In Chorus of Lungs, Leila Sujir & Maria Lantin are exploring elements of the social body through experiments with sound and image spatialization of voices and voices, breath and breathing, which will become a video-audio installation. In the installation, the lungs will appear to be floating in a shared space with the viewer, with exterior spaces and portraits projected onto the interior spaces of the body. Chorus of Lungs will work with an ebb and flow of images, a particle-like motion simulating breathing, moving between the individual portrait to the larger grouping of the chorus, becoming a vocal conversation with the viewer, not necessarily in words. Viewers will be invited to interact with the chorus through a small object held in the palm of the hands, which will be programmed, each object connecting to a pair of lungs to invoke a fragile yet tensile strength and physicality, along with a sense of exchange and responsibility. The project explores questions of interior spaces, the body, simulation and presence.

Bio

Maria Lantin has been working with Leila Sujir (Concordia University) under the group label Tulip Theory since 2005. Their first project, Tulipomania, explored the creation of virtual video sculptures using technology usually reserved for games or traditional virtual reality. Maria, within Tulip Theory, is exploring the creation of visual effects and physical interfaces for the manipulation of video and sound in virtual sculpture. In particular, she is working with particles of video and sound to generate new interaction and visual possibilities.

Leila Sujir is an artist and a professor at Concordia University in the Intermedia Cyberarts (IMCA) program of the Studio Arts Department with a background in visual and media arts production and theory. In 2005 through 2006, she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Calgary, a one year research position as an artist in the Interactions Lab in the Department of Computer Science. Tulipomania/ My Two Grandmother RMX (2006), an interactive video installation working with a tabletop interface, is a project which culminated from the year at the Interactions Lab and as a co-production in the Banff New Media Institute. Sujir's video artworks, both sculptural pieces as well as works which can be shown on a screen or a television, interlace narrative into the time and space of video, working with various poetic forms, biography, autobiography, and history, with story as one of the threads shaping our lives. A solo exhibition which has toured Canada, Luminous Stories, initiated by the Art Gallery of Peterborough, covers the last ten years of her video production. Her video works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, U.K. as well as galleries and festivals all over the word. New Republics, a group exhibition out of the U.K. toured Canada and Australia 1999-2000. Sujir's video artwork within that exhibition has also toured India: The Dreams of the Night Cleaners (1995), generated out of Canadian archival government documents, Royal Commissions as well as immigration policies, with the video's narrative investigating the larger myths and dreams circulating around the unspoken assumptions around 'nation'. Her video works are in a number of collections, including the National Gallery of Canada which own four of her works, starting with productions from the mid-eighties through to the present. Sujir's video work has also been shown on educational television in Canada. Her previous project, For Jackson, A Time Capsule, (2003) supported by five Canadian broadcasters as well as the National Film Board, came out of an earlier installation, a working process which allows art projects to take shape and develop as they move through various media. She and Maria Lantin are embarking on a new project, Breath I/O, supported by a three year SSHRC Research Creation grant.