OBJECTIVES OF THE EVENT

Champ Libre is looking for installations allying art and architecture and occupying the public space, while using new media components, works that explore the architecture of the site occupied in its spatiality and transform the visual or sound perception of this latter.

Champ Libre is looking for interventions of art and of microarchitecture that occupy the contemporary public space and question it in terms of programming, that offer an appropriation of the site by the mutation of one of the aspects of the latter.
Champ Libre is looking for interventions of art and of architecture that transform the experience, the comprehension or the perception of the site of the event for the spectator, and that include the participation of the latter to the existence of a site and to a ritual that renders exceptional and makes this space evolve through time.

THE MANIFESTATION INTERNATIONALE

A NEW DIRECTION, A NEW ORIENTATION, A NEW MANIFESTATION
ART – ARCHITECTURE – NEW TECHNOLOGIES – PUBLIC SPACE

A SIGNIFIED CHANGE
After Cécile Martin took over the general and artistic direction of Champ Libre, 2007 was a year of report. After evaluating trumps and weaknesses of the Manifestation, it was necessary to acknowledge that after 7 editions, the biennale of Champ Libre had to mark a cut with the past, recentering its mandate around an expertise recognized by its public, the participants to the different editions of the biennale and the event’s partners. In 2007, the MIVAEM becomes therefore the MANIFESTATION INTERNATIONALE of CHAMP LIBRE. The biennale will hold his eighth edition in September 2008 under the theme of the Forest in the Quartier International de Montréal (QIM).

REINFORCED TRUMPS
Champ Libre reaffirms today its capacity to propose marking themes and sites as framework to the Manifestation. Champ Libre will continue to invite new media artists to propose big scale site specific installations that transform the perception of the site occupied. Champ Libre will continue equally its collaboration with architects in order to present and reveal the hidden qualities of these exceptional sites.
In order to underline and gather these forces, in order to render more significant and serve better these different aspects and goals, Champ Libre has decided to tighten and reorient the Manifestation.

THE MANDATE AND THE PROGRAMMING
Thereafter, the Manifestation will only present works in the form of installations, each exploring the encounter between new media arts and architecture in the public space. Different media, university and culture partners will be gathered in order to give a visibility to and emphasize alternate and significant proposals in the public space, while promoting critical questionings and optimizing the realization of a number of restricted major works of emerging as well as established creators.
The Manifestation will have as a mandate to question, transform experience and redefine contemporary public space.

EDITORIAL LINE / CRITICAL APPROACH
Champ Libre considers public spaces as complex ecosystems. Through its events, the organization participates actively and in a critical manner to the artistic and architectural reinterpretation of these environments and to a new appropriation of these by the general public, all while exploring new media art, architecture and urban planning problematics. Every event proposes a thematic underlining its site specific character and proposing new experiences in existing public spaces in order to unveil the chosen sites’ qualities, transform and improve the perceived and understood complexity of these spaces.

Thus, the interventions that compose the event’s programming are as much contemporary points of views on the history of the site, than on its possible becoming. These perspectives serve equally as basis for the composition of a book, a symposium and for a series of related activities. Each artwork of the programming is the fruit of an encounter between media arts and architecture that question the existing borders between these two fields. At the time of the Manifestation, Champ Libre invites new media artists, architects, and professionals of connected fields to expose their knowledge outside of conventional exhibition spaces and to explore the limits of their discipline, through a poetic and engaged use of technology and an interpretation of the site of the event in its architectural and urban, social and historic dimensions.

Besides, Champ Libre encourages partnerships with the aim to bring individuals working in different disciplines within a team so that be confronted different expertises as for the problematic at stake and that are gathered their know-how in order to realize a shared by all utopia. The event is a concentratation of exchanges allowing to attain a common goal. The major resources in the realization of the Manifestation are confrontation, conviction and collaboration. The Manifestation aims to surprise all as for the becoming of a new public space, of a new media art and of a new architecture.


RESPONSIBLE EXPLORATION OF THE PUBLIC SPACE
Before all, the Manifestation is a space of exploration and of interdisciplinary exchanges that collectively questions the public space and its occupation, before being a simple space of presentation of works. All disciplines and individuals working in public places are invited to a collaborative, citizen and responsible experimentation that allows the redefining of the uses and the contemporary meaning of the public space. The process enables to fully validate a discipline in this collective space, and show the capacity of the latter to reinvent a contemporary programmatic of these places.


PARTICIPATIVE REAPPROPRIATION OF THE PUBLIC SPACE
At the time of the Manifestation, Champ Libre proposes a series of interventions that transform the uses of the site occupied. It is while revealing and inspiring to the collective imaginary a multitude of new uses, that the réappropriation of these places by the citizens initiates itself. Thanks to the participative experience proposed by every work, the public discovers the individual and collective power to endow the public space with new meanings and to act on the transformation of the latter.


SPACE-TIME REINVENTION OF THE EXISTANT
The Manifestation has as a goal to work in the existing urban space, in order to reinvent and transform the spatial and temporal experiences of these places. The interventions that take place within question the meaning of contemporary public space and processes of its manufacture, explore supplementary strategies of intervention on the existent and of creation of spaces of experience (application to the public space of principles and strategies exterior to the traditional expertise of professional maintenance and creation of public spaces, new media art and architecture). The new role played by the collective spaces must be defined at an era in which each individual constantly lives simultaneous experiences of compression and of expansion of one's perception of reality.


FLEETING AND DURABLE
The Manifestation proposes interventions which, beyond their circumscribed existence in the event’s time and space, durably question and transform contemporary public spaces, going as far as to leave durable traces. Validated by public participation, the works that will add value to certain necessary and significant uses of the public space will become essential to the new relationship of the citizen to these places and eventually could become permanent.


NETWORK OF DISTRIBUTION & OF COLLABORATIONS
Champ Libre’s network of distribution is composed of more than 7,000 collaborators and partners including national and international architects and artists, new media arts and architecture (and related domains) organizations, museums and festivals, and many departments of universities and research laboratories. In Montreal only close to 500 radio, television, written or Web medias, university departments / research laboratories and cultural structures meet the interests of Champ Libre for the fields of public space, art, new technologies and architecture. Within this context, Champ Libre will generate emulation around the goals of the event by the meeting and the confrontation within every sphere of the Manifestation of Montrealers, Canadians and foreigners.
Besides, the post-Manifestation tour will bring part of the programming to be presented in the framework of other Canadian and international major events having for mandate to occupy the public space by new media arts and architecture interventions.

The Manifestation is conceived in order to attract artists using technological components in their installations in order to validate their creative process on a large scale, with a widened public.
The Manifestation is conceived in order to attract architects and professionals linked to design (landscape architects, urban planners, etc), not excluding the general public. The event commits to develop a participative and game-like experience for the spectator, conceived to increase the consciousness of alternative uses of architecture, of art and of technology in public spaces. It is also wanted as a free space within which architects can express themselves in an imaginative manner outside professional constraints. By a poetic reinterpretation of the existent, the programming proposes to the audience the power to reinvent itself as a community.


FEE POLICY
Authors’ rights and fees are given to the creators following the updated rates of CARFAC (Representation of Canadian Artists) and its recommendations such as specified on the website of Champ Libre www.champlibre.com.