MAX BOUTIN « Texturologie vibratoire »

MAX BOUTIN

France
– ENTRÉE LIBRE –
BIBLIOTHÈQUE CHARLES-ÉDOUARD-MAILHOT

An experimental multimedia installation employing a ‘SkateCam’ − a skateboard equipped with an camera that captures the sounds and vibrations of the urban ground.

These video sequences are projected onto an oblique concrete screen where the surface of the ground moves at full speed, echoing the sounds of the skateboard produced by the friction of the wheels. This hypnotic kinetics reveals an invisible musicality of the city, due to the skateboard rolling in the grooves of the urban materiality, like a needle on a vinyl record. This sensory immersion is heightened by a wooden haptic module that transmits vibrations under visitors’ feet, using tactile transducers. Between two sequences, when the skateboard and its sounds come to a halt, the visitor’s gaze turns to a second video projection in the background to contemplate the overall shots of the places travelled through, whose varied urban soundscape is spatialised around the work.

« Texturologie vibratoire » is thus a sensory transposition where the audience can, for a moment, experience the texturology of skateboarding.

About the Artist

Max Boutin is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher currently completing his doctorate in art studies and practices at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). His thesis develops a texturological approach in which the skateboard is likened to an instrument, making it possible to play with urban rhythms and textures. This consideration gave rise to a visual, sound, and haptic installation entitled « Texturologie vibratoire ».

His research and creative work are part of the art-skate which he has recently mapped and in the skates studies, an international and transdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of skateboarding. With his collaborators Brian Glenney and Paul O’Connor, he co-authored The Sonic Spectrums of Skateboarding: From Polarity to Plurality (2023) and more recently The Skater’s Ear: A Sensuous Complexity of Skateboarding Sound (2025), two articles on the acoustic world of skateboarding.

His research is supported by Hexagram, an international research-creation network based in Montreal, and by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture, which funded his doctorate as well as his postdoctorate in sound composition, which began in spring 2025 at the Laboratoire Formes – Ondes at the Université de Montréal.