Enapolis is a piece of work that reports the artist’s critical and worried look at the current evolution of urbanism in the face of climate catastrophes. It is inspired by ‘building worlds’, in which it would be possible to spend an entire life, from the maternity ward to the mortuary, without ever leaving.

The project in brief: 

Yells-Atreuma is a speculative prefiguration of man’s remediation of his environment, enabled by the physarum polycephalum (commonly called blob) as a medium of communication and connection.

The project in brief:

Yells-Atreuma is a set of sculptures combining a software entity (neural network), a biological entity (physarum) and a synthetic entity (3D prints). Each module represents a vital organ (heart, lung, kidney, spleen, etc.) brought into contact with a living organism, the physarum polycephalum, which will colonise its host. The very title of the work: ‘Yells-Atreuma’ is derived from a textual generative program. It is one of many poetic and lexical possibilities produced by a neural network whose essential ‘feeds’ consist of two distinct lists. One lists all known pathologies in the world, the other lists several mythological, sacred and occult figures. From these specific and intertwined lexicons, a new form of language is produced, activated, shaped by the physarum and its movements on the organs. The latter then produces a meta-language, stammering and, paradoxically, sometimes complex, evocative, opening onto hybrid imaginaries. Yells-Atreuma is part of the ‘Mycore’ cycle, which proposes a remediation of the human being via a transformation by the fungi kingdom.

Photophonia is an installation inspired by an invention by Alexander Graham Bell (1880) using light as a sound transmission channel. Rid of the decorum and the discourse on innovation, Photophonia leads back to a raw and crude idea of technology, which can be seized and transformed into a poetic and political gesture. 

The project in brief:

The installation uses the movement of two flashing lights as sound transmitters. The circular movement of the mirrors around the bulbs produces a hypnotic sound vibration. The reception, made possible by small solar panels connected to an amplifier, produces a noisy, raw and yet fascinating result. This protocol offers a potential of construction and propagation of small networks whose manufacture is accessible to everyone. The question of the codification of information underlies this creation, notably by articulating the politics of data and the plasticity of light, its universality and its ephemeral beauty…

The project in brief:

A contemporary reinterpretation of the war memorial, Lorette is a set of sculptures including eleven authentic shell casings from the First World War set in resonance by a system of firing pins. Throughout the exhibition, from 4 October to 23 December 2018, the installation played 18.6 million notes, one for each death in the conflict. Through this process of data sonification, Lorette gives body to mortality data, repeated so many times as to become abstract; so enormous that they exceed our faculties of immediate representations. As a tribute to those who lost their lives, the stele highlights their words through the lyrics of the famous Chanson de Lorette, written and sung by the “poilus” (French World War soldier) since 1915.

Composite relational sculpture from which vibrated sounds emanate. ORGAN is an audio-tactile installation that invites the public to place themselves ‘in’, to snuggle ‘against’, to embrace, to move objects from which vibrating music emanates. Sometimes active, sometimes passive, the spectator places themselves between, on and under the objects and becomes part of this sensitive matter.

The project in brief:

ORGAN is a composite organic relief from which vibrating sounds emanate. ‘The closer I get to it, the more I’m part of this landscape. Or is it more of a part of me?’

ORGAN is an invitation to a playful, contemplative or even meditative journey. Far from supersonic speeds and internet flows, ORGAN is a work of slowness, of the tiny and the close.

This interactive sculpture brings into play not only the sight and hearing of the spectators, but also their touch through physical interaction. The skin is the main transmission interface, the membrane through which this disconcerting experience of sound and vibration passes for those who take the time to try it. It is an intimate and gentle experience made up of recesses and reliefs.

Hidden inside each object, a discrete audio-vibrating technical device diffuses sounds and vibrations through a network of speakers and vibrating motors. Each object has a sound and vibro-tactile identity, each one has its voice, its moods, its personality and together they create a spatialised polyphony both sound and tactile.

This project is a continuation of the research on audio-tactile works conducted by the artist Lynn Pook since 2003.

The project in brief:

Evaporation Silencieuse, by Nicolas Schneider, is a collaborative work evoking the imbalance of our landscape. It is concretely composed of a set of drawings made with ink and watercolour by the artist, in a sedentary, virtual and mental journey, thanks to the use of digital tools. In addition to the visual installation, a sound composition by Gaëtan Gromer enhances the spectator’s experience. Using field recording, the practice of composing music from field recordings, the sound artist equipped himself with hydrophonic microphones and walked the same routes.

The project in brief:

With the Ballade du Fou, Zahra Poonawala provides a new opportunity to travel both inside and with a sound. The work is a continuation of previous works that already allowed sound to be heard not as an impenetrable surface, but as a volume to go through via movement and listening. These works, like Tutti, were also based on a dialogue between the movements of the spectator/listener and those of the sound objects. The result was an increased awareness of the plasticity of sound, of its living character.

In the Ballade du Fou, the sound configurations evolve according to the physical relationship between the spectator and the installation. As the spectator approaches, a ceramic loudspeaker comes alive and emits a song, that of a soprano, while following the spectator’s movement through its rotations. The composition of this ballad was entrusted to Gaëtan Gromer. By approaching or moving away, the spectator can make the music evolve: the soprano is ‘influenced’ by them, sometimes shy, sometimes inhabited, revealing a palette of different nuances and regional accents. The original classical lied is revealed under unexpected facets.

The project in brief:

Still processing… is a multimedia installation that questions mortality statistics in current armed conflicts around the world. It thus plays on the purely statistical representations disseminated and repeated by the mass media and reveals to our sensibility what the simple repeated data ends up hiding: the unbearable reality of the number of victims. The incessant flow of data delivered by the different media causes an astonishing form of abstraction, a protocol to which we hardly pay attention anymore. Conversely, Still processing… opens a parenthesis of time to try to apprehend the fact of war through the singular, but essential, prism of the human cost and offers us a tangible way to realise this.

For a fraction of a second, you feel as if you are in a souk in Marrakech, a seaside resort in California, a city under alert in Japan or an amusement park in France. Triggered by our movement, a stream of words and sounds travels to us, attracting attention, calling us to prayer, arousing desire or evoking danger.

The project in brief:

Public Address System is a sound installation, placed in the public space, that broadcasts a recorded sound that has been emitted through a speaker of the same type elsewhere in the world. The sequences are triggered randomly when a person passes in front of it. You can hear recorded sounds, among others, in Paris, Tokyo, Isfahan, Montreal, Moscow, Kathmandu, Pokhara (Nepal), Geneva, Strasbourg, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Angoulême (France), Minoto (Japan), San Diego, Prague, Vienna, Bangalore (India), Rome, Shanghai, Wattwiller (France), Manama (Bahrain) and sounds from imaginary cities, such as Yirminadingrad for example. This collection creates a real poetic and musical universe composed of quotations encountered along their journeys and plays with the sound poetry of the various places.

> The work was awarded the 3rd European Digital Art Prize Imagina Atlantica in Angouleme.