Winner of the 2018 Big Bang artist-and-engineer residency program merges Montreal and Calgary talent
Exterior rendering Skybridge Syncopation, courtesy the Big Bang Residency team.
CALGARY / BANFF, AB, November 22, 2017 — A team that brings together top talent in art, engineering and architecture from Montreal and Calgary will be the creators of one of the flagship spectacles at Beakerhead 2018.
Their project, called Skybridge Syncopation, will turn one of the Plus 15 walkways into a large-scale interactive work for a week in September 2018, and will be developed over the course of the year through the Big Bang Residency Program, a Beakerhead and Banff Centre collaboration.
Every year, one of Beakerhead’s more spectacular projects is supported by the Big Bang program. This international competition is dedicated to supporting collaborations between artists and engineers.
The winner of the 2018 competition is a team led by Montreal lighting artist Conor Sampson, a principal at CS Design, one of the partners in the interactive lighting installation at Beakerhead 2017 – the giant teeter totters. Other team members are Marc Boutin, an award-winning Canadian architect based in Calgary; Daniel Iregui, an artist based in Montreal; and two engineers. Thomas Egli is with EGP Groupe based in Montreal and Geoff Bouckley is with SMP Engineering in western Canada.
The Big Bang Residency team is provided with a one-week all-expense paid residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, valued at $15,000, a budget of $50,000 for artist fees, materials and supplies. The program is supported by the Remarkable Experience Accelerator, a joint initiative of Calgary Arts Development and the Calgary Hotel Association.
This is the third year for this Beakerhead program. Beakerhead is an annual smash up of art, science and engineering in Calgary that is entering its sixth year, and will run September 19-23, 2018.
About Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity: Founded in 1933, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is a learning organization built upon an extraordinary legacy of excellence in artistic and creative development. What started as a single course in drama has grown to become the global organization leading in arts, culture, and creativity across dozens of disciplines. From our home in the stunning Canadian Rocky Mountains, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity aims to inspire everyone who attends our campus – artists, leaders, and thinkers – to unleash their creative potential and realize their unique contribution to society through cross-disciplinary learning opportunities, world-class performances, and public outreach. banffcentre.ca
About Beakerhead: Beakerhead encourages the arts and engineering sectors from across the city, province, country and world to build and exhibit works of interactive entertainment, culminating in a spectacular five-day phenomenon of culture, science and technology each September. To stage this exuberant expression of human ingenuity, Beakerhead supports learning-by-doing for people of all ages, year round, to create artistic projects that have science and engineering at their heart – and, when completed, offer audiences a chance to see, touch, do and create. beakerhead.com
The Remarkable Experience Accelerator is a partnership between the Calgary Hotel Association and Calgary Arts Development designed to enhance the story of Calgary as a cultural hotbed and give people even more reasons to visit Calgary as leisure travellers. The program is investing up to $1,164,000 from the Destination Marketing Fund (DMF) over three years to accelerate medium to long-term (at least two years) plans for remarkable arts experiences. The maximum number of clients participating in the program at any given time is limited to seven.
