Getting ready to scream ‘Woo!’ with the rest of you

You can thank Europeans’ dwindling Christian faith for a sensory bombardment that’s taking over Europe. The poor attendance at all the churches and cathedrals has been a boon to a new totally immersive art-architecture experience of sound and image, artist-architect Francois Wunschel said in a lecture at Emily Carr University Wednesday night, while fellow Frenchman musician Fernando Favier manipulated the audio. 

All these old, underused stone edifices became opportunities to develop new forms of public engagement, said Wunschel. Pierre Schneider, his colleague at the Paris-based 1024 Architecture firm, shared with the audience some video examples: building facades visually distort and morph into faces; public squares transform into pulsating spaces of light and sound, all controlled by simple devices like a public microphone or a joystick.

Using MadMapping — AutoCad-like building-design software that overlays the spaces on actual architecture — Wunschel and Schneider are innovators in the growing artform that turns hard surfaces into an embodied experience that has become a signature European urban festival experience.

Tonight Vancouverites will get a (free) taste of all that at 10 p.m., behind Emily Carr’s digital media building on Great Northern Way, when the Paris team joins forces with some local artists as they premiere Live/Work, a 10-metre cube of scaffolding that promises to be a “manifestation of interdisciplinarity, collaboration and an exploration of the contemporary landscape in relation to changing cultural and economic conditions.” Gotta love that artspeak. (Translation: A bombardment of lights and sound that will have the locals yelling, “Woooooo!”)

Hypercube is all part of the New Forms Festival 13.

Below: Two videos of distinctive, immersive physical experience of sound, light: A voice-activated setup allows the public to animate a building in Lyons, France. At bottom:  Transporting a dance club crowd through light and sound.