If “Get fit” and “See more art” are on your New Year’s Resolution list, then make your way to Visual Voice Gallery for its Art+Science in Motion Short Film Festival, in collaboration with Cinema out of the Box!.
At this event not only are the pictures moving, but so are the gallery visitors. To make the video projector work gallery visitors must peddle on a stationary bicycle, turning their energy into light. The effort will be worth it: the collection of 13 science-inspired art videos by eight international artists explores the solar system, zooms into the microcosmos, turns sound into sight, and visualizes mathematic principles.
Highlights from the reel include three films by Charles Lindsay, the first artist in residence at the SETI Institute. Titled CARBON I, II, and III, the short films were created with  a carbon-based imaging process Lindsay  invented, for which he received a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship.
The film Black Rain by UK artist duo Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) transports us into the orbit around the Sun . The artists worked with images collected by the twin satellite solar mission STEREO, which captured visual data of solar wind and coronal mass ejections. Semiconductor’s unique creative approach has won them the Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship and NASA Space Sciences Fellowship.
Australian artist Andy Thomas works with data from the Netherland’s Institute for Sound and Vision. His mesmerizing animations Nightingale and Canary and Bird Echoes are particle-driven 3D abstractions reacting to the sound of bird calls.

The total length of the looped reel, which was curated by gallery owner Bettina Forget, is about half-hour. Each film is between 3 and 6 minutes long, which means you don’t have to commit to pedalling for long stretches of time. The mobile Cinema out of the Box! was developed by McGill University’s Moving Image Research Lab to encourage ‘cinematic experiences’ in new and unexpected ways. The Lab focuses on developing a portable infrastructure for a mobile cinema and to equip it in an ecological and sustainable way. The cinema spent the summer months of 2014 in various Montreal parks, even a night in the cemetery, and Visual Voice Gallery is delighted to have it spend two weeks in its gallery space this winter.
The Art+Science in Motion short film festival takes place at Visual Voice Gallery from January 14 – February 7, 2015. Opening hours are Wednesday to Saturday from noon until 5:30pm.

Artists
Chris Abbas, deskriptiv (Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb), Markos Kay, Charles Lindsay, Parachutes (Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lafaucheux), Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), Kim Taylor, Andy Thomas

Curator: Bettina Forget

Cinema out of the Box! by McGill University’s Moving Image Research Lab and the sustainability Project Fund, directed by Alanna Thain

Exhibition: January 14 – February 7, 2015
Vernissage: Saturday, January 17, 2015, 3pm – 5:30pm

Text: Visual Voice Gallery

More information: www.visualvoicegallery.com