Confluence: Inner Pierces, Outer Spaces

Improvised performance with images by Peter Mettler and music by John Oswald

in/future Festival, Cinesphere at Ontario Place, Toronto

2016

in/future Festival hosts a unique collaboration between Peter Mettler and John Oswald at Cinesphere – the first ever IMAX theatre, in a geodesic dome on the water at Ontario Place – with 7.1 surround sound.

In this live performance, these two artists meet for the first time to draw spontaneously from a large database of collected and self-produced materials – mixing, editing, layering, and manipulating them, as two musicians might in performing an instrumental duet, effecting a dialogue between two mediums and senses. There is no fixed plan, script or score; each reacts to the other, building a one of a kind audio visual experience.

Using as their base archival images drawn from some of NASA’s cosmic recordings, Oswald and Mettler perform at the confluence of inner space and outer space, highlighting machine mediated vision, autonomous spacecrafts, landing ports, and telescopes that travel through time, paralleled by a variety of fanciful renderings of what might be found in the beyond. Through the artists reactions to, and manipulations of, this raw unpredictable material, a reflection of our earthly yearning and imagination coalesces.

"Moving into the future we see ever more deeply into cosmic reaches unimaginably far from our ground, but also into new and unfamiliar dimensions of perception, knowledge and awareness. Our image-making media lie at the crux of inner and outer exploration in that they have the potential to both document objective reality and subjective inner space, suggesting and discovering altered ways of being and seeing."