29.01 > 04.02.2024 | Zone Libre – Sound Art Festival 2024 | Bastia (Fr)

In March 2023, the “City Sonic Spring Sound Camp” took place in Vilnius (associated with the twentieth anniversary of the City Sonic international sound arts festival initiated in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation by Transcultures). This workshop which focused on the “field recording” techniques and the soundscapes in urban space brought together around ten Lithuanian artists supervised by 3 Belgian and French artists/artistic curators (Philippe Franck, Tommy Lawson and Christian Vialard).

It gave rise to a sound art exhibition accompanied by performances, “Reimagining the city” (hosted by the multidisciplinary cultural space Kompresoriné/Ideas Block).

From these different contributions/creations, Paradise Now has created, at the invitation of Zone Libre, an environment which highlights the creativity and talent of this young Lithuanian scene with differentiated aesthetics.

Sound environment
29.01 > 03.02 – 14 >17:00
Centru Culturale Alb’Oru

Assembled/mixed by Paradise Now. Featuring Edvinas Siliūnas, Aleksejus Sapiego, Hasan Alp Celikel, Kotryna Kvedarytė, Gediminas Stepanavičius, Raimonda Žiūkaitė & Agnė Žiūkaitė, Toma Čepaitė, Paradise Now, Tommy Lawson, Christian Vialard, Roberto Beccera, Kotryna Žilinskaitè.

Production: Transcultures/City Sonic 20 years, European Pepinieres of Creation, Užiateka, Oasis of the Arts in partnership with Kompresorinė – Ideas Block, with the support of the City of Vilnius and the Lithuanian Council of Culture.

Sound artist and sound designer Tommy Lawson, is interested in the sound body of urban spaces by developing with the series of geolocated sound tours a reading and listening experience, from different places in France and abroad.

From site specific sound fragments, he arranges mini-stories, “postcards” of perceptions in motion. Like the long walks to ferret out and collect sounds for his sound creations, he carries his camera around to capture hundreds of images taken at different moments in his personal history.

Throughout the traveling projects, looking in addition to listening reflects the atmosphere and materiality of the city, urban or natural landscapes, changes in atmosphere…

Tommy Lawson offers us, for his first monographic exhibition, a dialogue between photographs and “field recording” pieces (which recently gave rise to two mini-albums on the Transonic label) here offered for listening on headphones

Most of the sounds from the “D’un monde [sONore]” à l’autre project were recorded in La Louvière (Belgium), to create a geolocalized tour of the city as part of the ARTour Biennial of Contemporary Art and Heritage (summer 2023).

“Bega [Sonic Scape]” (2022) is an invitation to a sonic journey between Bastia, Timisoara (Romania) and M’Hamid (Morocco) questioning the moment, shaking up the uses and the people and events encountered in situ, to immerse us in a bubble of mental images between environmental ambiances and electronic textures.

Photo & audio exhibition
29.01 > 03.02.2024 – 14 >18:00
Centru Culturale Alb’Oru

Conception/composition / soundscapes & photos : Tommy Lawson
Special thanks to Benjamin Grenier/Transcultures & Éric Claus/ARTour
With the vocal participation of Jean Daniel Bécache
Production : Transcultures – City Sonic 20 Years, European Pepinieres of Creation, ARTour-Central, Zone Libre.

“A few years ago, while visiting the western fjords of Iceland, I came across a coastline dotted with large driftwood. These trees had been there, untouched, for years before becoming unwanted. As in many migration stories, what was once useful becomes unwanted. It took 3 years for this driftwood to travel from the rivers of Siberia across the White Sea to Iceland, but many of them have been there for decades. During World War II, my family had been moved from Poland to Siberia to work in a labor camp – a fate shared by many during Russia’s annexation of the land at the start of the war. One of my great-grandfather’s jobs was to cut down trees.

These were floated down the river to be transported; those that did not meet the requirements were swept out to sea (and drifted to Iceland). And so, the lifelines connect.

In this site specific audio installation, the fixed lines also move with the wood that grew when my great-grandfather was alive, the charcoal (here on the ground) from a tree that he could have cut down and the migratory lines that appear as the visitor interacts with the space.

The aim here is to explore these materials through their audio qualities and the sounds produced by their transformation by the element of fire, also with vocal recordings resonating through ceramic objects.”

Maja Jantar

Installation paper, red ink, ceramic, sound and charcoal
30.01 > 03.02 – 10 > 17:00
Museu di Bastia / cellule – 1

Production: Transcultures/City Sonic 20 Years, European Pepinieres of Creation, Zone Libre. With the support of Art Promotion Taike.

This installation is inspired by object theater, concrete and electronic music, digital art, pop art as well as still life painting. The objects on a breakfast table become the performers of concrete and electro-acoustic music with a very rich and unexpected polyphonic sound diffusion.

Numerous motors hidden in the different utensils make them move, collide, spin, jump, in order to create sounds. The organization of all these sounds creates a musical composition based on everyday sounds.

All actuators and different motors are controlled directly via music software, which allows giving the musical composition an electronic touch.

Playing on our perceptions, the installation is intended to be immersive and sensory, the viewer is immersed in the heart of a short fantastic or animated film in which objects come to life thanks to ghosts who occupy the places, thus breaking down porous borders between perception, imagination and reality. An infra-bass synchronized with the light variations of the chandelier suspended from the ceiling floods the space and physically grips the spectators. Immediately putting the viewer in an intriguing atmosphere, where their senses of sight, touch and hearing are directly solicited and disturbed.

Installation d’objets sonores
30.01 > 03.02 – 10h à 17h
Musée de Bastia

The installation Digital Breakfast was initially designed in 2014 with Arnaud Eeckhout, member of the sound art collective VOID.

Landscape of disaster [creation]
AR interactive visual device / 2021-2024

The disaster landscapes are AI-assisted creations dating from 2021. They are created from a model produced by the artist and reflect on the world which has become a landfill, an immense chaos of destruction. For this exhibition, the artist presents an interactive work in augmented reality, opening up the possibility of playing with sound in order to create a sound composition for the viewer.

Black-Hole in the language [Création]
Video installation

Between 2016 and 2022, Philippe Boisnard presented the interactive work “Black-Hole in the language” in an exhibition (in Montreal, Paris and Angoulême). For this exhibition, the work is transformed into a video and is completely redesigned in a different 3D logic, as well as sound research developed specifically for the Zone-Libre festival. An immense vortex made up of hundreds of thousands of letters absorbs the possibility of language. A metaphor for networks, “Black-Hole in the language” reflects on the disappearance of human language in the flow of data.

30.01 > 03.02 – 10h > 17h
L’Arsenale

Production : Zone Libre, Transcultures/City Sonic 20 Years, European Pepinieres of Creation.

The “heretical” creations imagined by Christophe Bailleau take their source from the ambiguity between creation using artificial intelligence and that which is purely human. From the photos, video and sound environment that constitute this hybrid exhibition, an impression of strange in/humanity and heterodoxy emerges, with a scent of the absurd. These artifacts are ghosts from another time – “human too human” – which also announce an immediate future. It depicts an “intelligence” that watches itself evolve at exponential speed.

The different components of this “terminal” dialogue with each other in a “between world” that is both lush and icy: the photos are free references to painting and more particularly to still life (which is not so much here) but also to geometric-kinetic figures (fixed but as if in movement); a video makes the link between “real” images and others created by AI; the sound environment is composed of a selection of recent electronic and organic landscapes, some of which were created with AI (but the identification clues are scrambled here); finally, a poetic fragment (also partly written with AI) sets the tone of these “Ghosts of Brilliance” opening towards a dreamlike dimension and a “nonsense” which would make sense.

Photo – video – audio exhibition
30.01 > 03.02 – 10h > 17h
L’Arsenale

Production : Transcultures/City Sonic 20 Years, Zone Libre, European Pepinieres of Creation

Since its creation in 1986, the VIDEOFORMES festival (Clermont-Ferrand) has been interested in different forms of the moving image. With the advent of the Internet and the personal computer in the 90s, VIDEOFORMES explores the artistic innovations of sound and visual performances in its Electronic Arts Nights.

Today, the artists’ videos presented by VIDEOFORMES (International Festival of Hybrid and Digital Arts) bear witness to a unique research into sound/image correspondences in the development of artistic imaginations.

For Zone Libre, Gabriel Soucheyre, director of VIDEOFORMES, has designed an international selection of recent videos of varied aesthetics and which have in common an attentionparticular to the sound.

Untitled #3, Rafael (Es/Be), 17’, 2023

“At a time when only stars existed, before the dawn of the Sun and Moon, there lived only a very, very, very strange creature…”

Directed by the Belgian artist Rafael, Untitled #3 is a hybrid object between art film, audio-visual performance, video installation and choreography (with the dancer of Algerian origin Lila Abdel-Kader).

Inex.Materia, Datum Cut (Ca), 10’ (extract), 2023

inex_materia is a dreamlike celebration of impermanence and obsolescence. Post-digital meets analog in this audiovisual performance inspired by anarchitectural sections, media archaeology, experimental cinema and video art.

Created in residence at VIDEOFORMES.

Physical Exercises, Agnès Guillaume (Be), 10’ (selection), 2023

Quantum physics teaches us that a particle can be here and there at the same time, still and in motion. Inspired by this counterintuitive vision of the world and the contemporary craze for exercises of all kinds, Agnès Guillaume offers us here a visual training in the idea that reality (and perhaps ourselves) can encompass diverse and uncorrelated states, with no causal link from one state to another.

Filmed in 16 mm and reworked with AI, this video presents a complex choreography of hands seeking and touching each other, oscillating between sensuality and emotion, bordering on abstraction. Each of the sequences offers playful gymnastics for the mind through a variation in the processing of the image and an improvisation on the saxophone on the twelve tones and semi-tones of the octave.

With the collaboration of Antoni Hadzijanev, Guillaume Mazloum, Guillaume Faure, Damien Brassart, Cédric Vanstraelen.

Haiku, Martin Gerigk (DE) 17’, 2020

This symphonic audiovisual project for two Japanese performers, alternating percussion groups, soundscapes and rhythmicized video sequences, is an experimental approach to pay tribute to the beauty of Japan and the extraordinary art of Japanese haiku poetry of 15th to early 20th century.

Zig Zag : Handclaps in Alternity, Van McElwe (USA), 10’, 2021

A series of claps, each creating a new space, echoing through anonymous worlds.

Video Selection
30.01 > 03.02 – 10h > 17h
L’Arsenale

A Zone Libre presentation, European Pepinieres of Creation, Transcultures/City Sonic 20 years.
Banner credits : rafael (détail)

Philippe Franck (Transcultures/City Sonic) and Bruno Letort (Ars Musica) lead the Sound Creation course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Their two approaches/fields of expression – sound arts and open contemporary music – combine to explore current sound practices (beyond music), in their most varied dimensions, to integrate them into installations, performances, hybrid or multimedia devices going beyond the classic concerting arrangement.

During the year, “field recordings”, captures and montages of urban environments lasting around 3 minutes are carried out by students in Brussels, in the multi-cultural district of Fontainas (near the Royal Academy of Fine Arts) or in particular acoustics of Brussels.

This selection is completed by other field recording capsules (same duration) produced for the Art of Noise course given by Drita Kotaji and Philippe Franck at the Mons ARTS2 school of visual arts.

Listening Station
30.01 > 03.02 – 10h > 17h
L’Arsenale

Partnership : Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation, ARBA-ESA, ARTS2

In this AV performance created for Zone Libre, the electronic, organic and sensitive music integrates, for a small part, a dialogue with the artificial intelligence subtly integrated into these landscape compositions, like a sort of monitored parasite.

The video production reflects a poetic, offbeat and sometimes amused look at an often surreal reality and magical moments captured in the banality of everyday life.

Transitions to black which contrast with the vibrancy of the images open onto more serene moments and uncertainty gives way to the possibility of renewal.

The traveling sound dialogues here with a selection of video images recently produced by Christophe Bailleau. Through an atmosphere that is both dreamlike and domestic, this AV performance bears witness, in a unique way, to the current state of the world.

Christophe Bailleau is developing a musical and hybrid project creating musical pieces based on acoustic sources (guitar, percussion, voices, various noises, etc.), mixed with concrete sounds and field recordings. He also makes intriguing and dreamlike short films which try to capture the unspeakable.

Audiovisual performance
30.01.2024 – 20:30
Centru Culturale Alb’Oru / Grande salle

Christophe Bailleau: guitar, electronics, percussion, voice, video
Production: Transcultures/City Sonic 20 Years, European Pepinieres of Creation, Zone Libre

At the invitation of Zone Libre, Maja Jantar offers us in the resonant spaces of the Bastia museum a multilingual vocal performance in a singular microworld, to combine poetry, spoken word and vocal improvisations in a long piece of tonal and vocal modulation in free dialogue

Somewhere between sound poetry and experimentation, Maja leads us into a ritual with the desire to communicate with the sound of these ancient stones, and to explore a mythical story to communicate with the clouds, oceans and tides.

Vocal performance + meeting – Bastia museum cisterns
30 + 31.01.2024 – 14h30
Museu di Bastia

Maja Jantar: voice and video images
Production : Zone Libre, Transcultures/City Sonic 20 Years, European Pepinieres of Creation.

Stéphane Kozik intervenes live on his ‘Digital Breakfast’ installation in a performative form. In this sound performance, he takes us into a mix of electronic music played live with the kitchen furniture. He makes several small dishes live which he offers to the public during the performance. The utensils are amplified and produce household sounds when handled.

With this unique instrumentarium Stéphane Kozik takes on the challenge of putting on a concert while cooking. The universe created by the household appliances that come to life transforms the recipe into a real sound tale, a multisensory moment enriching for the eyes, ears and taste buds.

In this unique project, Stéphane Kozik does not hesitate to mix genres and disciplines: the pictorial practice of still life and pop art, concrete music, repetitive, progressive, electro-industrial music come together and new instrument making, without forgetting of course the art of the table.

A way for the artist to play again with contexts by allowing them to be seen, listened to and experienced differently, in a friendly moment of sharing.

Sound objects performance
02.01.2024 – 15h00
Museu di Bastia

Supported by Zone Libre, Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation

For Zone Libre, the vocalist-performer of Dutch-Polish origin Maja Jantar and her Franco-Belgian sound creator accomplice Paradise Now deliver an adventurous performance which brings together traveling pieces. These are all poetic micro worlds in which the multilingual voice (English, French, Dutch, Polish, etc.) in its different facets evolves as intimately as freely on soundscapes and organic-guitar-electronic canvases.

A video montage made from images recently captured in their countries of residence (Finland and Belgium) and temporary host city (Bastia) completes this sonopetic travelogue.

Concert/audiovisual performance
02.01.2024 – 20h30
Centru Culturale Alb’Oru / Grande salle

Production: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation, Zone Libre.

In line with his poetics of catastrophe (2015-2022), presented numerous times, Philippe Boisnard is developing a new poetic and audio-visual performance focusing on collapse.

Both a poem and a visual and sound experience, the live performance unfolds as an exploration of the collapse of an entire civilizational system: linguistic, spatial and graphic. Manipulated live in a form of synesthesia of sound and image, Collapse plunges the viewer into a minimalist and radical flash in order to capture the accelerated destruction of a world.

Performance A/V
03.01.2024- 15h00
Maison des Sciences – Casa di e Scenze

Philippe Boisnard : design, production, performance
Production: Transcultures, European Pepinieres of Creation, Zone Libre

Through different retroactive systems Colline Gall attempts sound assemblies using DIY synthesizers. Loops and repetitions mingle to offer only a kind of well-organized chaos. Almost Blue extends into an expected unknown and lets itself be carried into space. “Permanent wandering, between gentleness and violence, calm and storm, certain sounds seem to disappear while others cling as best they can to strained ears.”

Between preparation and improvisation, good and bad surprises appear. Colline Gall listens to Miles Davis, Alain Kan and Oli Xl, reads Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, William S Burroughs JR and dances whenever the opportunity arises.

Inspired by the Free Party movement and its actors, the idea of free and open listening is particularly close to his heart. It extends the “experimental” scene within its temporary autonomous zones and offers moments of listening.

Concert/performance
03.02.2024 – 18h30
Hôtel Central Bastia

As part of the Sound Emergences program
With the support of European Pepinieres of Creation, Transcultures et la Villa Arson/ENSA Nice.
Colline Gall is taking the Add Diy To course from Christian Vialard, professor of digital cultures at Villa Arson/ENSA Nice.

With this time for shared reflections, Zone Libre intends to be a vector of meetings and emulation for mediation linked to the different types of practices, digital and hypermedia devices between arts and sciences. Zone Libre thus contributes to promoting the development of collaborations linking artistic and scientific research and creation.

Illustrated lecture
03.02.2024
Maison des Sciences / Casa di e Scenze

Since 2021, research and software related to AI have multiplied. Not another day without there being articles or announcements of new AI protocols. Artificial intelligence has interfered in many practices that were thought to be reserved for the sensitive and intellectual part of man. While robotics has revolutionized manual work and its mode since the end of the 1970s, we are witnessing a revolution in the act of creation of still images, animated images, 3D, writing, thought.

This lecture will attempt to unravel in the swarm of all these news and announcements, which are divided quite generally and in a Manichean manner between fear and fascination, what is at stake regarding the act of creation.

We will thus discover that far from the obvious, this imagination questions us about the possible understanding of our own human imagination, leading us to conceptualize a post-aesthetic.

From there, Philippe Boisnard and Khaldoun Zreik will criticize a certain form of creation made by AI based on the imitation of reality, and will attempt to bring out a form of thinking about AI, opening up to a practice and an ethics of creation linked to artificial imagination.

Philippe Boisnard :

Media artist and writer, he questions the constitution of man through the materiality of codes and representations linked to political, social or economic dimensions. Its installations and performances are presented internationally in more than 20 countries.

Khaldoun Zreik : Professor of Information and Communication Sciences, University of Paris 8, he is also Director of the Hypermedia Department (UFR MITSIC), University of Paris 8, and head of the CiTu-Paragraphe Cybermedia, Interactions research group , Transdisciplinarity & Ubiquitous), Paragraphe Laboratory Université Paris 8. He is co-director of the NET Master (Digital: Issues and Technologies): Université Paris 8, and co-editor in chief of the RIHM journals (Revue des Interactions Humaines Médiatisés, Ed. Europa, Paris – IJDST (International Journal Of Design Sciences Technology), Editions Europa, Paris.

Moderators : Philippe Franck (Transcultures, CiTu Paragraphe-Paris 8) & Tommy Lawson (Zone Libre)

L’Odyssée Sonore (Hamida Mathieu) and Zone Libre (Tommy Lawson) open a path of exploration in an elegant and warm setting in the hotel lounge for a unique sensory sound journey. As in a listening room, comfortably seated, visitors are immersed in a universe rich in melodies and vibrations generated by a variety of instruments and electroacoustic sounds. These two universes seem stranded on a beach in the Mediterranean, and complement each other in a mysterious and volatile space.

“Mare Nostrum”: beneath the agitation of its surface, in its depths, hides a moving and poetic sound world.

Space-time, space-movement, the Mediterranean Sea as continuity positions us facing History, our common history, our common space. Its contours, its landscape, its sounds are like an invitation for a sound journey orchestrated by singing bowls, crystal bowls, gong, shruti box, hand pan, koshi chimes, creating an alchemy of sounds and vibrations through a maze of landscapes moving sounds on a journey out of time.

Concert/listening lounge
04.02.2024 – 18h
Hôtel Central Bastia

Production : Zone Libre, L’Odyssée Sonore, European Pepinieres of Creation