Claude Périard

The Centre de production DAÏMÔN is proud to welcome Claude Périard in residence.

Claude Périard is a Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses primarily on sound art and music. They holds a bachelor’s degree in digital music from the Université de Montréal and has released a dozen albums of pop and experimental music, sound installations and experimental films. They is also a sound recordist and mixer for film.

A multidisciplinary artist and musician, Périard seeks above all to create bridges between the various visual and sound mediums. Their creations are articulated around a social concept. Claiming creativity at all costs with the means at hand, Lo-Fi, open source software rather than technological finesse, their slightly raw aesthetic is put at the service of the idea, which is metaphorized through the form. We definitely find a search for bareness, a quest for the infra-thin in their most recent media works, sound or visual. With their engaged art, more philosophical than militant, Périard expresses themself through images (visual or sound) rather than through abstraction.

ÉCRYPTURES is an interactive wall-mounted sound installation that questions language and its various forms of encoding. The starting point of the work is the image of the oldest stele found to date: the law code of King Hamurabi of Babylon, engraved in stone. A quote from this text will be encoded in different forms: text, voice, Morse code, binary code, Braille, ASCII code, bar code and sign language. These multiple graphic codes will generate sound equivalences. The spectator will be able to activate different sounds from a computer keyboard. The graphic codes will be printed on sheets fixed to a loudspeaker, becoming sound material of the generated waves.

Through this project they question the techniques of encryption and conservation of information. Speech was the first medium of encoding, in sound form, then later writing engraved in stone or written on paper. Nowadays, information is encoded in binary form with only two numbers, 0 and 1, on digital media, dematerialized. ÉCRYPTURES attempts to re-materialize these codes in visual and sound forms, available to human perception.

To follow their work, please visit their web site.