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A Take on "Piece for Guitars" is an extension of the installation called Pieces for Instruments, which features three filmed sound performances entitled Piece for Drums, Piece for Microphones and Piece for Guitars. In each performance, a musical instrument is dragged through a different natural site. This approach aims to use the ground as an actual "musical score", in order to question how landscape shapes culture and, more specifically, sonic and musical imaginaries. Piece for Guitars took place in September 2018 at the Pinède provinciale de Lachute, in Quebec, and was executed with two guitars running side by side on the forest floor. A Take on "Piece for Guitars" can be considered both as a reminiscence of this performance and as a separate work of composition solely made out of the guitar sounds recorded that day.
Pieces for instruments is a video installation articulated around the meeting of sound and landscape. In its three videos, a human figure strolls through natural landscapes while dragging musical instruments on the ground. These instruments emit sounds that can be heard individually through headphones or all together in the gallery space, forming some kind of broken-up rock music.
How does the landscape influence our auditory and musical imagination? What instruments, what rhythms, and what melodies is a given landscape likely to suggest? By what means can a forest floor, a mountain, or a beach play the part of a musical score? The gallery becomes a space of contemplation in which these questions intersect.
Data String Oscillations is composed from a selection of five audio cassettes found in Artexte’s collection (www.artexte.ca). Parts of the sound content of these cassettes were sampled and mixed with other sounds recorded in the physical environment of Artexte (metal squeaks from the library shelves, electromagnetic noises from the thermo-hygrometer, sounds from the staff computers browsing the database back-end, etc.).
The five selected cassettes were digitized as part of an archiving project, and metadata was added to the files created. This metadata was turned into a different score for each track of the album, using software that transforms alphanumeric characters into MIDI parameters.
Through this process, the album draws out a new sonic territory, different from the original cassettes, but still related to it. Overall, the album aims to highlight the originality of these selected works from the 80’s and 90’s, while giving a voice to the archival framework that allows their management and preservation.
Cycles and cycles is a listening device playing a sound composition whose structure is constantly changing. Four portable cassette tape players are playing cassettes of different lengths. The magnetic tapes are ‘looped’ so as to never stop and the motors of the portable players are not spinning at exactly the same speed. Thus, by de-synchronization, the structure of the piece is modified at each loop. Like the instruments of a quartet, each of the cassettes contains a sound track which, when coupled with the others, forms the soundscape of the piece.
All sounds originate from a room tone recorded in a morgue. They were freely transformed in order to extract musical qualities. The repetitive structure of the piece can evoke the cycle of life and death, as well as the cycle of labor and mourning which intersect daily in the environment of the morgue.
Écrans aims to illustrate the relations between cinema and death. Many thinkers have studied cinema from the perspective of “spectrality”, making it the ghostliest of arts, notably because of its particular temporality which intertwines past and present, as if the time of shooting came to ‘haunt’ the time of viewing.
To this end, the sounds surrounding the tombstones of five filmmakers from Quebec were recorded. Each recording was then used to make an audio-reactive luminous frame flicker, through a device that transformed sound into light. The frame was installed in five locations on Quebec territory where the five filmmakers’ works were once shot. These interventions in the landscape were each time documented on video at dusk.
The resulting shots last 40 minutes, allowing first to see the frame planted in the landscape, then, as the image darkens, to see it transforming into a simple rectangle of light seemingly floating in space. This rectangle of light can, by its shape, bring to mind the archetypal shape of the cinema screen or the auto-focusing collimator visible in the viewfinders of many video or photo cameras. As for the twinkling light, it evokes one of the fundamental principles of cinema: the palpitation of light creating the illusion of movement.
This project stems from Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 work entitled Erased de Kooning Drawing, in which the artist entirely erased a drawing by the famous painter Willem de Kooning.
This iconoclastic gesture, which marked art history, is certainly a provocation. However, in art as in life, provocation often calls for retaliation. Such is the form taken by this project: a retaliation, attempting to throw back at Rauschenberg’s work the full extent of its audacity, by re-appropriating it as it once re-appropriated De Kooning’s sketch.
Here, a reproduction of Rauschenberg’s work was printed, then framed, respecting the original dimensions. During the printing process, electro-magnetic sounds produced by the printer were recorded in order to be played back through six speakers near the reproduction. If Rauschenberg’s proposal highlighted the processes of erasing and disappearing, it is subverted here in order to emphasize processes of writing and appearing. This new version, as an auditory interpretation of Rauschenberg’s work, displaces its focal point, oscillating between visual absence and auditory presence.