Right in their elements Environmental artist, earthy trio coming to Cluster Fest
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/06/2024 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Michael Lucenkiw isn’t a scientist, but like many artists, he is just a little bit mad.
Equally inspired by electrical circuitry and natural life, Lucenkiw’s work places him at the nexus of what he refers to as bio art and citizen science, cutting through the muck of data like river turbidity with an inventive approach to scientific communication.
Call it streampunk.

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
Michael Lucenkiw is an artist who is equally inspired by electrical circuitry and natural life.
A trained landscape architect who grew up in Winnipeg’s Southdale neighbourhood, Lucenkiw, 38, first dipped his toes into those waters while completing his master’s in fine arts at the University of Windsor, near the eroding shores of the Detroit River.
“During my time there, I did a lot of cycling along the river corridor and couldn’t help but notice how impacted that river system is,” says Lucenkiw, who wears round wire-rimmed glasses and has a brass wrench earring dangling from his right lobe.
“It really did make me think about our relationship here to our rivers.”
Lucenkiw got to work on what became his master’s thesis project — a collection of machines illustrating the river’s well-being. He collected samples from several access points along the waterway, using the liquid as source material to translate water quality into abstracted, sense-oriented gadgets.
For one installation, Lucenkiw used spindles of hookup wiring to map the river system, mounting the electrical network on the wall beneath projections of undulating water samples. For another called the Pollution Piano, he built a six-valved candelabra from brass piping, inserting into each opening a test tube filled with river water samples, each with a distinctive mineral makeup which, when connected to a depressed wooden key, produced a unique “note.”
“I wanted this to be a place where people can jump in and feel free to look at water in a different way,”–Michael Lucenkiw
His machinery — built with found and cheaply procured materials — has a DIY “Touch the Universe” vibe, harkening back to the interactive exhibits in the former Museum of Man & Nature.
“Basically, distilled water should be more or less non-conductive. Oftentimes when it’s quite conductive, that means there’s heavy metals or some sort of (other matter). Basically, if it’s more conductive, the pitch will be higher, so when you play the piano, you can hear the pitch variation between each sample of water,” he says.
Heavily influenced by a visit to a French museum exhibit on Victorian Era inventions, Lucenkiw’s apparati were supposed to be exhibited together when he graduated in 2020, but COVID prevented a public showcase.
Four years later, the work is surfacing as part of the Cluster Festival of New Music and Integrated Arts for a month-long exhibition at Video Pool’s Poolside Gallery on the second floor of 100 Arthur St.
Cluster Festival
“This festival is about artists pushing the limits of their own practice,” says artistic director Ashley Au. “(That means) audiences will be seeing something quite live and palpable, with frenetic energy that feels like a sport. Our goal has always been to support artistic risk-taking and audience curiosity.”
“This festival is about artists pushing the limits of their own practice,” says artistic director Ashley Au. “(That means) audiences will be seeing something quite live and palpable, with frenetic energy that feels like a sport. Our goal has always been to support artistic risk-taking and audience curiosity.”
● Thursday, 8 p.m.: Debashis Sinha, Jason Tait and Compost at the WECC, $20
● Saturday, 8 p.m.: Domo11, Meanspath, Zorya Arrow, Olivia Shortt and Jaime Black in Room 201 at The Forks, $23
● Saturday, 10 a.m.: Graphic Scoring for Kids, with educator Nathan Krahn, free; pre-registration required
● Sunday, 8 p.m.: Madeline Hildebrand, Everett Hopfner, Sarah Jo Kirsch and Natanielle Felicitas at the WECC, $20
Tickets and more information available at clusterfestival.com
He calls it the Environment Machine Shop, and it runs from Friday to July 12.
To reproduce the project with a local flair, Lucenkiw, who once worked with Manitoba Hydro as a linesman assistant, headed to the banks of the Assiniboine, Red and Seine rivers to collect fresh samples, fishing out the water with a bucket on a pole used to fill six glass containers purchased from Dollarama. (A close call along the Assiniboine almost saw Lucenkiw swimming alongside the common carp.)
To gather site-specific field recordings above grade, he brought along a handheld recorder to capture underwater sounds, and fashioned a makeshift hydrophone out of a piezo microphone and a sprayable rubber coating called Plasti Dip.
Lucenkiw’s aim as an artist is to use manipulatable machinery to whimsically illustrate the biodiversity of specific places.
“I built these tools and the idea of the shop with the intention of making a playful place where people can be introduced to scientific tools and terminology, but without the heavy guilt I think that often comes with climate and environmental advocacy/ I wanted this to be a place where people can jump in and feel free to look at water in a different way,” says Lucenkiw.
Compost breaks down its WECC performance

MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
Lucenkiw’s Environment Machine Shop runs to July 12.
Eric Roberts, Julian Beutel and Justin Alcock — the members of the groove-based trio Compost — first met each other at Brandon University’s jazz program in 2007.
After their dorm room days, the artists stayed connected as they forged their own paths through the music industry, but in January 2023, they reconvened in a jam-space/shed in St. Boniface to see what sounds emerged from the soil.
Once a week, the trio united to improvise miniature musical sketches, recording them straight to a two-track. The following week, they’d gather again to refine the raw material, resulting in a self-titled cassette of 15 bite-sized tracks of “improvisational, vamp-based music” released on March 1. It’s a fertile listening experience.
“We didn’t approach it with any hard and fast musical references,” says Roberts, also a member of the local indie act Slow Spirit. “We let those come to the surface organically.”
Alcock tosses into the mix a grounding in hip-hop-leaning percussion; Roberts adds indie elements on the bass; while Beutel, a video game composer and sound designer with Winnipeg’s FlightyFelon Games, brings electronic and orchestral influences via his Fender Rhodes piano.
“The intention behind the band’s name was that we’ve played a lot of music together and (this music) is like the fruits and vegetables of our musicality that have melded together in a very rich, loamy synthesis,” says Beutel, laughing. “This is the organic nature of what led us to this point, and the music is the growth that comes out of that.”
Compost will perform in a Cluster Fest showcase called Pulse, joined by a “quadrophonic sound performance” by Toronto’s Debashis Sinha and a new, solo improvised work from Winnipeg’s Jason Tait (the Weakerthans) on Thursday at the West End Cultural Centre.
For their part, Compost wanted to create something new, using the band name as natural fuel.
The bandmates were fascinated by what they’d learned about mycelia, the root-like structures of fungi that communicate along forest floors through mycorrhizal networks. That tied well into the band’s improvisational process of shared, subconscious communication.
“So much of our ecology relies on (those processes) to take the decay and turn it back into base nutrients that more can grow out of. I think that music, our music, functions the same way, where we’re digesting the world around us and trying to break it down into the most basic components,” says Roberts.
The result is Decomposed, a performance divided into four movements: growth, decay, mycelium and regrowth. The sounds will be supported by video projections of time-lapse photography by filmmaker Joel Penner.
“We call what we make nutrient-rich music for your mind and body, because we think there’s a lot of depth to what we’re doing, but it’s presented in a palatable, digestible way,” says Roberts.
ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.
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