Catalog essays: Introduction by Peter Courtemanche
and When cities sleep, what dreams may come? by Anna Friz.

r e v e r i e                      English | Français

is a virtual urban landscape (on the Web). Inside this city, an ever-expanding group of international sound artists will build venues for their work. Reverie imagines an urban landscape that includes a variety of poetic extrapolations on the types of regions that exist in our cities – a merging of Sunset Boulevard, Lower Manhattan, boat houses on the canal, the Surrey Landfill site, and a public botanical garden of the future. The web interface for the project consists of an abstracted grid. The contributing artists will locate themselves within the grid and define the characteristics of their environment and sound venue. Over time, the growing collection of audio art venues will define a structure of neighbourhoods and communities in which artists plan time-based events and engage other inhabitants in collaboration and exchange.

The title, Reverie, comes from a novel entitled "The Artificial Kid", by Bruce Sterling. The protagonist in this story (the Kid) is the focal point of a futuristic reality TV show. He moves around in a disjointed urban landscape – traveling from regions of neglect, violence and industrial decay to the mansions of wealth and power. The book is both a comment on our contemporary North American urban phenomenon and an exploration of virtuality. Sterling puts forth the idea that at some point when you take on or wear a virtual personality it becomes a real personality. To a degree, the actor who plays a long-standing role becomes the character and the distinction between real and virtual breaks down.

The project also refers to William Gibson's "Walled City" and other non-fictional on-line virtual communities (MUDs, chat groups, networked gaming groups, BLOGS, etc.). "Walled City" exists as a distributed network game that requires continuous human interaction to keep it alive and functioning. The players adopt a persona and take responsibility for maintaining different parts of the city. These parts are then passed from player to player as the participants log-in and out of the game. In a similar fashion, Reverie imagines a city that is activated purely through the ongoing activities and exchanges of sound-artists. This project was initially inspired by an early version of antarti.ca (a map of Antarctica that acts as an interface to organizations and information on the web (no longer on-line)) and Alien City an artwork by Alien Productions (Martin Breindl, Norbert Math and Andrea Sodomka) (Austria) that explores the concept of the city as a dynamic, evolving place for exchanges and cultural practice.

Reverie is produced by the Western Front Society and aaeol in Vancouver, Canada with the support and collaboration of artists and artist organizations around the world. The Western Front is an interdisciplinary artist-run-centre that was founded in 1973. It operates a media arts program, performance art series, new music program, a gallery and a bi-monthly magazine. Reverie includes artist-in-residence projects, a variety of streaming events within the virtual city, and an international exchange-art festival in January 2005. A catalogue and audio CD documenting the project will be released in April 2005.



Reverie Artists-in-Residence:

At the Western Front in Vancouver

September 2004 - January 2005
Jean Routhier - sound artist and co-curator.
Elizabeth Fischer - sound and new media artist (web-site design and creator of the map images)

November 2004 - January 2005
Anna Friz, Alberto Guedea, Ken Roux, Igor Santizo.
Michael North - collaborating with Elizabeth Fischer, long-distance from Ottawa.

January 2005
Roberto Paci Dalò and Francesca Mizzoni from Italy -
with the support of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Vancouver

At Studio XX in Montròal

November 2004 - January 2005
Emily Hermant - "City of Lies"


Ongoing streaming events will take place within the virtual city from mid November 2004 to Januaury 2005. These events will be posted on the schedule.


There will be an Exchange-Art Festival between all of the artists in the virtual city from Friday, January 14th to Monday, January 17th 2005. This will include on-site performances, concerts, radio-broadcasts and generative audio installations at Western Front, Studio XX, Radio Kinesonus, Kunstradio and other locations around the world.