André Éric Létourneau

As a musician, he has collaborated with other composers including Sam Shalabi (Shalabi Effect), Roger Tellier Craig (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Et Sans), Joëlle Léandre, Jac Berrocal, John Berndt, Phill Niblock, Alexander MacSween, Michel Smith (Orchestre Vélo Karel), Helena Espvall, Jackie Blake, Dan Breen, Neil Wiernik (a.k.a. NAW) and Réjean Beaucage. He produced the score for the immersive film installation "Rouge Mékong" by François-Lavoie Pilote, presented in Montreal at la Société des arts technologiques in 2013 and 2014.

Since 2012, he is Professor at Université du Québec à Montréal and researcher at Hexagram, Art & Flux (CNRS - La Sorbonne Panthéon) and at the research centre "Le corps de l'artiste" at the Institut supérieur des beaux-arts de Besançon/Franche-Comté.

Létourneau adapts his materials and methods of production according to the environmental requirements of each project. For example, the use of correspondences, legal agreements, CD publishing and radio broadcasts in his 2005 piece "Standard III". Létourneau also used other media such as integration of sign language and lip readings in various popular productions for television and Hollywood Cinema in "Biblical Consequences of the Representations" (2007–2010); photography, psychogeographic factors and individual conversations in "Standard II" (2001–present); radioactive material process in a particle accelerator at the Université Laval, aircraft and video in 1997's "3 9 30,"; anagrams and floating custom built sound modules in "Sonata for the Wolf" from 2001. "Létourneau is calling upon the structures that have and do produce us, our notions of nationality and belonging, and he is using the self-same tools that gave rise to our present-day status". Some Létourneau works are also raising issues about sex and human trafficking. These works were presented in collaboration with different NGOs, community groups, and human rights associations in Canada.

Since October 2001, Létourneau's artistic work has been centered around a series of meeting-maneuvers with citizens around the world. These maneuvers take place in the United States, Canada, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Italy, Germany and France.

Since the mid-eighties, Létourneau has also performed works from other experimental music composers such as Alvin Lucier, John Cage and I Wayan Suweca. In 2000, he conducted a radio performance of the Symphony No. 5 by the Korean composer Nam June Paik for the CBC radio.

Létourneau produced several radio art projects and music compositions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In 1999, he was the producer for the CBC of the special Hörspiel broadcast from 10 to 12 PM on the night of December 31 for the passage to the new millennium. Another Hörspeil, "Standard III" (2002), was commissioned by the CBC and broadcast on the night of Easter Sunday in 2003 under a program developed and curated by Mario Gauthier and Hélène Prévost. He received several grants and awards including grants from the Artists and Community Collaboration Program (ACCP), the Inter-Arts Program of the Canada Council for the Arts and from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for his artistic and curatorial work.

He qualifies most of his works as site-specific (pieces to be performed or installed in a precise place) but also "time-specific" (pieces to be performed at specific time of the day or of the year). Since 1999, Létourneau has also involved himself with music composition and interpretation and as the creator of custom-made instruments which are used in his work with the sound performance trio mineminemine along with intermedia artists Magali Babin and Alexandre Saint-Onge. The group regularly presents mineminemine's work in America and Europe.

Mineminemine is an eclectic experimental music and performance art group he started along with Magali Babin and Alexandre Saint-Onge. They formed the band in 1999. The band plays a mix of different conceptual-based musical forms. An American tour of the band have been organised by the Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist John Berndt in 2000, involving Christof Migone as a guest for the concert in New York City . Mineminemine performed at many art galleries and festivals in Europe and America such as the Red Room (Baltimore, USA), Hull Time Based Arts (Hull, UK), Westwerk (Hamburg, Germany), Université du Québec à Montréal, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and Sala Rosa (Montréal, Canada).

Between 1997 and 2001, Létourneau was a collaborator, executive producer and radio announcer for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). He has also served as a professor of Theory of Multimedia, Communication Phenomena Analysis, Art History and Conception of Transmedia Events at various colleges and universities. In 2001, along with the Chinese artists and curators Shu Yang and Chen Jin, he took part of the Open Arts Festival, the first series of Performance Art Festivals officially organised in the Republic of China.

In 1997, André Éric Létourneau received the Media Art Award from the Pépinières Européennes. A book about his work P/ACT, was published by the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede, the Netherlands. Since 1999, he received several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and from several private foundations. At the opening of the XVe Biennale de Paris in 2008, it appointed director Mr Alexandre Gurita, declared about Letourneau's work : "La démarche d'André Eric Letourneau s'inscrit dans le spectre de l'invisibilité opérante, qui constitue l'axe de l'économie de l'immatériel et de la connaisance vers lesquelles nos sociétés évoluent. Dans sa pratique, le temps de l'art se fait avoir par le temps réel." (The work of André Éric Létourneau is created within the spectrum/ghost of the principle of operative invisibility, which is the axis of the dematerialized world we are now living in - because of its ways of storing knowledge and memory. In his art, the time of art is snatched by the time of reality.") In 2010, Létourneau's work is presented at the biennale "Madrid abierto" in Spain.

André Éric Létourneau is a French Canadian media and transmedia artist, researcher, author, musician, composer, curator and professor based primarily in Montreal and Saint-Alponse-Rodriguez, Québec, Canada. He uses several pseudonyms, most notably Benjamin Muon and algojo)(algojo. His work has been associated with the development of performance art, radio art, process art, sound poetry and experimental music. Since the 1980s, Létourneau has presented intermedia works in international performance art festivals, galleries and museums such as the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre (1992), The James H.W. Thompson Foundation in Bangkok (one of Thailand's National Museums directed under the Patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, 2006) and at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum (as part of Les Escales Improbables in Montréal, 2007). In 2006, he was one of the artists selected to represent Canada at the XVth Biennale de Paris under a pseudonym. Since 2012, Létourneau has also contributed to the Biennale des Arts d'Afrique de l'est in Bujumbura (EASTAFAB-BURUNDI), the InterAzioni festival in Italy, the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria, Festival Phénomena in Montreal, Grace Exhibition Space, and The Emily Harvey Foundation in New York.

Since the end of the 1980s, Létourneau has also been involved in cultural and political journalism in the written press and for various public and community media. He continues to produce radio documentaries about artists, including Zhu Yu, The Residents, Genesis P-Orridge, Willem de Ridder, Jose Luis Castillejo, Juan Hidalgo, Robert Ashley, Christian Vanderborgh, Stelarc, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Angéline Neveu, Charlemagne Palestine, Emmanuel Madan, Michel Chevalier, Esther Ferrer, Denys Tremblay, Julien Blaine, Jac Berrocal, Richie Hawtin, I Nyoman Rembang, and I Wayan Suweca.