NAISA’s 20th anniversary edition of its SOUNDplay festival continues to serve artists and audiences alike with an experimental platform for encouraging new avenues of exploration between sound and new media.

"NAISA’s programming theme "Digital in Nature" is explored and expanded upon by the artists in this year’s SOUNDplay Festival with works that explore relations between human and non-human worlds, perceived and invented reality, as well as human-made and organic phenomena. Like last year, all of the works presented in this year’s SOUNDplay Festival include an online element in one form or another, allowing for audiences to attend from wherever they happen to be." – Darren Copeland, Artistic Director, New Adventures in Sound Art

This performance launches a two year program of new works by Canadian media and sound artists developed in celebration of NAISA’s 20th anniversary. In this YouTube livestream performance of I Eat the Stars (hosted with audience discussion on Whereby) Laurel MacDonald continues her exploration with video-music with settings of poems from Rebecca Elson’s collection A Responsibility to Awe. The performance will also include a screening of Laurel MacDonald and Phil Strong’s Videovoce performance from 2012 which is part of the NAISA 20th Anniversary video collection on YouTube

For her new concert production I Eat the Stars, Laurel has set several poems from A Responsibility to Awe, a book of poetry by Montreal-born astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (1960–1999). MacDonald says: “Rebecca Elson had an extraordinary power of intellectual and creative imagination in each of the dipolar realms of science and poetry. She recognized the intrinsic link between these realms - that each is essential to and inseparable from the other, as together they define and celebrate the entirety of the human psyche. With I Eat the Stars I am very honoured to be working with this exquisite poetry, endeavouring to express its complex and joyful ideas through my music and visuals.”

I Eat the Stars is the first solo concert production from Laurel MacDonald in over eight years, and will have its full-length premier as part of the 20th Anniversary edition of the NAISA SOUNDplay Festival.

Rebecca Elson’s poems have been used by kind permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK.

This screening of new media artworks by Tansy Xiao and Véro Marengère explores relationships between humans and nature. Tansy Xiao’s "Bone and Air" is inspired by juxtaposing sounds of bone conduction (within the human body) and air conduction (receiving sounds via the ears). The video also invites audience members to participate. "Roserade" by Véro Marengère is a videomusic work that is sometimes frenetic and sometimes contemplative, it proposes a world that deforms without ever completely destroying or building itself.