The Idoru project questions the meaning and physical location of music performance by collaborating with a virtual avatar  that will become a subversive electronic pop figure. During the residency at IAC, the artist will work on the music production and narrative development as well as finding strategies to communicate and exchange material with the remote collaborators.

The multi platform performance brings forward concerns and reflections about current identity politics, drifting slowly towards a disquieting homogenization of dialogue. We live in a context where identity representations are increasingly mediated via a virtual persona, created by users of social media. These virtual personas and representations blur our perception of individuals and of social reality while concretely affecting ‘irl’ interactions. Paradoxically, the art community tends to give more and more importance to personal background and identity, in an age when the very notion of identity becomes flexible, malleable and begins to dissolve.

The residency will include research about vocal synthesis and modification techniques and work on the narrative and compositional aspects of the music performance. The artists will accompany the birth of the avatar, whose online presence it will be possible to follow from the end of the residency period. From that moment, the avatar will become an independent entity.

Myriam Bleau’s residency is organized in collaboration with Inkonst, and Bleau will be back in April to present the project in some form at Intonal 2018.