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t'Obsolete or not t'Obsolete ...
Vieux Media Fests à La Générale - 3 ((2017))

august 10 , 2018

[ ... Read earlier words & thoughts about the 2017 Vieux Media Fest at La Généreale ... ]

#9 - Chance Meeting

[ 10 secs of sound, July 22nd 2017: 2M0M1XXVII Third, 9'20" - 9'30" ]

The evening of Saturday July 22nd, 2017 came with the chance meeting of two (audio-)visual works, the minimalist-video (dispositif d')installation Sâdhanâ by Marc Plas, and Vermille, a 3D generative work coded (in C) by Anne-Sarah Le Meur.

[ Marc Plas : "C'est quelque chose qui est fait pour être vu dans un espace, en passant ; mais si vous restez, il y a un côté film, continuité, quand-même. Et il y a un travail sonore."
Emmanuel Ferrand : "Et ce dispositif est compatible avec la volonté de l'autre artiste, Anne-Sarah. Chez elle, c'est de la vidéo générative."
Anne-Sarah Le Meur : "Effectivement, je voudrai quand-même indiquer que c'est un rapprochement de deux travaux finalement eh décidé aujourd'hui, car par rapport à la durée des deux travaux ça paraissait intéressant de les réunir et aussi parce que finalement en termes de visuel il y a des points communs ; en termes de fluidité, de lenteur. Moi ça m'intéresse, les rapprochements - comment dire ... improvisés, les confrontations. Et puis la bande son... normalement mon travail je présente dans le silence. En général. Et dans la musique de Marc Plas ... eh je ne sais pas si tu l'appelles musique ... en tout cas dans la bande son, il y a aussi des moments de silence. Donc eh la musique pouvait se prêter à un jeu de rapprochement... Donc à vous de voir comment les coincidences, les dialogues, jouent." ]

#10 - Trompe-l'œil

[ 10 secs of sound, July 20th 2017: 2M0M1XXVII Third, 9'00" - 9'10" ]

#11 - unPublic #45, Paul Claudel ...

[ 10 secs of sound, July 24th 2017: 2M0M1XXVII Third, 9'40" - 9'50" ]

July 24th, in the afternoon, before La Générale opened its doors for the day's Vieux Media events, we gathered there with a number of the Fest's participants for the 45th edition in our series of unPublic performances. There was Uspudo (whom we seemed to first have met on the occasion of our performance with Yaping, Michael Nick, Rébus & (?) Naoki Kita in Saint Ouen, Chez Madeleine, on April 8th 2016). Uspudo is a painter and self taught piano/keyboard virtuoso whose special interest in the music of Erik Satie is reflected not only by his moniker (uspud is the title of a 'Christian ballet in three acts' for which Satie wrote the music in 1892 - * -) but also by his longstanding close friendship with the Italian-French pianist and well-known Satie interpreter Aldo Ciccolini (who died in 2015, in Asnières-sur-Seine).

During the unPublic Uspudo played the acoustic piano, but also the amazing Farfisa organ, up on La Générale's gallery.

[ more farfisa ]

Then there were Hector Castells-Matutano, a Spanish artist living and working in Paris, who played the guitar. On persephone there was Sigolène Valax, who during the 2017 Vieux Media Fest did a working residency in La G's cave with the trio Vierge Noire E (Sig, Léo Dupleix, Anna Gaïotti). Marc Plas manipulated a vieux super 8 film projector. And then FlexRex, Rébus, me.

Most interestingly, however, the 45th unPublic came to sort of being hijacked by performer/actress/artist Juliette Bineau and her colleagues Edith Valdy and Arnaud Le Glanic, who - during these Vieux Media Fest days in 2017 - were working on the interpretation / rendering of (parts of) the 1929 theatre play 'Le Soulier de Satin, ou Le pire n'est pas toujours sûr' (The Satin Slipper) by the French poet, dramatist and diplomat Paul Claudel, a 'love story dominated by the ideas of sin and redemption' that apparently is only rarely staged, mainly because of its extreme length.

The 45th unPublic thus unexpectedly came to be largely centred around the declamation by Edith Valdy of long parts of the play's text - that is because for all the time that we were performing, Edith simply didn't stop reciting...

(On the unPublic's Bandcamp page you can listen to the, as always ever so slightly edited, recordings while reading along with the recited text from Paul Claudel's play)

" ... Et c'est vrai que je suis attaché à la croix, mais la croix où je suis n'est plus attachée à rien. Elle flotte sur la mer.
...
C'est le mal seul à dire vrai qui exige un effort, puisqu'il est contre la réalité, se disjoindre à ces grandes forces continues qui de toutes parts nous adoptent et nous engagent.
...
Et s'il désire le mal, que ce soit un tel mal qu'il ne soit compatible qu'avec le bien.
Et ce qu'il essayera de dire misérablement sur la terre, je suis là pour le traduire dans le ciel. "

It must be a little something inherently French in this and similar Francophone dramatics that makes, to me, this unPublic, despite the obvious and big musical differences, sound an awful lot like Agonie Ajournée - especially in the fifth track (from which the textual fragments above were taken).

#12 - Boulder <👉> Colorado <👈> Denver...

The Sunday July 23rd events of the 2017 Vieux Media Fest at La Générale were curated by Tomoko Sauvage, who used the opportunity to follow up on a recent trip of hers over there, and brought art and artists from Colorado, USA, over to here.

Present in person at La G there was Jenna Maurice, a visual artist currently living and working in Denver, CO. Tomoko interviewed Jenny in English about her video works, and then translated what was said into French. Which, in a way, became a performance in itself, kind of 😏...

[ Jenna Maurice : "My work is like performance art, that is specific to a very specific landscape. So the only way you can see it, is when I document it with a video. Does that make sense?"
Tomoko Sauvage : "Eh, donc j'a demandé la différence entre vidéo et eh performance-vidéo. Elle dit que le performance-vidéo c'est eh c'est une performance art, art performance on dit en français pour performance art ? Performance artistique ? Ah d'accord. Il y a un mot eh ... donc eh c'est une performance artistique mais filmée et ... bon ... Donc dans le cas de son travail, spécifiquement lié à la landscape eh ... paysage ... et eh c'est montré seulement, pas seulement, eh only as a video, right?"
Jenna Maurice : "Right! ... But the first piece that I am going to show is not on that piece of paper, so you can't read about it ( ** ). But I want to explain what it is, because there is no sound, no dialogue."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Of yours?"
Jenna Maurice : "The very first one of mine. So, the very first piece is ehm ... I invited strangers into my studio..."
Tomoko Sauvage : "So... elle parle de la première pièce à elle, qu'elle va montrer, c'est à dire, it"s gonna be like ... the ... the third one, the second one ... because the first one is Adan, right?"
Jenna Maurice : "No, the first one is this one!"
Tomoko Sauvage : "You changed the ... order?"
Jenna Maurice : "I did. Yes. The first one is the first one. The first one is not on the paper!"
Tomoko Sauvage : "The very first one?"
Jenna Maurice : "Yeah. Yes. Yes."
Tomoko Sauvage : "So that's number zero. Right?"
Jenna Maurice : "Zero. Yes. "
Tomoko Sauvage : "Le titre zéro, c'est... C'est pas écrit dans le papier, mais eh est sur la, eh, elle a invité des gens, eh... you said they were strangers..."
Jenna Maurice : "Strangers. I don't know them."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Okay... elle a invité des gens qu'elle ne connaissait pas, à son travail... your work, right?"
Jenna Maurice : "Yes, this is my work... Oh! Yeah, I invited strangers into my studio..."
Tomoko Sauvage : "... dans son studio ..."
Jenna Maurice : "... and I asked them to remember something important that happened in their life, that they could think about in a play by play way in their minds."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Donc elle a demandé, elle leur a demandé de se souvenir, de penser à, au mémoire le plus fort, eh, qu'elle a, eh qu'ils ont, et eh elle a filmé ces gens pendant qu'ils pensent à ces mémoires."
Jenna Maurice : "So I asked them to look into the camera, and use the camera kind of like a portal, to have the memory just play out in their mind, while I left the room."
Tomoko Sauvage : "You left the room?"
Jenna Maurice : "I did. Yeah. So I'm not there."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Donc elle a demandé à ces gens de regarder la caméra pour utiliser cette caméra comme portail de ..."
Jenna Maurice : "Portal. Just like a place to focus on."
Tomoko Sauvage : "... un endroit pour focus ses yeux ..."
Jenna Maurice : "And then have the memory in their mind."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Et avec le mémoire, la mémoire dans leur tête. et elle est partie, elle est partie, elle a quitté la pièce."
Jenna Maurice : "But I am interested in the non-verbal communication and what we can glean from their memories just by looking at their faces."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Elle s'intéresse à la communication non-verbale eh en regardant juste eh l'image de cette personne, ses regards..."
Jenna Maurice : "And if we can like have a personal connection with these people, even though we're not having a communication."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Et le ... elle espère avoir une connexion personnelle sans avoir une, une communication."
Jenna Maurice : "So the full piece has about sixty people in it, but we're gust gonna see, I think five."
Tomoko Sauvage : "Elle a fait ce travail avec soixante personnes mais elle va montrer seulement cinq personnes."
Jenna Maurice : "And the rest of the work in the screening kind of takes on a different context now with our new political [laughs] climate in the United States. The other work is based on political ... ways we are dealing with the political structure of the United States right now."
Tomoko Sauvage : "En discutant avec Emmanuel, de la Générale on a pensé que ça serait intéressant de faire une sorte de discussion sur eh la situation des artistes sur le régime Trump ... eh ... Tromp ... on dit en français ... Tromp ? ..."
Jenna Maurice : "But we should also know that all this work was made before ... the election."

The still above is from Difficulties in Relating to the Toadstool Rock, from Jenny's very fine series of video-d Concerning the Landscape performances.

(It is interesting to note the formal similarity between the unPublics and Jenny's Landscape performance series: like in the case of the unPublics, Jenny performs in situ without audience, for the mere eye of her digital camera, like the unPublic musicians perform for the ears of the digital audio recorder; and - in both cases - what subsequently is made public is the digital, timeless, registration of the unpublic performance.)

...

Not present in person that Sunday July 23rd were Ryan Ruehlen and the Rum Pilots collective, a collaborative sound/experimental music/poetics project from Colorado, The artists however did a live encounter / performance / intervention for us, transmitted directly via Skype (which, as we like to observe, may very well be considered 'vieux media' at this point in time) from the Boulder sewer to La Générale.

...

Then, on that same Sunday evening, many of us took hold of one or more mostly only approximately functioning vieux media tools, and joined the sound-making in Marc Plas's little playground, much of which was Larsen (feedback) based, e.g. the one obtained by

[ 10 secs of sound, July 23rd 2017: 2M0M1XXVII Third, 9'30" - 9'40" ]

...

...

... OK. So far, so good... Now on to even more of Vieux Media at La Générale...

...

notes __ ::
(*) Robert Orledge - Erik Satie's ballet "uspud": Prime Numbers and the Creation of a New Language with Only Half the Alphabet - The Musical Times Vol. 150, No. 1908 (Autumn, 2009), pp. 31-41
The 'strange' and 'provocative' ballet uspud was a collaboration between Satie and his friend Patrice Contamine de Latour, a Spanish poet who lived in Paris and who shared for many years Satie's bohemian misery. [ ^ ]
(**) Jenna and Tomoko had handed the audience in La Générale a photocopied A4 sized piece of paper, which on its one printed side had the title ColoradoLove. Screening Program Notes, followed by a four part list with names of artists/authors, titles and descriptions of video works that were going to be projected:
1. Adan De La Garza - Giving Myself a Reason to Scream But Not Cry (parts 1 and 2)
2. Jenna Maurice - Selections from "Concerning the Landscape. A Study in Relationships"
3. Jeanne Liotta - Soon it will be too hot
4. Kelly Sears - A Pattern for Survival        [ ^ ]

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tags: obsolescence, vieux media, unPublic

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