CHANTAL DUMAS
La mesure du temps
2013
Biography
Montreal artist Chantal Dumas, an adept of field recording, explores the medium of sound through installations, fiction, radio fiction-documentary and electroacoustics. Her works stem from, and revolve around, sounds captured in the immediate environment or certain targeted sites. Dumas has created over twenty-five radio projects using various narration modes. Her works can be perceived as ambulations through different spaces: mental or physical, architectural or urban, natural or cultural. In addition to her numerous radio projects, the artist makes use of sound installations to question the relationship between mobility, sound, space and the listener. Her works have been widely broadcast by public radio stations abroad, primarily in Europe, and presented at numerous festivals in Canada and overseas. They have also earned her several distinctions: in 2010, she received the Prix Opus from the Conseil québécois de la musique in the category “Concert of the Year: Electroacoustic and musique actuelle.” She also received the Bohemia Prize from Czech Public Radio in 2010, as well as the Prix de la fiction (1997) and the Grand prix du documentaire (2000) awarded by the French association Phonurgia Nova.
About Avatar
It was from a distance that I discovered Avatar, its mail first reaching me in Marseille. Avatar: an enigmatic name, an artist centre in Quebec City with artistic proposals that were at once bold, inventive, amusing, open-minded, serious, imaginative, dynamic, unconventional, non-hierarchic, provocative and conceptual. Artistic creation was seen as a vast field of possibilities with unlimited boundaries. Sound was at the centre of its interests and research. I immediately joined in the enthusiasm!
I worked with Avatar in various avatars: as an employee, Board member, member of God’ar (Le Grand orchestre d'Avatar), artist, instigator of its Excavations sonores, promotion woman. With great pride, I also made the first sale of the OHM Éditions collection to the Bibliothèque Gabrielle-Roy in Quebec City and to the Phonothèque de Montréal, motivated by a desire to spread the good news. To be part of an organization like Avatar was to be involved, on numerous levels, in the fundamental questions of art.
Joining up with Avatar was a chance to explore and define a new disciplinary field. To compare ideas, genres, aesthetics, ways of creating and producing. To be stimulated by approaches that you didn’t always subscribe to, but accepted nonetheless because of the seriousness of the research. Avatar, in fact, was and is a laboratory in sync with the concerns of the artists who give it life.
About the work
La mesure du temps reflects the passage of time, heard through the human measuring of seconds. Guided by the paces of clocks and stopwatches, metronomes and diverse mechanical or electronic timers, the participants experience the rhythmic performance of some hundred of them. To the relative irregularity of these time-measuring devices is added a difficulty of articulation: the rhythmic changes and the degree of interiorization. And yet each person finds and follows, at his or her own rhythm, the pulsations of time.
This work was based on 86400 secondes, a sound installation employing sixteen speakers, which premiered in August 2013 at Espace [IM] Média, a biennial digital arts and culture festival produced by Sporobole centre en art actuel in Sherbrooke, Quebec.