Following on an excellent performance with luminous discs several years ago, this Canadian musician and multimedia artist returns to NEXT with a brand-new audiovisual show. Unsculpt, inspired by the work of Donna Haraway and the speculative architecture methodology, probes urban and natural settings created through conjunctions of human creativity and machine learning, sometimes ornately called artificial intelligence. Myriam Bleau plays on a laptop and modular synthesizer backed by a visual projection, giving motion to synthetic landscapes emerging on screen like dream fragments or faded postcards from an imaginary future. Inklings of human and natural structures – mountain ranges, shores, skyscrapers and facades – blend and converge in animated collage. AI algorithms allow a slow metamorphosis between textures and materials: from marble to silk, from concrete to meat. Like Basinski, Bleau gently touches on materialism in its fleeting nature.

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