Montreal's Message in a Bottle



Founded by Daniel Langlois in 1997, the Montreal-based Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology has been at the forefront of supporting projects that merge art and technology for over a decade. It now boasts a specific initiative devoted to developing new conservation methods to meet the needs of frequently immaterial media work, and the foundation's Web site serves as open storage for many watershed projects in the history of electronic and digital art. To celebrate a decade of the DLF's accomplishments, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting Communicating Vessels: New Technologies and Contemporary Art from September 20th to December 9th. The exhibition only scratches the surface of the vast number of works the foundation has supported in its history, but it gathers a fairly representative selection of important projects by Eduardo Kac, Jim Campbell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jessica Field, and a long list of other notable artists. The title 'Communicating Vessels' refers to objects that facilitate a transfer between two worlds--be it material to code or robotics to biology--but one of the most interesting transitions undertaken by the show will no doubt be how the curators overcome the installation challenges presented by bringing tech-heavy work into the museum's traditional galleries.