Biennale Montreal 2009 - Open Culture

The Biennale Montreal is an art exhibition event put on by the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal. For next year’s edition, Creative Director Scott Burnham has launched three collaborative initiatives under the umbrella of Open Culture (Culture Libre).

Open Music: Co-curated by Scott Clyke (Montreal Mirror, The Goods) and Claudio Marzano (CIAC), yours truly was commissioned to compose and record a “soundtrack” for Rick Leong’s painting Dancing Serpent in Dawn’s Quiet. The painting is now a part of the permanent collection of the Musée-des-Beaux-Arts; you can listen to the track on my MySpace. Soon, any willing musicians, vocalists, producers, MCs and/or DJs will have access to individual multitrack files and the notated score to remix and re-interpret. If you want a headstart, go to the Open Music page and e-mail the Biennale team (or ask me really nicely). The best selections will be issued on a limited edition compilation coinciding with the Biennale next May. There will also be a performance.

Open Cinema: Filmmakers can apply to be part of a team of eight, who will be dispatched to make short films inspired by a common database of images populated by the general public. For those less cinematically inclined, you can submit images into the database or fill out a personality quiz; the latter will inform the character traits of the protagonists in the short films.

Open Design: Renowned designer Stefan Sagmeister (whose most recent work is David Byrne’s fantastic new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today) has a project, now issued in book form, called Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far. He designs magnificent installations and photo spreads utilising axioms he has culled from his own personal diaries. E-mail the Open Design team to get an un-realized Sagmeister sentence, and design it yourself!

More information on all these endeavours (and more!) will be forthcoming over the next few months leading up to the Biennale. As a creator of source material, I’m super excited to see what the end results will be.