre PHI with a collection of illuminated spinning tops, or Xela Edna’s unexpected technical glitches on the night of her album launch at the SAT for My Data Cannot Rot — consciously or subconsciously intervene in the clock’s domination and trouble the notion that technological tools are unquestionably cool.

Fluorescent lights flicker rhythmically. Data indeed rots. Anyone who has ever relied on Montreal’s Métro system understands that time is just a suggestion here. If the train is running late, more time is simply added to the clock. The Métro’s turnstiles are locked from forward motion. But everyone knows that if you spin them backwards half a turn, you can slide right through.

Technological innovation doesn’t de facto produce better art. It is arguably in the ethics and aesthetics of technological failure that creative revolutions are incubated. If intelligent machines encourage our moral stagnation, then winding the clock back might be the most promising strategy to push us forward. Sometimes, what works best is that which evidently doesn’t.

As tech-savvy as Montreal presents itself, our cutting-edge technologies seldom function as advertised. And so, we exploit weird tricks, cool tools to navigate our social spaces, our culture.◼︎

Cover image: Public Appeal performs at Espace SAT 11 June 2026. Rory Creelman for NicheMTL.

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Our Side Has to Win

Joyce Joumaa, A Temporary Loss of Consciousness, Galerie Eli Kerr, Until 19 August 2024

Joyce Joumaa, Solar Panel Screen Installation, Galerie Eli Kerr. Photographed for NicheMTL.

50 or so species of ants have been known to practice various forms of what we might consider slavery.

Aphids, the minuscule insects that suck sap from plants and flower petals, produce honeydew as waste matter. So, farmer ants collect colonies of these sugar-making aphids and mine them for their sweet excess nectar.

Scientists call this a “symbiotic” or “mutualistic” relationship because the farmer ants exhibit a protective kind of behaviour, often moving their aphid populations to new and more fertile ground and shielding them from other predators.

But farmer ants also act violently to keep their aphid populations under strict control, deliberately clipping their wings so they can’t escape, and secreting a tranquilizing chemical from their feet which makes them docile, continuously producing sap for their Formicidae masters.

The Polyergus genus of ants go one step further, enslaving other ant species to perform virtually every aspect of work life for them — from cleaning their nests to taking care of their young and even feeding them. Polyergus are so reliant upon slave populations that they no longer do anything autonomously; they exist solely to raid, entrap, and subjugate other ants.

Even though they should be capable of overcoming their attackers in sheer number and physical force, researchers discovered that Polyergus discharge a compound called a “Propaganda pheromone” that confuses their prey, disorganizing and preventing them from mounting an effective defence. The Polyergus then steal their pupae and larvae to raise them on their own as slaves, consuming some of them along the way as they travel in columns back to their colonies.

Ants have yet to develop a governing moral character that, for instance, regulates the media, or prohibits chemical warfare and kidnapping, or condemns slavery, cannibalism, and colonialism.

Nature’s dystopian brutality unfolds for ants with quotidian banality.

Yuki Isami, Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024

Yuki Isami performs at Club Montréal TD, 1 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The only time I was ever in prison was to visit and interview the author and famous Canadian bank robber, the late Stephen Reid. I somehow knew or at least suspected that he smoked cigarettes, so I brought a few packs of American Spirits as a gift. Even if he didn’t smoke, I thought, he could at least trade them for something else he was addicted to.

Of course he wanted them, and over four of the most interesting hours of my life, the two of us chain-smoked one after another after another in the yard of the William Head Institution on the south-westernmost coast of Vancouver Island. “Doing time is easy,” Reid wrote in his 2012 book A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, “quitting cigarettes is hard.”

One of the most surprising things Reid told me was that he wasn’t unhappy in jail. He rather preferred its routine to the chaos of civilian life.

The Persian-born autodidact Doris Lessing observes in her Massey Lecture, broadcast on the CBC in 1985, “We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in.” Some forms of brainwashing are benign, while others can manifest in innocent people confessing to crimes they never committed, and even killing in the name of cult, country, or king.

“The best we can hope for,” says Lessing, “is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”

Angela Grauerholz, Ellipses, Blouin | Division, Until 31 August 2024

“The blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that.” Photographed for NicheMTL.

“It’s a little bit of a thing that I have,” the photographer Angela Grauerholz tells me behind the scenes at her exhibition’s vernissage.

“Doors and windows, the scrim or screen that sometimes happens, the blur gives a veil to what you’re looking at. I do like that. I do like putting some kind of device between the viewer and the actual image, to just give a moment of arrest.”

Joep Beving, Le Gesù, 30 June 2024

Joep Beving signs an autograph for a fan. Photographed by Darragh Kilkenny-Mondoux for NicheMTL.

In the third episode of the classic British series The Prisoner entitled “A, B, and C,” the character known as Number Six, a former spy-turned-inmate, is administered three doses of a powerful drug that allows his controller, Number Two, to view and manipulate his dreams on a TV screen.

For three consecutive nights, Number Six dreams of attending a garden party where he encounters three of his former colleagues, each of them a potentially suspect collaborator, while Number Two seeks “information” on the reason behind Number Six’s resignation.

A doctor called Number 14 delivers this experimental truth serum via injections to Number Six’s wrist, which he eventually discovers, replacing the purple drug with water on the third attempt, finally thwarting the mind-control experiment.

In each episode of the psychedelic drama, which plays out something like Gilligan’s Island on acid, Number Six attempts to discover who is ultimately in control of the island-prison, called “The Village.”

He repeatedly asks Number Two, a character played by a different actor in each episode: “Who is Number One?” And over and over, the answer he receives is a cryptic non-sequitur: “You are Number Six.”

In the end, just a slight change of inflection, a strategically placed comma, reveals a clue to the riddle’s solution.

Biennale Elektra — Illusion, Arsenal, Until 21 July 2024

Still image from Slow Track by Timothy Thomasson. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Then the proud waters had gone over our soul. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. —Psalm 124:5-7

Amidst this year’s assemblage of ultra-contemporary, technologically assisted, and artificially intelligent art, which gives a cumulative affective impression approaching Homer Simpson’s website, is a thoughtfully produced and quietly executed video entitled Slow Track by the young artist Timothy Thomasson, an infinite scene which recedes deliberately and hypnotically through familiar-feeling tableaux representing, as the accompanying text aptly describes, “nowhere in particular.”

This gently profound work is a welcome exodus from the hyperactive and overstimulating tendencies characterizing digital art today.◼︎

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NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Angela Grauerholz, La Compteuse 2/5, 2018, Inkjet prints, 45 1/4 x 65 1/4 in. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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