Audiotopie, laureates
Founded in 2008, Audiotopie is a cooperative of artists in the fields of new media, electro-acoustic music and urban design. Audiotopie designs immersive sound works that are closely connected to physical spaces, through creation of sensory experiences. The creative process employed by Audiotopie begins with an analysis of urban atmospheres, landscape and social interactions. A script is then written, using the outcomes of the analysis, that expresses the inherent specificities of the urban environment. In the final step, an electro-acoustic music score is composed to sonically harmonize the physical space with the narrative elements.
Audiotopie also forges collaborative endeavours with communities that have divergent outlooks on the city. These itineraries are a way for observers to step into the shoes of a third party and discover a space through different eyes. These stages result in a contextualized path that invites the listener on a contemplative stroll providing for auditory and poetic experimentation of a particular urban environment. By analogy, the work becomes a “nomadic movie” in which the viewer is truly involved in the action, with the artificial moving pictures replaced by reality—but reality augmented by a narrative, musical thread.
Yannick Guéguen
Yannick Guéguen is a landscape architect and digital media artist. He has a master’s degree in Planning (“Design and Complexity” option) from Université de Montréal, and has also studied landscape architecture and visual arts at the Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore in Grenoble, the École nationale supérieure du paysage in Versailles, and the École nationale supérieure d’arts, Paris Cergy. He specializes in design methods, principally those involving in situ itineraries as well as analysis of atmospheres and social interactions. He writes and produces scripts for Audiotopie. He also performs urban and prospective analyses for projects.
Education
Master’s degree in Planning (“Design and Complexity” option)
Université de Montréal
[email protected]
audiotopie.com
Thierry Gauthier
Composer and multidisciplinary artist Thierry Gauthier earned his bachelor’s degree in Electro-acoustic Composition from Université de Montréal and is also trained in computer-assisted sound design. His approach is to apply novel creative processes and decompose raw material into fragments that reveal unexpected qualities. His collaborations with Audiotopie are in video production, wherein he combines animation techniques applied to photographs with embedding of imagery in superimposed layers.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Electro-acoustic Composition
Université de Montréal
[email protected]
audiotopie.com
Étienne Legast
Composer and sound artist Étienne Legast has a bachelor’s degree in Electro-acoustic Composition from Université de Montréal. His specialty is improvisation and real-time music processing, and he has a particular fondness for experimental music. Within Audiotopie, he is responsible for musical creation, focusing on contextualization of sound and recomposition of soundscapes. He also contributes to the development of geolocation-based mobile applications dedicated to auditory experience, as well as mobile sound distribution systems.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Electro-acoustic Composition
Université de Montréal
