The sixth edition of the ELEKTRA festival of digital arts took place May 10-15, 2005, and featured installations, new-media performances, interactive works in public spaces and professional exchanges. The success of the festival is helping to make Montreal an important centre for digital arts in North America.
As a major rendezvous for digital artists on the continent, ELEKTRA is well known around the world for the quality of its productions and presentations. Its mandate is to explore all possible links between music and visuals by promoting artists whose work fuses cutting-edge electronic music with visual design based in new technologies (animation, installation and robotics). ELEKTRA expanded its horizons this year to include installations in the programme, such as interactive works in public spaces and a lecture on animation design. The 2005 edition also extended beyond its usual venue, Usine C (one of the event's sponsors), to take up residence in new venues like Place des Arts, the Musée d'art contemporain, Metropolis and Station C.
With the aim of reinventing the term "audiovisual" (A/V), which our multimedia generation has rendered banal, we chose original works that use different platforms to show how sound and image are progressively merging. The schedule of ELEKTRA's sixth edition included interactive pieces that combine audio and video projection in a reactive way, alongside presentations and performances of non-narrative video-based music.
Besides Montrealers, ELEKTRA 2005 highlighted the talents of Canadian artists from Vancouver and Toronto, and artists visiting from England, France, Belgium, Germany, South Africa, the United States and Japan.
ELEKTRA, presented by the ACREQ in collaboration with EPOXY and USINE C, was made possible by generous support from the public sector: the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Ministère des Affaires municipales et des Régions, Heritage Canada, the City of Montréal, the Borough of Ville-Marie, the French Consulate of Montreal, the British Council, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. We are also grateful for the generous participation of our private contributors.
