ALEXANDER MACSWEEN and PAUL LITHERLAND
Musical and visual performances
Paul Litherland is a visual artist whose work in photography and multimedia addresses the themes of vulnerability and machismo. A recent work entitled Security/Insecurity (48 hours / 48 artists, Montreal, 1999) linked security guards sleeping on the ground with the image of a pruned but healthy tree floating above their heads.
Alexander MacSween is a musician and composer. As a drummer, he performs with the quintet Sloth is the Love and the duo Detention. As a composer, he recently worked with choreographer Stéphane Deligny for whom he composed the music for the piece Anamnesis, presented in January 2001 at the Calixa-Lavallée Centre.
In this age of "hypercommunication", not being in contact is an aberration, if not an impossibility! However, this type of communication implies a loss of materiality. We are almost reduced to being transmitters of messages and our physical presence becomes almost incidental, even embarrassing.
In the performance entitled 01, the digital flow is slowed down and made visible. Artist Paul Litherland and musician Alexander MacSween are installed at their drums equipped with electronic contacts and send messages to a computer. Using the rhythms of the drums converted into binary code, the drummers can choose to spell words, create texts from predetermined word lists and link them to images projected on two screens, one for each performer.
Paul Litherland's concerns lead him to question and understand this primary need of man, a need that lives in us all, the need to be heard, to be understood. The technical means we have developed produce and broadcast a phenomenal quantity of messages, but this proliferation ends up deafening the listener, placing him, at the limit, off-circuit.
Paul Litherland is a visual artist whose work in photography and multimedia addresses the themes of vulnerability and machismo. A recent work entitled Security/Insecurity (48 hours / 48 artists, Montreal, 1999) linked security guards sleeping on the ground with the image of a pruned but healthy tree floating above their heads.
Alexander MacSween is a musician and composer. As a drummer, he performs with the quintet Sloth is the Love and the duo Detention. As a composer, he recently worked with choreographer Stéphane Deligny for whom he composed the music for the piece Anamnesis, presented in January 2001 at the Calixa-Lavallée Centre.