This performance extends the experience of the interactive installation The Garden of Dreams, presented simultaneously in Musées Gadagne (Lyon) and Maison Française of Columbia University, by allowing two flutists, one in Lyon, the other in New York, to play together via the Internet, crossing the dreams and the oniric landscapes of the installation.

The Garden of Dreams proposes to the visitors the interactive exploration of dreams coming from all over the world, in many different languages, recorded both on the Internet and at the two installation locations in New York and Lyon (France). These dreams take part in a collective memory, which visitors of the installation can consult by traveling through oniric universes. Everyone can record in video and share a dream, thanks to a website specially designed for this purpose, http://thegardenofdreams.org, and to a “Dream Station” conveniently provided next to the installation.

The performance Distant Mirrors makes the two flutists to meet in a musical and visual imaginary space build around these dreams. The musicians do not have a finite, printed score: instead they play music that they discover in the same time that the audience on a large vertical screen, on which they also see each other, like through a window to “the other side”.

Indeed, images on the screen include fragments of musical notation that they have to sight-read and play “on the fly”. Some characteristics of the image itself, like its structures and colors, transport a musical semantic to be also interpretated. These “dynamic scores” are sometimes predefined, written by the composer, and sometimes developed by the computer according to compositional rules prolongating the music played live by the flutists.

In this way, Distant Mirrors intends to put the performers in a situation similar to the “state of dream”, in which you can recognize some elements but not all of them, many being alternately close or strange, in which you never know exactly what is going to happen next, you just have to adapt to the enigmatic course of events, and create your own interpretation of dreams.

Conception, Composition, Computer Music and Graphics:

Jean-Baptiste Barrière

Computer Music and Graphics Realization : Christophe Lebreton (Grame),

With the research teams of Grame & Ircam in the framework of the Inedit Project

Flutists: Margaret Lancaster (New York), Camilla Hoitenga (Lyon)

Realization : Grame, Image Auditive

Coproduction : Grame / Biennale Musiques en Scène

Production : Grame & Image Auditive, in partnership with Musées Gadagne (Lyon), Miller Theater,  Computer Music Center & Maison française

of Columbia University (New York)

With the help of: Inedit Project /ANR, Scan fund of Région Rhône-Alpes, Dicream

Margaret Lancaster on stage (live at Miller Theatre in New York) with Camilla Hoitenga on screen (live at Musées Gadagne in Lyon)  rehearsing together through Internet

the performance of   « Miroirs Distants/Distant Mirrors » on March 29th, 2014: