Created in 1999, the artistic group The Puppet Project has set itself the goal of establishing a theatre of puppets of their own creation which touches on themes that are political, social or artistic. Established at McGill University, the team, made up of students from the same university and from Concordia University, did not have, at the onset, any knowledge of puppet art or theatre. With the aim of stimulating thought through performance and exploring the puppet as a tool for building community, the members of The Puppet Project presented their own production, The Memory Tree. The show, almost always sold-out, was given from February 6 to 16 last at McGill and, through the story of a puppet community, showed the cultural amnesia caused by the frantic pace of life. Invited last summer to perform at the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik in the Northwest Territories and at the Ontario Association of Puppetry Festival in Peterborough, the troupe intends next to improve its blend of acting, song and lighting effects as well as to offer workshops on the construction and use of puppets.
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The initiators of Glitch & Noise Productions, from different backgrounds yet all possessing a passion for the rapid development of multimedia, wanted to offer serious amateurs of video and music production an appropriate structure for learning and broadcasting their art by taking advantage of the accessibility and increasing quality of semi-professional recording techniques. Brought together at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, this team of artistic and visual creators has developed a wide range of means for achieving this goal. As well as the Glitch Fest, an annual amateur film festival which will soon be in its third edition, they have supervised the production and diffusion of the music compilation Varia and are preparing a music festival entitled B-Fest for the summer of 2003. The activities of Glitch & Noise are made known above all through a Web site (www.glitchnoise.com) where the creators can reach a large audience by offering a certain number of their audio and video works free of charge.
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The MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project, initiated in 2001, is a travelling exhibition dedicated to artists’ books and different types of independent publications. Last year, from July to November, the team, made up of students aged between 24 and 29 from Concordia University, travelled around in their library-museum, a 1959 Airstream trailer. Over 40 sites located in some twenty Canadian (Winnipeg, Ottawa, Fredericton) and American (New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago) cities thus hosted the exhibition and workshops in a variety of settings such as schools, artist centres, parks and other appropriate locations. This year, and organized in conjunction with a counterpart based in Philadelphia, the project will include a visit to the West Coast and will further strive towards its two main goals: exploring the mechanisms of independent cultural production and building bridges between theory and cultural practice. To say the least, it is an original way of taking books beyond their boundaries.
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