Michael Mersereau (b. 1977) is a media and sound artist based in Oakland, California and Montreal, Canada. Mersereau’s work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries both nationally and internationally such as Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca in Ciudad de Oaxaca, The Diego Rivera Anahuacali Museum in Mexico City, and Maison de la Culture Claude Léveillée in Montreal. Mersereau is faculty at Mills College, and holds an MFA from Mills College and BFA from California College of the Arts.
Artist Location: Oakland, California
Social Media:
PARTICIPATION
Performance & Installation:
Swastikasualty
Collaboration with Marcuccio de Andreis.
Light Study: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is part of the installation series “Light Study”. Various movies are interpreted through Incandescent or LED bulbs and audio. in this case audio from the film will be interpreted into a sine or square wave in the 19 to 30hz range. For this installation the movie represented will be Kennth Anger’s “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome”. Located in the old guard shack, three lights: red, green, and blue will be reflected by five mirrors in a pentagonal shape on the floor. The flood of light reflecting from the floor will light the inside of the shack as well as seep through the windows. Located either on the ceiling, floor, or roof depending on allowances from Angels Gate in regards to the shack. A speaker for the sub frequencies will resonate the structure but will not interfere or alter the structure in any way.
Earmaginations [silent videos]
The Guest
A force outside of everyone’s control descends onto the front yard of a party. What it is and what it will bring no one seems to know. “The Guest” is a silent short made from a scene in Douglas Sirk’s “All that Heaven Allows” in combination with super8 abstract footage and overlaid images made from machine learning.
Sinking Territories
Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2021:
Sound Study for Suspiria
The full feature of “Suspiria” by Dario Argento, with all sound replaced by similar sound spaces collected in the Bay Area, California and Montreal, Quebec. Each scene in the film is mapped to an aural environment, turning the sound track into a tense soundscape in stark contrast to it’s original assault of music by Goblin. A transformation from terror to a haunting.
UHF Psycho-Memory
“UHF Psycho-Memory” is about my childhood growing up in the suburbs. Back then I would sneak out into the living room to watch horror films late at night. Before I snuck out, my father would watch WWII documentaries before going to bed, and though I didn’t know what it meant, there was often morse code in the documentaries as a signal that you were watching something about war. I always felt those as a haunting monster unable to move its mouth in terror. Falling asleep the sound of the tv and my memories would collide, metamorphosing into strange sonic dreams.
“UHF Psycho-Memory” takes the footage of old b-film, horror, and Spanish language horror and splices the film into audio cuts made by morse code which tells the story above in sound and text. The video component is on and old CRT color tv, while the sound is played across four speakers in the space. The audio and video itself is done in realtime by the software MaxMSP.
Earmaginations [silent videos]
The Paradist: Decapitation
The Paradist: Undercurrent
My installations, sounds, and videos investigate the absurdities and tragedies of characters developed and performed with me as an actor, director and composer. My latests character, the Paradist, is the ultimate tourist, a colonizing tiki bar terrorist searching for untouched beauty to take leisure from the chaos of the world. Unable to recognize the world around him, he sacrifices his and other lives for the simulation of genuine experiences in a paradise lost. Coming into conflict with his double, triple, and multiple selves, he begins to struggle for the vacation fantasy torn from him in uncertain times.
