A soccer tournament to benefit the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation will take place on Saturday, March 1, at the Loyola gym, starting at 11 a.m.

Four exercise science students, Josh Oubadia, DJ Bendavid, Sam Deiaco and Karine Senecal, are organizing the event as an assignment for their Fitness and Sport Management class, taught by George Short.

The cost to register is $100 per team of at least five players. Everyone over the age of 18 is encouraged to participate.

Every team will play at least two games and the top four will face off for awards at the end of the tournament. Refreshments will be sold and every participant will be entered to win door prizes in a raffle draw.

To register or for more information, contact Josh Oubadia at 745-0385 or by email at joubadia@yahoo.com.

Art Matters moves to the city

Art Matters was launched three years ago to mark the 25th anniversary of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and this year’s foray into the cityscape, scheduled for March 7 to 21, shows how quickly the festival has found its stride.

It offers a wide scope of works — theatre, dance, music, film, visual art and creative writing — by more than 100 artists. The festival organizers are Emily Pearlman and Craig Dessen.

The original Art Matters was intended to provide fine arts students with a forum for their work, but that concept has been extended, as proposals are now solicited from non-fine-arts students as well. “We are adding a community development aspect to the event,” Pearlman said.

As an homage to B-movie soundtracks, Les Angles Morts will perform live while the audience watches visuals through 3D glasses. The F.C. Smith lobby will be a performance space for original plays. Student films will be screened at the de Sève Cinema, which will also be the site of a spoken-word event by 14 creative writing students.

An exhibit on art and activism will address matters such as the G8 summit in Ottawa, the killings of aboriginal women in B.C., and issues relating to 9/11. There will also be an exhibit addressing the body, held, appropriately, at the YMCA.

The 70 festival volunteers are already reaping rewards from their involvement. Mostly first-year students, they are learning public relations, marketing and arts administration hands-on. Dessen and Pearlman hope that will get them thinking about making their own submissions for next year’s show.

Programs listing all events, including parties, will be available beginning March 1.

-Craig Stein

Interstices unites art and body

Interstices is a research group of artists, many of whom are associated with Concordia, who explore the aesthetic and poetic implications of human-machine interfaces in the media arts. In association with DARE-DARE (Centre de diffusion dÕart multidisciplinaire de Montréal), they invite the public share this experience at Espace 505, 460 Ste. Catherine St. W. Different prototypes will be exhibited each week, and the artists will be present at four receptions at 5 to 7 p.m., each Friday.

February 26 to March 1: Fran�ois Quévillon present États et intervalles, an interactive audio and video installation that the visitor enters to experience an oscillation between action and contemplation.

March 5 to 8: Lynn Hughes and Simon Laroche presents Perversely Interactive System, a video projection in which the image is controlled by a wireless interface that reads the variation in the perspiration level of the participant.

March 12 to 15: ConcordiaÕs Adad Hannah presents Still, a project that tries to slow technology down a bit, by using audience response to explore the notion of stillness. Manon De Pauw presents Paragraphie, an interactive device that interprets the rhythm and musicality of a writerÕs gestures rather than the sense of what it written.

March 19 to 22: Beewoo presents Habitgram Prototype, a coat into which are inserted a number of wireless mini-cameras. The audience will be invited to wear habitgram and therefore to ÒwearÓ the room in which they are standing. Alexandre Castonguay and Mathieu Bouchard present GridFlow on Friday, March 21, from 12 to 7 p.m., and in performance at 8 p.m. This is a multi-dimensional dataflow processing library for Ruby/ jMax/PureData, specialized in image and video.