(french below)
The collective work Did you say sound library? is now complete!
Between January and June 2025, I asked a number of composers to write or talk to me on the subject of the sound library in Acousmatic; a compositional tool designating a “palette” of sound materials that these artists use to compose.
These exchanges have led to this work, made up of twenty-three articles available in two languages (French and English), which I'm very proud to share with you today. Please feel free to circulate this work (links below or on my website in bio).
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L'ouvrage collectif Vous avez dit sonothèque ? est terminé !
Entre janvier et juin 2025, j'ai demandé à plusieurs compositrices et compositeurs de m'écrire ou de s'entretenir avec moi sur le sujet de la sonothèque en Acousmatique; un outil de composition désignant une « banque de sons », une palette regroupant les matières sonores avec lesquelles ces artistes composent.
Ces échanges ont permis de constituer cet ouvrage composé de vingt-trois articles disponibles en deux langues (français et anglais) que je suis très fier de vous partager aujourd'hui. N'hésitez pas à faire circuler ce travail librement (lien ci-dessous ou sur mon site en bio).
French version/Version française :
/Vous-avez-dit-sonotheque
English version/Version anglaise :
/Vous-avez-dit-sonotheque-ENG
With the participation of/ Avec la participation de :
Régis Renouard Larivière, Christine Groult, Francois Bayle, @normandeaurobert , @arrmando_b , Annette Vande Gorne, Marco Marini, Ana Dall'Ara-Majek, Jonty Harrison, @higakito , John Young, Philippe Mion, Elizabeth Anderson, @hanstutschku , @dufourdenis , Jean-Marc Duchenne, @danielteruggi , Elsa Justel, @christianzanesi , @bestiaire_sonore , Lucie Prod'homme, @parmerudake , Claude-Anne Parmegiani, @maximebarthelemy_nstgrm et @_maycec
Self-portrait 2 (excerpt) - Scanoscopies Cycle, 2026
Our bodies come up short compared to machines, which have the power to look ever further or deeper into human material. From our human perspective – guided by our own “user interfaces” (UI) – it is a question of observation. But for the machine, the body is not a subject to be observed; it is food, data. This second self-portrait is a work exploring this digestion of bodies by machines, a calculation.
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Scanoscopies is a series of works focusing on data packaging, expressed through the idea of crushing: the flatness of the self and the video medium. Based on photocomposition and scanner imaging, these works are conceived as musical pieces, in motion: mechanical and procedural.
Self-portrait (excerpt) - Scanoscopies Cycle, 2024
Self-portrait simply perpetuates the human obsession with finding his double through the question of representation. The latter is a moving, carnal body, and therefore opposed to the flat surface onto which it is projected. The work maintains this inability of representation to seize even its own reflection. The body is worked here as a flat plane of flesh. By eradicating most of its form and space, it is reduced to its matter qualities in a unilateral falling movement.
The main material of the work was obtained in a darkroom, by crushing my own body with a scanner. The artwork is a report with the task of exploring my flesh, of taking an overview of my body at a given moment. It's an evaluation of the fragility of this material, so complexing and foreign when it wants to be, that gives the cruel impression of living in someone else. More than a plastic work, it's the necessity of an anatomical self-fiction.
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Scanoscopies is a series of works focusing on data packaging, expressed through the idea of crushing: the flatness of the self and the video medium. Based on photocomposition and scanner imaging, these works are conceived as musical pieces, in motion: mechanical and procedural.
Plasforms (excerpt) - Scanoscopies Cycle, 2023
Plasforms is above all a visual composition, the relevance of the camera's absence, continuing in its time the plastic tradition of seeing. It is the exposure of the digital medium itself, a choreography of ghost images mechanically imitating the artificiality of a process.
With an average of 0.602 packages a day, I pack, repack and unpack a cyclical pile of plastics. The artwork is an exhibition/explosion of this garbages in their motion: a cycle of openings/closures gradually transforming them into concrete and filmic material.
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Scanoscopies is a series of works focusing on data packaging, expressed through the idea of crushing: the flatness of the self and the video medium. Based on photocomposition and scanner imaging, these works are conceived as musical pieces, in motion: mechanical and procedural.
Very happy to teach a seminar at @maynoothuni on February 25th: Getting started (and surviving) as a contemporary composer or artist. Thank you so much for the invitation Gordon!
