Inaugurated as part of the Montreal festival of spoken word, Voix d’Amériques (February 2006), the website was extended in the form of an installation at Galerie Espace (Montreal) and at Harbourfront Center (Toronto).
It was also presented at the festival E-Poetry 2007 in Paris (view a QuickTime video recording).
The poetic corpus of Childe Roland
Astres / Stars / Goleuadau is based on a reflection on the black holes of astronomy and the death of supernovas. It consists of dozens of sound poems, each line of which begins with an aspiratory syllable that, over time, dries out and chafes the throat. The sound poems exist only when they are read aloud, ‘like a slew of curses hurled at the merciless stars’ (Childe Roland). Written in three languages, French, English and Welsh, the texts are organised thematically, addressing a number of contemporary issues: the environment, epidemics, computerisation, globalisation, etc.
This work is part of an exploratory process that this Canadian artist, who lives in Wales, has been pursuing for several years. He works in sound and concrete poetry, and focuses on the physical characteristics of the text through artists' books and sculptural objects. Childe Roland is the artist name of Peter Noël Meilleur.
Susan Coolen's body of work
The Nova Scotia-born artist's photographic work also revolves around the theme of the cosmos. His main body of work Astral Projectionsas well as his other works (Celestial Travelers, Primordia, Galileo’s Observation), playfully and poetically present objects from space imagery, in the spirit of space explorers and in relation to fictional accounts of voyages to the Moon. His found objects and unpublished specimens open the doors of the imagination to the many possible entities inhabiting the vast universe.
Multimedia production by Agence TOPO
Agence TOPO is continuing its research into the convergence of literature and images with new media, using text as the very material for experimentation. The poems and images have led to the creation of multimedia tableaux that follow each other randomly as visitors browse the site. Agence TOPO has invited author Childe Roland and the poets Kim Doré, Tony Tremblay and Victoria Stanton à interpréter lespoèmes, lesquels sont repris dans le site comme extraits audio et vidéo.
