(4) The fourth Périphérique was held in exterior winter conditions in a Jeanne-Mance street backyard space, on February 7 2004.
Both the public and the artists dealt with climatic conditions and neighbouring relationships: wagonnette entrenched in the snow, warm gluewhein, dancing with lightsticks to fight off the cold and frozen feet ... A dog barking to unusual sound frequencies, neighbours looking on curiously to the scene from the windows of their homes...
Karl Lemieux and Olivier Borzeix started off with a hybrid set of concrete electronics and screen projections involving experimental painting on film. Recordings of the film's manipulations and alterations were used as base material for sound transferred on various CDs, that were mixed and amplified live by Olivier on the outside balcony.
Àlain Farah followed with 'Marquetterie', a poetic amalgam made up of material from trivial facts found in the Libération of September 16th 2003, his mother's medical dictionary, the canadian health and food guide, a weather forecast, excerpts of his own texts, the Bible's first Psalm, and the pocket-version etymological dictionary of Jacqueline Picoche.
Patric Lacasse and Myriam Yates integrated ideas of video-surveillance into their intervention, testing out limits of what might be considered private space. They transformed the interior of a voyager van, parked in the back-alley, into a receiving and transmitting cell of live video images filmed on the spot, zooming into neighbouring windows. A video narrative was built from various close-ups revealing domestic and private realms, subjected to the watchful eye of the camera, combined to vintage images of films like 'Rear Window' and 'Blow out'.
Virginie Laganière and Jean-Maxime Dufresne mixed up with the crowd, carrying cassetteplayers and handing out lightsticks to a tip-toeing public that kept on dancing to fight off the freezing conditions. Fragmented audio tracks set a quietly urgent mood for the upcoming set. Fictitious video situations involving the use of lightsticks were projected, implying ambiguous states between festive rites, winter activities, security considerations and territorial signage. The sound space simultaneously evoked a psychogeographic relationship to winter conditions.
