mesocosm^CA/QC

Photo credit: Bruno Aïello-Destombes

mesocosm, aka Emma Forgues, Joël Lavoie, and Philippe Vandal, develops speculative narratives around synthetic ecosystems and digital environments.

Working across installation, live audiovisual performance, soft robotics, and real-time systems, Forgues’ material-first practice explores how bodies are shaped by technological and ecological systems, using silicone skins, inflatables, sensors, image, sound, and code to create environments where touch, perception, and space co-compose. Rooted in care as a method, their work engages speculative ecologies, techno-feminism, DIY processes, and collaborative forms of making.

Lavoie’s sonic explorations sails through the troubled water of the individual and collective subconscious. Using mainly field recordings and generative synthesis, he extracts the musicality of these sonic timescapes to underline their changing nature and context, thus questioning the politics and aesthetics of inhabited spaces. His works take form in performances, installations and recordings.

A new media artist based in Montréal, Vandal works at the convergence of technological, ecological, and aesthetic concerns, weaving connections between bio-inspired critical design, environmental chemistry, and tangible, site-responsive media interventions. Drawing from the aesthetics of scientific laboratories, particularly those related to environmental chemistry, he recontextualizes these visual and material languages within an artistic framework. Through this approach, he explores contamination as a material that is simultaneously political, poetic, and aesthetic.

mesocosm – Resonance
Film

mesocosm’s Resonance explores the interplay between memory, space, and digital transformation. Incorporating 3D scans of various locations across Québec, it presents a dreamlike, ever-shifting landscape where reality and imagination blur. Through surreal environments—abandoned urban structures, snow-covered relics, and ethereal floating entities—the piece immerses viewers in a poetic reflection on decay, preservation, and the passage of time.

TW: This performance may contain intense visual and auditory sequences, including strobe effects.