Book | 24/7_PARADISE – Tribute to Philippe Franck | Société i Matériel – NoCode Éditions

Contributors (provisional list)

Philippe Baudelet, Philippe Boisnard, Carole Brandon, Anne-Laure Chamboissier, Alexandre Castant, Natan Karczmar, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Régis Cotentin, Christophe Denis, Béatrice de Fays / B2fays, Frédéric de Lapaillonne, Natalia de Mello, Peter M Friess, Jordan Fraser Emery, Philippe Franck (in memoriam), Maja Jantar, Stéphane Kozik, Pierre Larauza, Christian Leroy, Gilles Malatray, Alexander MacSween, Marie Julie, Didié Nietzsche, Jean-François Octave, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Isa*Belle Vrammout, Daniel Van Acker aka Daniel Duchamp, Daniel Vander Gucht, Marc Veyrat, Christian Vialard, Dominique Vermeesch (do.space), Emmanuelle Vincent, Rudy Rigoudy, Robin Rimbaud – Scanner, Rafaël Sanchez, Biba Sheikh, Gabriel Soucheyre, Zoé Suliko, Yves Tassin, Jacques Urbanska, JJ Duerinckx alias Maurice Charles JJ, Khaldoun Zreik…

24h-24 PARADISE (19 avril 2025)

Initiated by Marc Veyrat, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Isa*Belle Vrammout and Société i Matériel, 24h-24 PARADISE was a hybrid artistic and commemorative event that took place in April 2025, simultaneously in Mons (Belgium) and Seoul (South Korea – as part of Planned Accidents #2). It pays tribute to Philippe Franck, sound artist, curator and director of the Transcultures association, who passed away shortly beforehand. The event brought together a group of artists, researchers, performers and friends of Philippe Franck in a dynamic of collective networked creation.

Conceived as a work in itself, 24h-24 PARADISE is based on the use of the Discord platform, chosen for its flexibility of use and its server and channel functionalities, audio, video and text exchanges. Four main channels structured the event:

• FÉÉRIQUE Room (centred in Mons, Philippe Franck’s place of residence, coordinated by Isa*Belle Vrammout),
• Grand Jacques Channel (associated with Jacques Urbanska, deployed on Second Life, YouTube and the Transcultures website),
• VOX® Cellar (linked to Philippe Franck’s VOX ePŒTICs research-creation project),
• PLANNED ACCIDENTS Gallery (from Seoul, under the direction of Rafaël Sanchez).

These channels hosted performances, broadcasts, artistic interventions and discussions throughout 24 continuous hours. In parallel, several video streams (incoming and outgoing) were projected in the physical space in Mons, creating an immersive set-up that was both local and connected.

The event is part of a research-creation approach, an exploration of digital dispositifs and intermedial experimentation, intersecting issues of remote presence, memory, collective performativity and artistic ritual. It thus articulates the intimate and the public spheres, the local and the global, in a context of post-lockdown and increased circulation of online artistic practices.

Catalogue 24h-24 PARADISE

Over the course of its some 300 pages, 24h-24 PARADISE composes a discontinuous cartography in which critical writing, speculative fiction, sound poetry, intimate memories and conceptual scores intertwine, all traversed—directly or in hollow—by the figure of Philippe Franck. The book does not merely document an event: it extends its logics of activation, by disseminating forms, shattering formats, multiplying regimes of discourse. One encounters reflective contributions on post-digital aesthetics, narrative détournements, handwritten tributes, transcriptions of performances, creation protocols, theoretical fragments that elude disciplinary frameworks.

The volume acknowledges the heterogeneity of its voices (artists, researchers, fellow travellers, close ones, distant presences) without ever seeking to neutralise it. This diversity is not only aesthetic; it reverberates the multiple affinities, dialogues and transmissions that, over the years, have orbited around Philippe Franck—at once a catalyst of practices, an attentive mediator and an instigator of spaces for shared creation. This polyphony produces an effect of controlled saturation, where tonalities overlap more than they follow one another. Analytical texts on sound geopolitics or technological ubiquity sit alongside sensory narratives, hallucinatory visions, field notes, autofictions traversed by an absent figure, by diffraction. In places, the voice doubles, slides, becomes code, noise, quotation. Elsewhere, it returns in the form of notation, of silence, of mantra.

The book’s architecture is non-linear. You can enter at any page, drift from an interview excerpt to a drawing, from an encrypted image to a sequence of words addressed to no one. Thematic clusters emerge, without ever fixing interpretation: affective inter-worldliness, glitch strategies, embodied archives, speculative geographies, connected bodies, cybernetic rites of passage. It thus produces its own conditions of reading, at once fragmentary and cumulative, immersive and dislocated. It posits no centrality, except that of an absent presence around which texts, gestures, sounds and silences gravitate. More than a tribute, 24h-24 PARADISE acts as a network of persistences: each contribution plays the role of an emission point, a relay, a transformer. Nothing is closed; everything remains to circulate.

Some texts function as sensitive reconfigurations of the real: they shift the usual coordinates of critical writing to produce oblique forms of address, modulated by experience, mourning, memory or perceptual instability. One finds voices that perform their own erasure, diffracted narrations, autobiographical asides that fork into theoretical meditations. These are less finished objects than processes held in tension, open to incompletion.

Several contributions use the book as an interface to replay, in deferred mode, what was transmitted online: gestures, sounds, dislocated presences. This transfer from one medium to another does not operate through simple transcription but through aesthetic translation: what was flow becomes rhythm, what was interaction becomes editing, what was bug becomes syntax. We witness a material reinvention of the ephemeral.

Finally, the catalogue accommodates within itself zones of low intensity: typographic silences, drawings, blanks, scans, interruptions. These spaces do not fill a void; they work on it. They extend the project’s fragmentary ethic, refusing completeness in favour of a circulation of forms, where each text becomes the cast shadow of another, in a logic of relay rather than sequence.

The authors did not limit themselves to a memorial function; they unfolded a book-network, a porous, affected, unstable volume, which acknowledges disappearance while moving through it. What plays out here is not so much the preservation of a legacy as its continuous activation, in a movement of relay, infusion and reinvention, around a founding absence.

For Transcultures Jacques Urbanska