On July 21st, DHC/ART hosted the first of its three bilingual open houses in conjunction with Ryoji Ikeda’s exhibition, which runs until November 18th. For educators, the open house is a great way to include the general public into activities normally reserved for groups. As always, we were thrilled with the discussions that emerged upon seeing Ikeda’s works. Throughout this visit, we were able to add layers of complexity and meaning into our experience of the works, which will certainly have an impact on our next visits.

Seeing the public participate in Perte de Signal’s interactive workshop Synthesthesia was especially beneficial for us. We were extremely lucky to co-facilitate with Alexandre Quessy, one of the main collaborators in the design of Synthesthesia. His insightful comments allowed visitors a valuable glimpse into the development of music-generating software and a better understanding of how sound is perceived and created. We have been toying with the contents of this workshop for a few weeks now, and it was great fun to see people’s faces light up as they played with their creations and sound became the basis of a playful and intuitive audio-visual experience.

The education team will be hosting two more Open House workshops later this year, in September and October. We hope to see you all there and are looking forward to sharing what we’ve been working on with the public!

Daniel Fiset
DHC/ART Education

Photos: Daniel Fiset