we went to a few of the performances at the pixelache 2005 festival last weekend that was held (mostly) in kiasma. i went to a talk on wikipedia in the morning that was mildly interesting, it was pretty early so i think everyone was still a bit sleepy. in the afternoon we saw two performances in the main auditorium.

the first (pictured above) was called “a day on earth – what time is it?”, two screens tell of two people, one in japan (yasuko tadokoro) and one in montreal (thien vu dang), music was provided by christelle franca and patrick watson. the two scenes on screen showed the days of the two people, doing the same thing at the same time, showers, cycling, walking around and so on. a really nice performance.

the next performance was an odd one. called “iis:006” by rybn/eol, it used visual, aural and olfactory senses. it consisted of a lot of photos of (i think) paris using long exposure, then depending on what was on screen various odours were released to give a more real sense of what was going on. the music used was pretty intense for most of the piece. all in all it worked pretty okay, it was a bit too long, too loud and my clothes did smell too much after it all but it did leave much more of an impact than the first piece earlier did. some of the effects used in the long exposure images was incredibly effective and if i didnt loose my camera a few weeks back i would be out taking similar pictures but alas i cant. the odours released were for the most part slightly overpowering and almost distracting, at only one point did it work perfectly : a scene that had several photos of a desk with a bunch of flowers followed a few seconds later the smell of flowers wafted through the theatre. fantastic stuff.