Echo Chamber

ECHO CHAMBER
An audiovisual performance in several tableaus, Echo Chamber takes its inspiration from technologies that let us probe inside the body, such as ultrasound and acupuncture, generating a sound composition in which the idea of resonance predominates. In creating a modular interface of three panels allowing multiple manipulations, Messier has determined the boundaries of the possibilities for the performance of a choreography of sound and light. He wields long needles as if they were notes from an instrument, piercing through an audio-reactive plate that sets off sound sequences.

Like the ultrasound needle palpating the body to reveal what might be in its interior – a living yet invisible presence? – Messier’s performative gestures are the sources of images in which the body eventually appears, magnified as a transported shadow. The Echo Chamber device is continually transformed during the performance: by a series of movements and position shifts, an entire scenography unfolds before our eyes. The panels increase in number; the light sources appear, disappear, multiply, and mutate. Cut-outs of light cause visual elements to materialize in response to the sound echoes, to the magnetic resonances of the body left in shadow, now turned into a shadow.

The panels then become screens in which we see the body’s interior, where scintillating cells are in motion. Window to the interior, the function of the device is reversed: Messier takes us through to the other side, under the invisible skin. The interface-membrane becomes a passageway, a porous surface through which time is transposed and transforms the living matter.

Carrier of an electric charge, the matter of the body itself is a vehicle, a vector. This is what the final sequence of EchoChamber suggests: the link between the world and the self, between the outside and the inside – remanence emanating from the echo chamber.