Philippe Franck
Philippe Franck
Director
Art historian, essayist and art critic, sound and intermedia producer/creator, Philippe Franck (FR/BE, April 1963 – January 27, 2025) was the artistic director and founder of Transcultures (since 1996). He was also the founder and director of the international sound art festival City Sonic (since 2003) and Les Transnumériques, digital arts & cultural biennale (since 2005). Since 2018, he had been the general director of the European Pepinieres of Creation (international network) and since 2021, a member of the CiTu Paragraphe research team in Information and Communication Sciences and digital humanities at the University of Paris 8.
He curated many sound/multimedia/interdisciplinary exhibitions, events and festivals in Belgium, France and abroad. He also taught digital arts at the School of Saint-Luc (Brussels) and sound creation at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels and at Arts2 (Mons).
He produced or participated in numerous discs (on various labels including Sub Rosa, Optical Sound, Transonic), directed several collective publications on contemporary/electronic music, interdisciplinary, digital and/or sound creation (notably with La Lettre Volée editions), and wrote regularly as a critic in several Belgian, French and Quebec journals.
In 2022, he began a doctoral thesis in Information and Communication Sciences (Cognition, language, interaction) at the University of Paris 8 (CiTu Paragraphe Team), under the dual supervision of Khaldoun Zreik (Paris 8) and Marc Veyrat (University of Savoie Mont Blanc).
Artistic
At the same time, since the early 1980s, he had been developing a multifaceted artistic journey and produced numerous choreographic scores (for Nadine Ganase, Manon Oligny, etc.), interdisciplinary performances, videos (notably for Régis Cotentin, Hanzel & Gretzel, or Thomas Israël), and multimedia projects (with digital artists such as Philippe Boisnard, Marc Veyrat, and art2network).
In 2014, he co-directed the film Bernard Heidsieck, poetry in action (which was also the subject of the DVD book-box Variations sur Bernard Heidsieck).
Under the name Paradise Now (his solo sound project since the 90s), he collaborated with the holistic performer Isa*Belle (several body/sound art installations and performances since 2005), electronic musicians Christophe Bailleau (the Pastoral duo), Gauthier Keyaerts (within Supernova), Stephan Dunkelman, as well as vocalist Maja Jantar and several poets (including Ira Cohen, Gerard Malanga, Werner Moron, Eric Therer, Catrine Godin, Habiba Sheikh).
