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Alarm Songs: Leisure Machine

explores sound and history
3 weeks ago by Michelle Falk Add Comment

A video still from Alarm Songs: Leisure Machine //

Dominique Sirois

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Alarm Songs: Leisure Machine explores sound and history - Vue Weekly

They say that this is the Age of Leisure. Is it really? This doesnt feel like a period lled with
luxurious amounts of free time, even though its a choice for most people to work as much as
they do, and not usually a necessity.
Its a way of talking about our present days, Montral artist Dominique Sirois says of her
exhibit Alarm Songs: Leisure Machine. Since the 70s they consider [us to be] in the Leisure
Era, where people would work less. But is this really happening?
I think we are in a sort of transition, she continues. Where this kind of leisure society
could happen if we were maybe less attached to goods or to having a lot of money.
Alarm Songs was the starting point for the exhibit. The sound-installation component is a
database of siren and alarm sounds that Sirois collected from songs. She became fascinated
with how frequently these sounds occurr across genres of music like rap, avant-garde and
techno, and how what these shared sounds represent has evolved.

The link between the database and the videos is that the videos are an analysis of the
database, she says. So, in the videos, what Im doing is trying to retrace this historical
period[s] in the database.

Each of the four video installations depicts characters exploring a place with historical
signicance to each period Sirois chose to examine. In Colour Boy, a young boy explores
millstone ruins used for grinding grain, characteristic of the preindustrial period. In Military
Techno a man, one with a working-class athletic build, explores an old shipyard in a canal in
Glasgow, once used to build vessels of war then later for transporting goods. In Victorian
Sushi, a bored couple sits in a library. The nal lm installation is Leisure Machine, the
installation and the database book-ending the exhibit to form the title. This lm represents
the Sound System culture with a rave in a eld.

Before the raves it was like young people in the UK gathering in elds and having these
huge sound systems, and [they would] take drugs and dance all night, Sirois explains.

In the middle of the room stands a spinning wheel. On the wheel is a spiral image taken from
the vinyl records of a sound system techno band called Spiral Tribe. As the vinyl or the
spinning wheel turn, the spiral image becomes mesmerizing, depicting how work and leisure
both take on this hypnotic effect.
Through seemingly divergent imagery, Sirois seeks to demonstrate the inter-relatedness of
several key concepts: the Industrial Revolution, work, globalization, war, the economy and
leisure. There is an Asian motif throughout the exhibit, with bamboo sticks on the walls
surrounding the Alarm Songs and sticking out of a combat boot.
The bamboo was a way of pointing to the world we live right nowglobalized, a
consequence of the Industrial Revolution, Sirois explains.

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Alarm Songs: Leisure Machine explores sound and history - Vue Weekly

[This exhibit is] a way of talking more [about] our present days, which [were] maybe
supposed to be a leisure era but which didnt really arrive, she continues. Its not true that
we are in a leisure era. Its a reection on work, industrialization, leisure and maybe the
leisure machine.

Until Sat, Jul 11

Works by Dominique Sirois
Latitude 53
#Alarm Songs: Leisure Machine #Dominique Sirois #Latitude 53 #visual arts

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