The PAN M 360 team is criss-crossing the entire MUTEK 2024 program, observing as many artists as possible during this 25th edition of its Montreal version. Follow our experts right up to Sunday evening, as no other MUTEK media coverage promises to be this extensive!
During the last of the 24 hours on Tuesday August 20, the relationship between image and sound was exploited to its full potential, on the side of Daito Manabe, a Japanese artist of the highest calibre. The images are hallucinatory, extremely contrasted and extremely diversified. Sometimes inspired by video games, the shapes move as if controlled by a joystick. The resulting audiovisual effects are integrated with a variety of beats – house, techno, jungle/drum’n’bass, neosoul and more. The result is a truly immersive journey, whose experimental sequences are preceded by cues that are obvious enough to allow the audience to indulge in the discovery, before being brought back to the dance floor without the proposition breaking down in the middle of the routine.
Daito Manabe has clearly grasped the art of conceptual dosage and the use of familiar referents in a context where the aim is to communicate, stir and move.
Founder of the Rhizomatiks group, the Japanese artist is also presenting his latest audiovisual performance at MUTEK later this week, focusing more, we imagine, on visual materials this time inspired by everyday phenomena and attempting to artistically express the essential functions of living or artificial organisms.
Photo credit: Bruno Destombes
