Anyse Ducharme

Complex Waves @ Fubar's Fauxbar, Zagreb

Last October I got the chance to do a performance artist talk during Format C's Fubar Festival, over the internet. Below is an excerpt of the performance, connecting folks in a multi-country digital sound glitch jam session.

I'm sitting here, in my dad's garage in Hanmer Canada, connecting with folks in Zagreb Croatia.

I think of you often @ School of Machines

I think of you often, is the culmination of a learning experience at the School of Machines, Making & Make Believe this summer.  Throughout this experience I learned to work with different boards (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Bela.io), as well as many sensors (capacitive touch sensors, ultrasonic distance sensors, light dependant resistors)  and actuators (LEDs, RGB LEDs, servo motors).  All of which culminated in this work shown outdoors in public space in Berlin during 'Inside Outside: Interactive Artwork in Public Space', in July 2023.

I'd like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.

Complex Waves in  
Virtual Encounters @LOMAA

curated by Christine Negus


March—Kite and David Yu
Artists in conversation on Sunday, March 5, 2023, at 3 p.m. EST

April—Anyse Ducharme and Jacob Wren
Live performance and artists in conversation on Sunday, April 2, 2023, at 3 p.m. EST

May—Raven Chacon & John Dieterich and Ellen Moffat
Live performance and artists in conversation TBA

June—Jerron Herman and Autumn Knight
Artists in conversation on Sunday, June 4, 2023, at 3 p.m. ES

Painted Flower Pot, 2022

‘Complex Waves’ is a series of experiments in sound performance. I have been mashing together complex sounds from locations that have had an influence on me over the past 3 years into sine wave glitches with the use of internet based video communication platforms (Zoom, etc). Connecting to the same platform through both a hotspot tethered computer and a cell phone allowed me and the surrounding area to create a sonic loop.

Audio Description: High pitch sounds, sonic loops, circular beats, glitch sounds, cracking floors


Semi-Enclosed Ocean, 2023
A Mountain Above Pack Ice, 2023
Frozen Water Formations, 2023

Carrying Over @N2M2L

This installation was created to help N2M2L celebrate their move to a new space, carrying over their expansive past experience into a lovely, bright new workspace.



Move-out.wav
Clipped recording of the N2M2L team moving out of their previous location with reverb & delay.

Move-in.wav
Clipped recording of the N2M2L team moving in to their new offices.

Coding using open source software ‘Pure Data’
This code switches from both the move-out.wav and move-in.wav audio tracks according to the frequency of sound in real time, in the room.

Glitch Animations
I saved 80 frames from a video recording of N2M2L’s move in to their new offices into separate 32bit tiff files. I opened up each tiff file with a text editor and added language from N2M2L’s new lease into the code of each image. I then converted each new glitch into 8 bit files, ordered them in their original sequence and exported the animation into a blue-tinted gif file, to be played on a web browser.

Computer Background Images
These 2 frames can be found in each Glitch Animation.

Code Windows
In these 2 windows you can find the digital negative or the code of the Computer Background Images.

Photograph of the new space, unglitched
This is a still in a video of the newly set up room.

I’ve swear i’ve followed the instruction but my heart can’t close

model: Rihkee Strapp

A material and social glitch, a fashion show, a conversation.

Western mediated sources continue to extract monetarily from bodies by promoting those who represent only 5% of the population. In regards to fat representation, things have recently started to change, perhaps in part due to social media’s ability to connect and create community. Youtube - an example of the hopeful politics of Web 1.0 now transformed and monetized into Web 2.0 with targeted ads etc - is perhaps an example of a shift in this structure of mediation; prior forms of mediation such as television advertisement + programming were critiqued or maybe internalized more locally. The platform has allowed many to connect, to critique, but also to reinforce problematic cycles.

‘I’ve swear i’ve followed the instruction but my heart can’t close’ is looking at this shift in mediation: the platform’s history of extending connection and creating community, the support this has provided, as well as the platform’s archive of problematic rhetoric.

model: Cameron Ghent

I’d like to thank The Canada Council for the Arts + the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

I’d also like to thank Gallery 101, Cindy Baker, Cara Tierney, Laura Margita, Danielle Tremblay, Rah, Rihkee Strapp, Cameron Ghent, Kim Kitchen, Robin McDonald, Alexander Rondeau, Elia Eliev, Andrea Campbell and Larry Weyand for all of the conversations + help over the course of this research-creation project.

Intagram Takeover @ N2M2L, I’ve swear i’ve followed the instruction but my heart can’t close

This work is engaged with technological functioning as material processes, data visualization, internet commentary and craft.

To make the necklace, I sourced a comment found under a video of someone crocheting a heart on YouTube. I inserted this comment in the ASCII code of the image (ASCII is a character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet). The algorithm of the software reads the intrusion (comment) as if it was part of the ASCII and changes the image accordingly. This glitch process adheres to the proper functioning of the computer system, but interjects data from a social + mediated system of communication. The image transforms into a lush landscape of semi-randomized pixels and colours.

In the resulting glitch image, I found a formation of pixels and extruded an elevation from the data found in each pixel’s HEX colour code. Every pixel has a colour, every colour has a number - every number becomes a point of elevation in the topography of the formation of pixels. The 3D model produced by this process was printed using bioplastics. What would have become part of a sweater was transferred into data and became a necklace. It adorns and envelops the body with a whole new set of signifiers.

Iteration of 'I’ve swear i’ve followed the instruction but my heart can’t close' for fundraiser exhibition in support of the Tina Dolter Gallery in Corner Brook NL, Mi’kmaw territory.

Collaborative Sound, Media Art Network of Ontario's Cold Waters Symposium

documentation of collaborative sound performance during Media Art Network or Ontario's Cold Waters Symposium in 2019, still from videography by Cameron Lamothe


I was meant to mic some trees and create a site specific web of sounds, but... we got rained out. The festival organizers found a venue at St John the Divine, an Anglican church downtown North Bay. So, instead of trees, I mic-ed the benches and invited everyone in the room to make some sounds, throwing each bench's sound accross the room on an 8 speaker set up.

St-Louis de Zig-Zag, Foire d'Art Alternatif de Sudbury 6

documentation visuelle du processus et de l'installation St-Louis de Zig-Zag, lors de la Foire d'Art Alternatif de Sudbury, 2018

Organized by la Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario, the festival invited many artist run centers accross the country to engage and invite an artist to participate. I was invited by Gallery 101 to create a site-specific work over the course of a week during the 6th edition of the festival. The theme was asking for a consideration of our positions and responsibilities in relation to the land. Having grown up as a franco-settler about an hour away from Sudbury, I didn't know much about école St-Louis de Gonzague (the site of the festival), so I did a bit of research and learned that the elementary school had an interesting history in language education for the franco-ontarian community. I decided to mic the building in an attempt to engage with the building (on unceded territory), the structure (its' historical and current state) and with our sonic presences walking through the de-commissioned school.

In the following documentation there are signs with the words Unceded Territory painted on them. This work was created by Debajehmujig Storytellers and was installed throughout the building as well as outdoors.

Unceded Territory by Debajehmujig Storytellers, 2018






The title of the piece 'St-Louis de Zig-Zag' was borrowed from a chant children would sing in the school yard when the school was still in operation (told to me by someone who went to the school).


Merci au conseil des arts de l'Ontario pour la bourse d'aide aux expositions.

to slow down, to contain, to drift, shift + slide data within and outside the computer apparatus

This work is one of many processes, starting with the fabrication of a hydrophone to record the sounds of the melting ice on the Sturgeon River. The recordings were imported into a computer, shifted into a 3D model, printed with bioplastics, moulded with silicone, filled with water, frozen into ice, put onto a mirror on a pedestal and left to melt + evaporate into air.

a sound shaped drift

installation at the Middlesbrough Art Weekender - The Auxiliary POPUP space, England, 2017

a pliant twig beneath the sea is turned to stone above

These Data Shiftings were created off of the data contained in these audio excerpts, recorded with a hydrophone that I've fabricated. Below are excerpts of the audio, and a 3D printed formation of the pixels created off the sound data. The recordings were made on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territory, at Jericho Beach in Vancouver.

   

on the velocity of its' working parts

My first data shifting in vertical form. I recorded the audio of Marx's Kapital being read out to a big red empty room at the 2015 Venice Biennale. I then shifted a constellation of pixels in the visualisation of the sound into a small red bioplastic object. I commodified the shifting into necklace form along with a certificate of authenticity that states the phrase recorded in order to make this formation : on the velocity of its' working parts.

que l'espace s'effondre

'Anyse Ducharme evinces a similar interest in fragmentation and the interface between the image and its material support, but focused within the digital realms of data and image translation and processing rather than the physical world of the body and its (mis) representations. Often sourcing her raw materials from the web, Ducharme translates her chosen images and texts into code, splicing variant syntaxes (digital, textual) and generating out of this now glitch-ridden linguistic hybrid a new entity which is neither-and both-visual, textual, virtual, actual, and/or representative of anything real except the process of its own making. And yet it is in the artifacts and effects of the process-what gets lost and found in translation between sources and products-that meaning resides.

For instance, in creating que l'espace s'effondre (of collapsing space), Ducharme traces light's pathway between multiple layers of reality. Working from digital images containing screen-based reflections, she isolates the erratic forms, which themselves are based in continuously shifting conditions specific to the source and site of image and screen, and processes them in preparation for printing at monumental scale onto sheets of crystal clear polyester. The resulting image therefore originates in the emission of photons from photographed object to its entry into a capture by camera, to their translation into pixels and representation on backlit screen, to their interaction and combination with reflections on the screen's surface, to their selection and translation into ink on a clear substrate, to their interaction and combination with reflections from lighting in the gallery space, and finally to their entry into a capture by the viewer's eye. Borne of so many degrees of separation, the recombinant images embody multiple dimensions-chimeras made real, casting indexical shadows even as they embody a state of evanescence. When spontaneous errors in genetic transcription yield mutations that don't end up as fatal dead ends, they have the potential to advance whole species. Similarly, Ducharme's intentional interruptions, corruptions, and extensions of existing codes engender new and unexpected forms and functions for photo-based image making apropos to the age of the "migratory pixel."'

-Shani K. Parsons, excerpt from Proof 23 curatorial essay, Gallery 44, Toronto.

Transfer

Variances of transparency found in wide circulation, slowed down, in an instance of transference; glitched, bent and sliding onto transparent material.



The image file is an assemblage of processes that form a visual iteration. It is only readable because your platform functions in such a way as to allow it to be read, and manifests a visual on your screen (if you can think of a jpg image as a solidified version of a set of processes). Your computer is in communication with its components (algorithms, programs etc.) in order for you to view an image. It is also in communication with the image that has been transferred to you - which also functions in a state of assemblages of processes that solidify enough in order to create a visual iteration on your screen.

GlitchPOP

You can still to this day go to the Arcade Restaurant in downtown Memphis buy a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich and sit where Elvis used to enjoy his, detail, 2012

These comments were taken from the internet and inserted into the images of their corresponding stars. The glitch line in some of these images attempt to interrupt the image's gaze, but ultimately function as a cycle as the comments used to created the glitch lines seem to regurgitate this type of mediation.

Conte de syntaxe internaute

This early work was created by taking comments left on youtube, to then insert them into the code of a digital image. The wording that you will see throughout the piece acts as a link to the next visual glitch created by inserting it into the digital image. The sound heard while hovering over the writing link was generated off of running the glitch visuals through a sound editor. This work is one of in-between, of translation and interruption.

The Quality or State of Being Real

This was my very first attempt at visual glitch. To make them, I sourced comments left under random videos on Youtube. These comments were whimsical, problematic, technical, paranoid etc. I then inserted these comments into the code of an image, which produced these glitch landscapes. The writing at the bottom or the side of these images contain the portion of the ASCII code that was altered with the language code from the youtube comments. Each image was titled according to the title of the video I found the comment under; they were printed at medium scale on backlight media.

ça va?

Sound Machines

When making this work I was interested in archiving these apparatuses, but by doing a bad job at it. I photographed a record, a cd, a cassette, an 8 track and my little pink mp3 player. I translated the image data of the sound machines I'd photographed into sound and stuck them on mp3 players equipped with earphones to make the glitch sounds available to the viewer. The wording describes what each thing is and was taken from wiki. The plexiglass was meant to give weight, or legitimacy to these badly archived objects of mediation.

pas de flanage, s'il vous plait

These are photographs of different computer motherboards. I was interested in the idea of the city and Baudelaire's flaneur when I set out to photograph these. Coincidentally, I came across the title for the series on a plaque at the Tim Horton's on Gloucester + Bank in Ottawa.

© Anyse Ducharme 2023