Christopher Bissonnette

Christopher Bissonnette began his career studying fine art at the University of Windsor. Majoring in video and multimedia, he began to produce video that was inseparable from sound, and sound that produced contextual support to the abstracted imagery of his visual work. Bissonnette experienced the rise of the Detroit electronic music scene in the early 1990s, and began to develop an aural vocabulary of his own. He experimented with "purist" techno sound, working with analogue synths and rhythm machines.This was ultimately unfulfilling. In 1996 Bissonnette teamed up with Mark Laliberte to form Disseminator Audio, which produced hybrid performances of sequenced tracks, turntable experiments and spoken word. Bissonnette refined this vocabulary producing audio, video, and installation work. In 1997 Laliberte and Bissonnette began working with Windsor artist Chris MacNamara, founding Thinkbox, a media collective focused on the intersection of art and popular electronic music. Thinkbox produces art in a variety of media and spaces from art galleries to nightclubs and have fronted a series of limited edition, themed compilations, beginning with Settings. In early 2004 the collective released Guitar, a collection of the members manipulated interpretations of prerecorded guitar sessions. In 2004 Thinkbox was invited to perform a showcase at Mutek in Montreal. In addition to a collaborative performance with the other five members, Bissonnette offered a solo piece derived from a body of work that would eventually be comprised in his solo debut release Periphery.