Home Cart Listen Calendar Contact
2.jpg

Installations

A Soundmap of Sherbrooke’s Machine Songs
By Colin Frank
September 26, 2024 to January 6, 2025. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation

This interactive installation allows visitors to virtually explore machine sounds from the city of Sherbrooke, Québec. Machines pervade urban environments, yet their sonic performances are often overlooked. From air conditioners to electrical boxes, mechanical sounds resonate all around us, forming urban soundscapes that are frequently ignored. Visitors can navigate a virtual environment comprising of field recordings and 3D models the artist made of machines encountered in Sherbrooke. Through the compression and digitization of those everyday spaces, the industrial urban environment becomes unexpectedly aesthetic, providing a reimagination of the city whereby non-humans have their own voices, and beauty arises from the functionality of industrial objects.
Borderline (Almaguin Highlands): Collective counter mapping through sonic geographies
By Jessica Thompson
Open after September 14, 2023. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation
Borderline is a critical mapmaking project that uses sound to illuminate social and economic differences in local geographies. Visitors to the NAISA North Media Arts Centre are invited to contribute to a large-scale soundmap of the Almaguin Highlands by borrowing a toolkit to map sounds in one of the villages of their choice, or by using the Borderline mobile app. The sounds collected will be added to the map on an ongoing basis.

The Borderline iOS app enables users to automatically map sounds in their environment, put them in dialogue with other forms of data, and generate interactive soundscapes by playing sounds back into the environment. Click here to download


The Sensation of Distribution
By Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters
Open 24/7 year round.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario

The Sensation of Distribution is a reprise of Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters’s 2019 work, The Distribution of Sensation, which they created while artists in residence at The Bentway, a large, urban public space situated under an elevated highway in downtown Toronto. The Distribution of Sensation was a sound sculpture composed of PVC pipes installed around The Bentway that invited visitors to listen through the natural resonance of the cylinders, creating a series of musical experiences across the site. Mimic the plumbing infrastructure of the site, the installation was meant to create aesthetic slippages that might potentially lead to confusion as to what exactly functioned or counted as art.

The re-installation of this work at NAISA blends the pipe sculptures into a more domestic vernacular. Mounted on NAISA’s exterior walls to impersonate furnace vents and erupting from the ground to suggest rogue plumbing gone awry, The Sensation of Distribution re-invites visitors to explore the unnoticed or imminent sonic and aesthetic potential of our built environment.