It’s been a whirlwind couple of years for Montreal, Quebec. Between corruption scandals, student strikes, and electoral madness there’s been plenty of issues for the people of Montreal to discuss and reflect on. All too often, though, public debate lost out in favor of sensationalized media coverage.But now Montreal-based art collective Moment Factory has decided to give the public its voice back, through a joint project with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Quartier des Spectacles. From now until November the Megaphone interactive project, directed by Etienne Paquette, invites the public to re-invent their interaction with public space, turning the Quartier des Spectacles into an Agora 2.0.The project employs a megaphone that analyzes words spoken into it and bounces them back as video projections onto the Université du Québec à Montréal’s main building. Using voice-recognition technology, Mégaphone produces a unique pattern each time, one that marries the organic cadence of the human voice to the digital appeal of its video renderings. As the projected patterns fade, they mesh with clustered clouds of key words inspired by the phrases spoken through Megaphone—making it a pretty direct way of reading the collective consciousness.
