Fanfare (Montreal)
Montreal Science Centre
From June 12th to June 14th, 2009
In conjunction with the Montréal Science Centre and the Conférence régionale des élus de Montréal, Groupe Molior presents Fanfare, the interactive sound installation by Amuse designer Melissa Mongiat.
The third edition of the Eureka! Festival Science here, there and everywhere, which runs from June 12 to 14, 2009, at the Quays of the Old Port of Montréal, gave the public the opportunity to wander through Melissa Mongiat’s Fanfare, an interactive sound installation. With several arches in bright colours, the installation will allow festival-goers to simulate a marching band as their presence makes composer Bernard Poirier’s piece Les nains start to play.
Fanfare is a community-building project that aims to create a collective experience on festival grounds, where over a hundred interactive, entertaining and educational activities are on the line-up. These very diverse activities deal with topics that range from art, science and technology to humanitarian and environmental issues. Initiated by the Conférence régionale des élus (CRÉ) de Montréal, the Eureka! Festival is put on by the Montréal Science Centre, with financial participation from the Gouvernement du Québec.
Fanfare is a creation of Amuse.
Andrée Duchaine
Andrée Duchaine has worked in the visual arts area since several years. From 1974 to 1984 she was involved in setting up the video section at Vehicule Art Gallery and organized and curated VIDEO 84, the first international video encounters in Montreal. Mrs Duchaine curated several video art exhibitions in Europe, the United States and Canada. Between 1985 and 1995 she settled in Paris where she founded a short film distribution company. She worked with T.V. channels across the world.
Andrée Duchaine taught at Paris VIII, at the Université du Québec à Montréal and at the Ottawa University. In 2001 she founded a non-profit company Le Groupe Molior producing, curating and disseminating new media works.
Artist & work
Melissa Mongiat
Fanfare (Montreal)
2009
Interactive sound installation
Description of the work
Fanfare is an installation that comes to life through public participation, giving festival-goers a unique collective musical experience. As people pass under a series of arches equipped with sensors they trigger different parts of the score, with each arch having its own instrument. Visitors thus create their own individual or collective fanfares as they enter the Festival.
Biography
While embracing opportunities that new media offer, Melissa Mongiat’s approach focuses on participation and narratives. Her projects enable the public to live stories that are relevant to them and have an enduring effect.
She is best known for her work on a series of public interactive installations created for London’s Royal Festival Hall, which led to her selection by Wallpaper magazine in 2007 as one of the world’s ten breakthrough designers.
In Montréal, The Good Conspiracy, a multi-platform project she created while creative director at Amuse, was presented at the Biennale 2009. This year, she was awarded the Design Montréal Phyllis Lambert grant with associate Mouna Andraos.
Melissa Mongiat is also known for her research work on participatory design created in collaboration with Kelsey Snook. The results have been presented notably at the Royal College of Art in London, the Banff New Media Institute and the Instituto di Diseno Europeo in Barcelona, as workshops and conferences, and led to the creation of goodparticipation.com. She is also a founding member of Like People Do, a team formerly based at Innovation Central Saint Martins in London, with whom she collaborated on a £1M research project with Arup Foresight.
In November 2010, Melissa Mongiat represented Montréal at the conference ‘Design and mobility in the creative city’, part of the Design Biennale in Saint-Étienne, France.
Melissa Mongiat holds a BA in Graphic Design from the Université du Québec à Montréal and an MA with distinction in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She continues to visit both institutions as lecturer or teacher.
