by RAF KATIGBAK

The room you've just been herded into is pitch black and cold. As your eyes get accustomed to the dark, you suddenly realize that you're completely surrounded by about 100 feet of industrial fencing. Judging by the faces of the 60 or so people around you, the mood has suddenly switched from excited to slightly agitated. There's an audible clink behind you - evidently, your only way out is shut. Suddenly, a 40-foot screen that was hidden in darkness flares to life and you're jolted by a sudden burst of sound.

You know this scene. It's Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver and he's about to blow his brains out. You'd never forget that scene, and the screen won't let you forget the scene, either. Those few disturbing seconds, each frame, each sound, repeated, looped, over and over, changing slowly for minutes on end. Then, another scene, a disturbing snippet from The Exorcist, and the cycle of visual and sonic deconstruction and reconstruction repeats, again and again.

While this may sound like a twisted experiment à la Clockwork Orange, it's actually just an example of a live performance by Kendell Geers and Patrick Codenys (known together as Red Sniper), one of the many audiovisual artists invited to this year's Elektra, Montreal's festival of digital arts. Some may recognize Codenys's name as that of the founder of seminal industrial band Front 242 (also on the bill at Elektra this year). But Codenys and his creative partner Geers have been sticking it to audiences with their two-pronged sensory assault since their debut at the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year.

"We want to keep the audience as hostages of the pictures," says Codenys - almost too casually. "At that particular show in Italy, we actually wanted to have guard dogs outside the fences as well. The idea is that people are in a sort of audiovisual camp. It's really a way to make them aware that these images are not just disposable. When you force people to watch something, it puts them in a very different mood."

Testing and digesting

Whether you're after an intense experience that forces you to contemplate the transparency of the interface within the context of the man-machine dialectic, or you just want shake to your booty, this year, Elektra promises presentations for every mood. According to festival director Alain Thibault, this year's lineup of cutting-edge digital artists will further emphasize innovation within the field of integrated music and moving image.

"Since the beginning of Elektra," says Thibault, "the visual aspect was almost equal to the music. This year, we really made sure that everybody understands this, so we're using a broad range of aesthetics."

The result is a week that includes world-class innovators like Red Sniper, UVA and D-Fuse. While each act differs in form and content - from the stuttering, in-your-face polemics of Red Sniper to the graphical sound paintings of D-Fuse and the rhythmic, reactive experiments of UVA - each act pushes the boundaries of audiovisual presentation.

Mike Faulkner of U.K. visual collective D-Fuse has always been fascinated with live projections. Over the past decade, Faulkner has graduated from using a few slide projectors and 16mm film loops to helping create bleeding-edge digital visual work for Sony, Diesel and BBC, as well as musicians like Burnt Friedman, and most recently the dome-blowing DVD for Beck's latest album Guero.

"The idea of syncing images with sound in a live environment is really a perfect way to digest music," explains Faulkner, whose five-person collective is currently waiting for the final green light to back up Beck on his upcoming tour. For Faulkner, Elektra's immersive environment provides the perfect outlet for his crew's freeform performance.

"The problem with doing things in a strict club context is that, by definition, it's a place where people either take drugs or get drunk and dance, then go and find people to cop off with. In other words, people are really not there to focus in on the visuals. On the other end, if it's in a traditional cinema, it's too fixed."

Muscovite copyright

Just as the democratizing effect of music-making software has flooded the Internet with a legion of amateur musicians' crappy MP3s, almost everyone with a decent laptop can plug into a rented projector and call himself a VJ (visual jockey). Indeed, the online VJ community is growing, with sites like vjcentral.com boasting contributors from all corners of the world.

"It's interesting how VJing actually changes," says Faulkner, whose D-Fuse collective is currently compiling a book on VJs and live visual artists, "depending on the country. Take Russia for example. There, you can buy the entire Led Zeppelin collection on bootleg CDs, with hundreds of records, including ones that you've never even heard of. Even though they're completely bootlegs, they still put their own copyright line on it, as if they own it. You see, in their eyes, they've taken it and packaged it and they've done the work on the packaging, so they own it.

"They also apply that theory to VJs. They sample everything, they just grab stuff and they do the edits and since they did the edits, it's their work. It's the same in China - they have no respect for copyright because, historically, they're thinking, ‘Things change, so why should we?' Compare that to Austrian stuff that's very harsh and very black and white and seems to be influenced by their history with filmmaking. They're quite strong and opinionated people, so their work reflects this precision. It's an interesting cultural relation."

Beyond the box

Matt Clark from U.K. collective UVA is wary of relying too much on technology. "It's great that these things are available. Unfortunately, creativity doesn't come in a box. You have to dig that out of yourself. If technology is used as a mask for a lack of ideas, it soon looks dull and tedious."

Certainly one of the most well-known of live visual crews, UVA has sidestepped the homogeneous trappings of popular, commercially available software by developing their own custom programs. Combined with traditional lighting control and a flair for stylish graphic content, UVA have created breathtaking stage shows for electronic acts like Massive Attack and Basement Jaxx.

"Good artists always understand how to work with their existing technology level," says Clark. "Rembrandt or Michelangelo were masters of the paint technologies of their time, weren't they? In the future, it will become more and more common for bands to use visuals in the live arena, especially as the price of rental equipment is falling, and as the brightness and effectiveness of display technology increases. People are also more used to this kind of direct relationship between moving image and sound from using their home computers, and therefore will expect this style of performance more and more. In our experience, bands consider it almost as important as the sound."

Red Sniper are at Usine C on Wednesday, May 11, 9 p.m., $15, and Front 242 are at Metropolis on Saturday, May 14, 9:30 p.m., $35. D-Fuse (with Scanner) and UVA join Ali M. Demirel, Servovalve and Epsilonlab at Usine C
on Friday, May 13, 9 p.m., $25

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