The Satosphere puts the audience at the centre of audiovisual works in the first permanent immersive environment dedicated to art creation and visualization, this dome forms a 360° spheric projection screen.

SAT Symposium on the power of sound starts tonight

SAT, the Society for Arts and Technology, based in Montreal, opens its third annual symposium this evening; “IX” which stands for Immersion Experience, will focus this year on ‘Sonic Perspectives’. Luc Courchesne is co-director of research at SAT, and the co-curator of the symposium. He says “there is a change of paradigm happening right now.”

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‘Dedicated to digital culture’

A trans-disciplinary centre, the original idea began 20 years ago as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to digital culture. Over the years it evolved and has now become a landmark location on Montreal’s renowned St. Laurent Boulevard.

The SAT centre contains an artist-in-residence program, research facilities and the dome known as the Satosphere. Built for shared immersion experiences, the Satosphere is the first permanent immersive environment dedicated to art creation and visualization, with a 360° spheric projection screen. 

It is described as placing the audience at the centre of audiovisual works, and a new tool to create palpable and enveloping human experiences.

“In the daytime we create work, we experiment with it, and at night we sell tickets for Montrealer’s who are interested in more avant garde art forms” Courchesne explains.

“The smell of bread is something everyone can relate to”

SAT’s Food Lab, with the Satosphere in the background, is a big hit with Montrealers.

The savy inclusion of what’s called the “Food Lab” in recognition of all the senses, was also brilliant planning. In order to draw visitors to the centre, the people Courchesne says might otherwise leave the city centre and go home at 5 pm, the venue was created, complete with an inviting terasse.

Courchesne explains: “To compensate for the unfamiliarity of digital media, especially around immersion, we need to have something that’s very familiar, so the image was the odour of bread, the smell of bread is something everyone can relate to, so combining the idea of a bar and restaurant next to a very advanced instrument to create immersive experience was a good combination,”

It’s working; the audience, the visitors and the diners are coming. “We’ve basically created something that is sustainable with very little public funding” said Courchesne.

The symposium, the annual gathering was the next step in sharing the work going on at the centre, both in immersion and full-dome creations, the content created for other planetariums.

Luc Courchesne describes it as a “working meeting” with people from across this digital milieu, those he describes as, “the craft people, people who have the ideas, who create the experience, who produce them, who distribute them, but also people of the general public who have an interest in these new forms of media which is going to become mainstream for sure very quickly with all these devices coming out.”

The focus on sound this year evolved from the last two syposium experiences during which Courchenes says, they were obsessed with images. When someone commented last year that while the the sound is central to the experience, it always remains on the sidelines, the people at SAT listened.

As for how all this cutting edge research and development will reach the rest of us, Courchesne has a glimpse of the future in what he is witnessing in the work going on at SAT.

“It’s great to see that people that are in their early creative career have the whole new medium in their hands and they will have time to master it and come up with, you know, beautiful experiences that will be rich, I think, as cinema has been in the twentieth century.”

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