EIM 2019 / LISTENING ANGLES :: SOUND PIECES IN PUBLIC SPACE / PIERRE-LUC LECOURS / ILLUSORY TRUTH EFFECT

Opening reception : Saturday, July 27, 2019 ‑ 17h

Identified by Hasher and Goldstein in a 1977 study conducted at Villanova University and Temple University, the Illusory Truth Effect is the tendency to believe that information is true after repeated exposure to it. This phenomenon is explored in Illusory Truth Effect, a sound installation by Pierre-Luc Lecours. Sentences containing ambiguous statements or definitions of social phenomena, uttered by voice actors, are recorded several times with different emotional nuances and varying cadences. The dictated sentences come from different Quebec media sources: they are censored, distorted and extracted from their initial context. The sound piece unfolds in three movements whose intention is to engage the listener by provoking a questioning of what and how he hears. The latter is invited to circulate within the installation by adopting different listening postures, which allow him to hear the different flows of information vary according to his position. The project is part of an approach aiming to establish a correlation between form, format and content, that is to say between the way of presenting a material, its articulation and its meaning.

The work also questions our relationship to the transmission of information: in what way does today’s ultra-connectivity activate or deaden our receptivity and critical capacity?

Listening angles :: Sound pieces in public space

Two artists have been invited to create an audio work each for an outdoor sound device of 15 speakers specially designed for EIM 2019. Installed along a self-supporting triangular structure, the sound sources are arranged to generate a very specific spatialization of sound. The audience is invited to take a seat in the center of the device for a continuous listening session where the pieces are diffused in alternation – one being a composition while the other is a generative piece.
With this sound presence in the heart of the city, EIM takes the decision to meet the public and to infiltrate – in a way – the common space where the unexpected can still happen. The works presented put forward issues of infiltration/intrusion/transmission related to the digital world, amplified by our constant connectivity. The boundaries between fiction and reality, those crossed by “fake news” (Pierre-Luc Lecours) and invasive attacks on public networks, open and vulnerable (Phillip David Stearns), are the issues explored here and put into sound.

Pierre-Luc Lecours (QC-CA) – Illusory Truth Effect (2019)
Phillip David Stearns (US) – Here Be Dragons (2019)