In this DEMO, Max Boutin, a postdoctoral member, and Julien Paccard, a French Berlin-based artist invited for the occasion, reflect on the work they carried out as a duo. \ e.ko \ is an exploratory residency project centered on the musicality of skateboarding sounds and the textural experience of urban materiality. Their collaboration led to the creation of new works that combine the performativity of skateboarding, artistic performance, and musical composition, which were presented in the residency’s culminating exhibition, also titled \ e.ko \ .
Conducted at Hexagram-UQAM, the project brings into resonance earlier bodies of work by Julien Paccard and Max Boutin, a key point of connection that had already emerged in the latter’s doctoral research. Born in the same year (1988), the two artists share numerous artistic, conceptual, and process-oriented affinities, particularly an attention to urban surfaces and their sensory relationship with skateboarding, which they approach as a tool for perception. Through their urban drifts and explorations, they seek to reveal what skateboarding can disclose through movement: texture, vibrations, sounds, and the traces produced by its performative engagement with space.
Skate-Arts Residency1
From June 1 to 12, 2026, their complementarity was further refined during a research-creation residency in the experimental space of Hexagram-UQAM.
The main objective was to bring together their respective expertise in amplified skateboards, as both artists had independently developed different ways of creating music from skateboard movements. Julien Paccard employed a primarily analog approach, using elements borrowed from the world of the guitar (effects pedals, strings, tuning pegs, wireless transmitters, and contact microphones). In contrast, Max Boutin developed a more digital method through his SkateMic’s prototypes: skateboards equipped with integrated wireless contact microphones connected to music production interfaces for live performance. This exploratory phase thus involved DIY audio, 3D printing, analog and digital signal-processing chains, skateboards, and live performative experimentation.
At once dissonant and harmonious, their experimental approaches led them to explore together, through practice, the notion of dialogue \ djalɔg \ between musicians and skateboarders. This process resulted in two performances entitled Dialectique discursive and De concert, two works that invite reflection on language, its limits, and the ways in which audiences perceive it. In this context, discourse is no longer composed of words, but of trajectories, speeds, pauses, and sonic events.
At the same time, their live compositional explorations and field recordings also led them to create a first acousmatic work in collaboration with Isaak Paul-Rivest.
[1] In his doctoral research, Max Boutin developed a mapping of “Art-skate” practices, a term that has since evolved into “Skate-Arts.”
As he explains in his dissertation, this movement encompasses works produced within a contemporary artistic framework that reflects the issues, contexts, and lived realities of skateboarding.
Skate-Arts are inherently multidisciplinary, as they are created either by artists who are also skateboarders or by observers with a deep familiarity with skateboarding culture. Their research interests may nevertheless extend beyond disciplinary boundaries, as was the case in this residency, transforming artistic practice into an interdisciplinary approach in which the concerns of skateboarding and creative production are intrinsically connected. Skate-Arts move beyond the purely aesthetic representations generally associated with “skate-art,” a practice often limited to artistic expression in two dimensions and using the skateboard deck as a support or canvas (Boutin, 2025, p. 129).
BIG O
Max Boutin, Julien Paccard & Isaak Paul-Rivest BIG O, 2026
Acousmatic work for a 32-speaker dome Neumann KH 120 & KH 310 studio monitors, Kling & Freitag CA 1001 stage monitors Variable dimensions, 6 min. 20 s
BIG O is a sound work composed from recordings captured during a skate session between Max Boutin and Julien Paccard within the distinctive acoustics of the Big O, one of Montréal’s legendary skateboarding spots.
The piece offers an immersive experience of the site’s natural reverberation, where the sounds of a skateboarder are projected throughout the speaker dome. It evolves from simple gestures, such as a wheel circling around the audience or the rhythmic crack of a tail probing the space, before becoming more embodied through the sound of wheels travelling along the textured curved walls. Listeners hear these movements passing from one side to the other, punctuated by metallic grind accents and slides across concrete.
While this work originates from an encounter between the artists and an iconic pipe, what ultimately matters is neither the specific location nor the ego of the skateboarders who inhabit it, but rather the way the gesture merges with space to reveal its sonic qualities.
The spatialization of this sonic material within the dome was created by Isaak Paul-Rivest, himself a skateboarder and keen connoisseur of the Big O’s acoustics. This dual expertise made it possible to move beyond simple technical diffusion and extend, within the dome environment, the very intention of the captured gesture.
Dialectique discursive
Max Boutin & Julien Paccard Dialectique Discursive, 2026
Performance Skate microphones, guitar, DIY synthesizer, electronic drum kit, live transmission system (camera and 65-inch display), stage monitors, computer, cabling Variable dimensions, 30 min
Dialectique discursive is a collaborative performance that questions the limits of language through the interaction of skateboarders and musicians in an experimental jam taking place within a shared space.
Three skateboards equipped with contact microphones and wireless transmitters (SkateMic’s) are connected to the audio tracks of three instruments within a music production software environment. The skateboards are made available to members of the local skateboarding community, who are invited to participate in the instrumental dialogue. Whenever a skateboard is in motion, the track associated with its instrument is opened; when it comes to a stop, the track closes.
The work becomes a composition for three instruments activated by skateboards. An uncontrolled, unintentional language in which linguistic codes remain ambiguous. The skateboarders never hear the music in its entirety; the musicians never see all of the gestures that activate it. Each perceives the other only in fragments. Yet from this mutual partial listening emerges a collective voice, an incomplete new language. Only the audience can apprehend it from another room, where both the performance and its audio mix are broadcast live through a screen and loudspeakers. A dialogue unbeknownst to its own interlocutors. An experimental language.
De Concertis an instrumental interaction between a guitar producing melancholic, ambient chords and a skateboard equipped with a contact microphone and wireless transmitter (SkateMic’). In this performance, the duo formed by the two artists can be understood both as a complementarity and as a duel with almost Western-like overtones, where the skateboard’s movements, board slaps, skids, bigspins, and kickflips answer the call of the guitar.
Gradually, the sounds emanating from the skateboard are modulated through filters, blurring the boundary between response and harmony. Their altered timbre in turn redefines the intention of the gesture, as the skateboarder adjusts speed, trajectory, and tricks according to the inflections of the guitar and to what he hears being transformed beneath his wheels.
Little by little, there are no longer two instruments, but a single gesture embodied by two bodies. As the skateboard ceases to respond to the guitar and instead merges with it, it becomes impossible to tell, through listening alone, who is responding to whom, as the two artists perform de concert (together). Quite literally.
Exhibition
Upon completion of the residency, the works produced were presented alongside earlier projects in the eponymous exhibition \ e.ko \, held from June 18 to 20, 2026, at the Agora of the Coeur des sciences.
First, Texturologie vibratoire, itération #5 by Max Boutin, whose first version was the subject of DEMO22, a videographic, sonic, and haptic experiential multimedia installation. The installation offers a sensory transposition of the act of skateboarding across urban surfaces. Audiences are invited to immerse themselves in a large-scale projection, embodying the non-human perspective of a skateboard gliding close to the ground, while simultaneously experiencing the vibrations of skateboarding directly through their feet and legs via a platform equipped with tactile transducers.
Next, the exhibition featured GRRRND Zero by Julien Paccard, a multichannel video installation presented in a new version. Composed of seven skate films dedicated to seven urban materials (mosaic, wood, stone, marble, brick, metal, and glass), the work pairs each screen with a specific texture and soundscape constructed from the acoustic properties of the material being explored.
In synchrony, the various elements of the installation form a complex ensemble conceived as a visual, musical, and textural score, offering a polyphonic and poetic reading of urban territory. The musical structure was created by Julien Paccard in collaboration with skateboarder and musician Tommy Buder (Jena, Germany).
Finally, the exhibition space was punctuated by several skateboard-based artworks, including embossed prints from Max Boutin’s Texturologie Prints series, as well as new paintings from Julien Paccard’s Traces series, produced during the residency through skate sessions shared by the two artists.
Boutin, Max. (2025). TEXTUROLOGIES : Une transposition visuelle, sonore et haptique de la matérialité urbaine de Montréal par le skateboard dans une installation multimédia art-skate. Archipel, Université du Québec à Montréal. https://archipel.uqam.ca/19151/
Chion, Michel. (1995). Guide des objets sonores : Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (rev. ed.). Buchet Chastel.
O’Connor, Paul, Glenney, Brian et Boutin, Max. (2025). The skater’s ear: A sensuous complexity of skateboarding sound. Sport and Society journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2024.2446115
Schnebel, Dieter. (2017). Son et corps. Les presses du Réel.
Walsh, Barry et Tison, Marc (2006). Pipe Fiends, a visual overdose of Canada’s most infamous skate spot. Media Mudscout.
Max Boutin is a French-born Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal, holding a Master’s degree from Mo.Co. Esba (2013) and a Ph.D. in Art Studies and Practices from UQAM (2025). For more than a decade, he has developed an installation, video, and sound-based practice driven by a poetics of movement: capturing the sensory experience of a territory, its spaces, and its materialities, and translating it through sound, image, and motion.
His doctoral dissertation explores the texture of urban surfaces through the subjectivity of skateboarding, conceived as a geohaptic interface and an instrument that reveals the city’s hidden sonic qualities. This research led him to map Skate-Arts, an emerging artistic movement. He is currently pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship in musical composition at the Formes.Ondes Laboratory (Université de Montréal), further developing this sonic approach.
Supported by Hexagram and the Fonds de recherche du Québec, his work has notably been presented at Ars Electronica and the FIMAV.
Julien Paccard (*1988) is a self-taught French conceptual artist living and working in Berlin. His practice spans a variety of media, including painting, photography, cyanotype, and synchronized video installations. Music occupies a central place in his work, which explores the dynamics of interaction within groups and the forms of organization they develop through their own distinct languages.
Credits
Texts : Max Boutin & Julien Paccard Coordination and technical installation : Max Boutin Documentation and editing : Julien Paccard @texturologies @julienpaccard
Acknowledgements
This residency was conducted as part of Max Boutin’s postdoctoral fellowship in musical composition at the Formes.Ondes Laboratory of the Université de Montréal, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, Society and Culture sector (FRQSC).
Special thanks to the Hexagram team, particularly Jason Pomrenski for his technical support and trust. Heartfelt thanks also to Isaak Paul-Rivest for this rewarding first collaboration, to Nicolas Bernier for his expertise in composition and supervision, and to Pierre-François Ouellette for his contribution to the visibility and dissemination of our work.
Thanks as well to the Montréal skateboarding community, especially Jean-Yves Ginchereau and Félix Fecteau-Gauthier & friends.
Finally, thank you to everyone who took part in the performance Dialectique discursive: Frédéric Roverselli (guitar), Hubert Lamarre (DIY synthesizer), Charles-Antoine Arcand (electronic drums), Frédérique Luyet, Yann Pequignot, Mathieu DeBlois, Carl Cloutier, Jérémie Ménard, Camilio Furlan, Max Boutin, and Julien Paccard (skateboards).
