Thursday, May 7, 2026
3 – 9:30 p.m.
Free
In person or
Live Streamed

Mezzanine of the Cœur des sciences Agora
Université du Québec à Montréal
175 Président-Kennedy ave
Montreal
Directions

3 – 5 p.m. │ First Concert Series

With:

• Fanny Pimpurniaux (Rouyn-Noranda),
• Chantal Dumas (Montreal)
• Marsol (Soledad Coyoli & Marwan Sekkat, Montreal)
• Jérôme Joy (Saint-Nazaire)

5 – 6 p.m. │ Roundtable with the composers

Moderation : Éric Létourneau

6 – 7 p.m. │ Break

7 – 9 p.m. │ Second Concert Series

With:

• Kasey Pocius (Montreal)
• Jean-Ambroise Vesac (Rouyn-Noranda)
• Vagin Soleil (Saint-Alphonse-Rodriguez)
• Volkmar Klien* (Vienne)
• Simon-Pierre Gourd (Montreal)

9 – 9:30 p.m. │ LASER Performance

By Augur’s Wand (Montreal)

Augur’s Wand is the visual music duo of composer Kristian North (Student Member, Concordia) and artist-engineer Mike Cassidy. Using Phosphene, their custom synthesizer, they animate kinetic audio-laser performances where sound, colour, and form emerge from a shared electrical pulse. Extending the archaeological lineage of signal-based media, they seek transcendence of audio-visual hierarchies by prioritizing felt atmospheres and synaesthetic form constants.

The singer‑composer Soledad Coyoli grew up surrounded by the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, their grandmother’s sculptures, the figures of La Malinche and La Llorona, the spare robot parts from their uncle’s workshop, and the sacred music their father listened to. Their sound practice draws on the tradition of Mexican song and focuses on encounters between different voices, languages, cultures, and technologies, as well as on Náhuatl identity roots (her name means “little bell” in Náhuatl). A recipient of the UNESCO‑ASCHBERG award in 2014, their music has been presented in some of Mexico’s most important cultural institutions, including the MUAC (University Museum of Contemporary Art), the Franz Mayer Museum, and the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City. Since their arrival in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, their work has taken a new direction: the voice and the body as unique, singular, and non‑reproducible territories, but also as fluid, mysterious, mutable, and collaborative materials.

Montreal‑based sound artist Chantal Dumas has been exploring the medium of sound for over 30 years. Her work forms a personal, intimate, and distinctive practice expressed through narration, soundscapes, composition, listening journeys, and installations. Recurring themes of space, time, and territory reveal a strong environmental awareness alongside a sustained interest in listening. She was awarded the Studio du Québec in New York (CALQ) in 2011 and the Studio des Récollets in Paris (CALQ) in 2016, and has held numerous residencies, including at Banff, Sporobole, Oboro, Avatar, AdMare, and New Adventure in Sound Art. Dumas received the Opus Award in electroacoustic music (2009), as well as the Bohemia and Phonurgia Nova radio awards. Her album Oscillations planétaires was a finalist for the Opus Album of the Year (2019–20). Her work is widely broadcast and presented internationally. She regularly leads cultural mediation projects and collaborates as a sound designer on multidisciplinary artistic works.

A composer and professor of sound creation in the Immersive and Interactive Experience Design and Experimental Media programs, as well as in Film Music, Simon-Pierre Gourd is a co-founder of the Institut Universitaire des Nouveaux Médias, now known as Hexagram. His research focuses on the development of interactive and immersive systems, as well as on the study of issues related to sound in the context of new technologies. He is particularly interested in the perception of sound language and the representational phenomena emerging from current practices, notably immersive audio art, as well as the preservation of works and technological artifacts resulting from artistic practices and the methodology of research-creation. He is a founding member of GRMS. He has created works in various fields: acousmatic music, immersive music, sound creations for new media, film, radio, television, theater, visual arts, and dance. His works have been presented in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Artist, musician, composer, improviser, performer, and writer, Jérôme Joy develops a practice that is radically oriented toward experimental, electronic, and instrumental music. His work unfolds through performances, concerts, narratives, scores, video, and radio, exploring the zones of crisis, limitation, and instability inherent to sound. He is particularly interested in still largely unexplored registers of music‑making, dissemination, sensation, emotion, and perception. For the past decade, writing has formed a second acoustic environment within his practice, through the concepts of work‑as‑environment, background listening, and text‑as‑score. The initiator of numerous international projects—including Sobralasolas!, Collective JukeBox, RadioMatic, nocinema.org, and NMSAT—he is currently leading several initiatives around “art and contexts” emerging from extended music practices. He co‑directed the Locus Sonus laboratory and is a member of several collectives and ensembles dedicated to noise and experimental music.

ⒸEric Sneed

Growing up in Vienna Volkmar Klien spent his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background, Volkmar Klien today strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. He works in various areas of the audible and occasionally inaudible arts, navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.

Fanny Pimpurniaux develops a practice at the intersection of digital art and immersive environments. A graduate in digital creation and new media, she designs experiences that bring together sound, image, and space within sensitive and interactive frameworks. Her work goes beyond aesthetic research; it engages with questions about the limits of technology and the systems that shape our perception. Through immersive installations, she explores processes of transformation in which media intersect, translate into one another, and recombine. By creating unstable and evolving environments, she invites audiences to experience perception as something in constant flux, and to question how they inhabit and understand reality.

Kasey Pocius is a gender-fluid intermedia artist and researcher based in Montreal, teaching at Concordia and active within CIRMMT, IDMIL, LePARC, and GRMS. They create electroacoustic and audiovisual works that explore interactive electronics, spatial sound, and collaborative improvisation, with pieces presented internationally, from DIY spaces to Harvard.

ⒸTommy Davis

Marwan Sekkat is a French-Moroccan interdisciplinary artist based in Quebec. After earning a bachelor’s degree in audiovisual science in France, he completed a master’s degree in digital creation at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue in 2018. His artistic research has been supported by Galerie Jano Lapin and the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), as well as by the Sagamie Centre in Alma, and soon by the Bang Centre in Chicoutimi. His work has been exhibited at L’Écart, Eastern Bloc, the Biosphère, Livart, the Centre d’exposition Léo-Ayotte in Shawinigan, and in public art events such as REGARDE! and Mémoire de l’avenir.

Vagin Soleil proposes to dismantle any conceptual ambition and to regard Diderot-Québec as a convulsion within the transbiographical history of the Holy-Ethic. By altering the lower black body (or “the case of the black edge”), the materiality of antimatter, and the impermanence of economic evolution, the collective celebrates fleeting moments in which culture attempts to defile the commodity. Vagin Soleil brings together musicians—tangible or intangible—including Karen Eliott Trudeau and Monty Cantsin Lehman, mysterious and talented figures from the underground and exploratory music scenes in Quebec and Poland since the 1980s.

Jean-Ambroise Vesac is a researcher, educator, and digital creation artist at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT). His work explores mixed realities, human-machine interaction dynamics, and forms of cultural hybridization, notably through interactive audiovisual performance in virtual environments.

Chantier Performa