I won this prize called the Imagineria '99 prize. They commissioned me to work with the English designer, Paul Farrington on an installation piece, Sound Polaroids, which premiered this month at the ICA Gallery in London. Paul's just finished college, he's done bits of work with record sleeves, but mostly book design. Really very beautiful minimalist stuff. Very pure white space with interesting use of text.

Montreal performance/installation press release

Montreal festival - ticket info

other Scanner live dates



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Scanner+Tonne - Sound Polaroids: Remapping the Hidden Sounds of the City.

This project is a movement towards remapping a city that in a sense is invisible through its familiarity, and in so doing reveal it in a new way. Collaboratively Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) + Tonne (Paul Farrington) will produce a cinematic performance that examines the textures and beauties of sound and image in the city of Montreal.

Through excavating the hidden sounds of a city, uncovering new meanings and experiences within it, an urban space can be exposed with fresh eyes and ears and an audience can clearly recognise a direct relationship between methods of recording information, processing and transformation through the use of digital technology, and the subsequent potentials of its application. Image will form sound, sound will write a new language of the city.

Digital images, still and moving, will be located and photographed in the city of Montreal and collated. A map of a city, of narrative and place will be built in the process, language and location playing a key part. This data will then be processed using software that gives one the ability to paint with sound and compose with light. Such a graphical approach will allow us to import and playback the digital images we have taken across the city and use the painting tools within the programme to filter and shape images directly within the frame.

This would be then taken one stage further. These 'photographic sounds' would be entered into a computer program that 'writes' the sounds by interpreting the acoustic data and outputs a text/typeface based on the sounds themselves. A new form of language would be formed from the slight shifts in tone and shape and re-assemble the fragments of a city into a language born from its wow and flutter.

The live performance would be an improvisatory filmic interpretation of the process - photographically processed sounds would meld with image, projected text and image would extend this new digital language of the city into a visual display allowing the audience to experience the diction of the city image through sound in a unified sensuous encounter.



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28th edition of the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media (FCMM)

FESTIVAL INFO
Advanced sales at Ex-Centris beginning October 9. Single tickets : $7
Booklet of 10 coupons (catalogue included): $55
Festival Passport : $150 (good for all screenings and performances).
For more information, call Info Festival at (514) 847-1242 or visit the website

In the 28th edition of the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media (FCMM), independent cinema and new media are brought together for the third consecutive year, further exploring the ground between past and present. From October 14 to 24 the FCMM is presenting nearly 200 works from 34 countries : 55 features, 82 short and medium-length films, and some 50 new media productions.

NEW MEDIA at the Media Lounge at Ex-Centris, October 15 to 23
The New Media section returns in an enhanced Media Lounge format. More than a fleeting look at emerging trends, Media Lounge has become over the years a celebratory probe of new artistic currents. Some fifty productions were selected by Alain Mongeau to reflect the latest developments in the surging field of new media : performances (9 evenings), 5 installations, and 20 projects.

Among the daily performances at 9 p.m. are the following high points :
Atmosphere de Berlin, on the opening night of the 15th with members of the mythical Berlin label Chain Reaction (Germany);

Sound Polaroids 2 in which London artist Scanner, together with Tonne (Great Britain), offer a unique creation based on the alteration of multiple images and sounds pre-recorded in Montreal's urban environment (16th);

Farmers Manual (Austria), a sound-image synthesis performed in real time in a kind of audiovisual-cybernetic laboratory in which viewers are faced with an increasingly dehumanized stage peopled by machines slipping into madness...(17th);

The Birds Are Coming! by Martin TŽtreault, Robert Marcel Lepage, RŽal La Rochelle and Jean-SŽbastien Durocher (Canada), a collage of images and sounds, an essay-lecture on the triumph of sound in the history of cinema (18th);

The Wonderful World of Ron and Safy (Germany/Israel), a virtuoso improvisation in sound-image "scratch" that recombines the planetary heritage of current events, news reports and documentary films... (19th);

Video Groove, a foray into electronic art with an explosive panorama of avant-garde clips compiled by the London collective CINEFEEL (20th);

AFASIA, with Marcel L’ Antœnez Roca manipulating in real time the actions of strange robots, sounds, lights and projected images in a dazzling multimedia interpretation of The Odyssey (21st and 22nd);

Closing the Media Lounge on the 23rd is TILT, an end-of-millennium audio and visual blowout with multimedia performances by Locust (Great Britain) and Eboman (Holland), along with the VJ SNIPER project by Safy;

And for inveterate night owls, a series of "night capsules" with local DJs and musicians (not to be missed: the heralded return of Richie Hawtin, who won a Best New Media prize at the 1998 FCMM).



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SCANNER LIVE DATES

Oct
17 Ottawa - live show
29 Nouvelles Scenes festival in Dijon at l'Usine with Pole
30 ICA FREE talk - 16:00 about the installation. "Come and ask difficult questions."

Nov
6 Karlsruhe Germany ZKM
18 Holland - November Music Festival with Pierre Henry et al
20 Ghent : November Music Festival
24 Thun / Mokka / Switzerland
25 Torino / Italy
26 Venice/Festival / Italy
27 Bologna/Link / Italy
28 Basel/CH / Kaserne
29 Wurzburg Galerie / Germany
30 Nurnberg / Desi Germany

Dec
1 Frankfurt / Mille Plateaux show (tbc)
2 Cologne/Germany - GebŠude
3 Hamburg/Germany - Hafenklang
4 Berlin/Germany- WMF/Festival



Scanner's new album Lauwarm Instrumentals

Scanner's new Sulfur/Sulphur label

Scanner's website