Immersive. Botanical. Meditative. Aleatoric. Awe-inspiring. I keep effusing these odd combination of terms in describing SKOLTZ_KOLGEN, the endearing and impressive collective-of-two from Montreal, Canada. They performed ASKAA for a marathon 5 hours at the CMKY festival, described as an interactive ecosystem inspired by vegetation. JPGs of course, don’t to the experience justice – the visuals hovered, danced and grew throughout my time there, but not in the artificial, randomly animated way some sonified graphics are done. And not being content to just press play on some video loops and walk away, SKOLTZ_KOLGEN actually performs a live soundtrack to accompany the A/V installation. Inside of CU ATLAS’s state of the art Black Box, ASKAA was powered by 3 10,000 lumens projectors, multiple laptops running MAYA rendered video and topped off with contact mic’ed bells, crystals, and wooden boxes routed through NI Reaktor. But technology aside, the space they created allowed one to reflect on the silences in between breaths of a truly living installation. Pillows were scattered around the floor, inviting people to lay back and drift off into the piece. I felt like I was floating underwater and in inner-galactic space simultaneously.

More photos of ASKAA here.