This project originates from the exploration of the relationship between visual arts and acousmatic music. Its development led to the concept of
“modulating reproducibilities”.
Initially, several research avenues were developed, such as structural analogies, a dialogue between two artistic disciplines through a possible sensory equivalence (synesthesia), or the similarities between certain processes inherent in acousmatic music and their corresponding graphical techniques.
Each creation begins with the line. This line dictates the details of the project as it develops, through a process that combines both deliberate and unexpected compositions.
Through meticulous graphic manipulation, the line — or rather these lines — transforms into visual material. This material is shaped, transformed, layered, and adjusted through the appropriation of algorithmic tools that craft these works.
The various compositions gradually enrich a library of graphic abstractions, whose elements can serve as material for future creations. This process is akin to how acousmatic composers “sculpt” sounds from their sound banks to create compositions.
Acousmatic music is actually considered “music on fixed media” because the pieces are created in an electroacoustic studio and fixed on an audio medium, to later be deployed in space using an acousmonium.
This deployment aims to enhance the work; it allows for faithful reproduction or adaptation to space. Thanks to this sound spatialization work, the composition and sound can then take on a different artistic dimension.
Another essential intention of the acousmatic concert is to foster the construction of mental images. Personal experience seems to suggest that the perception of sound is often linked to, or even dominated by, the visual aspect of a musical performance.
This project plays with the idea of reversing this mechanism. The spectator is invited to question their ability to develop their sense of listening, their mental perception of sounds from an image, to perhaps detect a “sonority”.
As is often the case in acousmatic music, the digital environment is also used as the primary medium for creation. This environment represents fertile ground and is the ideal tool for experimentation.
The reproducibility of the digital medium is used as an asset, a system that generates both variability and uniqueness, where each creation can be explored from multiple angles.
By favoring a digital format that enables adaptability across different media, these compositions can evolve beyond the digital sphere, materializing through different production techniques, in various locations and on different surfaces.
In this context, the challenge does not lie solely in the transposition of a digital image into a physical object, but also concerns the way in which these forms can exist differently depending on their mode of appearance. A single composition may then reveal itself differently depending on how it is contextualized, produced, or reproduced. It may thus unfold across various media (drawing, painting, volume, or moving image), generating new perceptions.
This variety of possible iterations and their adaptability to space gives rise to the concept of “modulating reproducibilities”. This concept plays with our relationship to the copy, to the replica, and questions, through this, the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of our conception of originality.
These compositions being conceived as transformable structures, each creation functions as an evolving matrix, capable of generating a multiplicity of states, without any of these manifestations being considered original or derivative.
This logic of modulation is based on a set of operations (cropping, scaling, distortion, deformation, addition, fusion…) which, individually or in combination, allow new configurations to emerge from one or several initial matrices. It is, therefore, part of a dynamic of systematic exploration, in which the multiplication of variations produces compositions while constantly shifting their states.
Acousma thus questions the tension between reproducibility and singularity, by proposing structures capable of modulation while maintaining a distinct identity, within an open generative system.
These investigations contribute to an aesthetic of variation pushed to its furthest extent, where forms, subjected to these processes of reconfiguration, tend toward states of densification or reduction, potentially leading to compositions reaching extreme thresholds, between saturation and erasure. They thus aim to explore the conditions under which a formal system can evolve to the point of testing its limits.
Since these creations initially exist in digital form, the NFT environment seems well suited to their dissemination. Photographic simulations represent one of the possible media. They allow the first phase of this artistic process to be revealed by contextualizing and presenting one of its visual possibilities.
They are autonomous digital artworks, constituting the project’s first expression, the foundational version that precedes and informs its future physical evolutions.
This deployment in the form of NFTs therefore offers access to the creations prior to any physical production phase.
Additional Information:
Although algorithmic tools are used, these compositions result from an artistic research process and not automatic generation (AI was not used).
OpenSea: NFT Collection.
https://opensea.io/collection/acousma
For more information about the NFT project, please refer to the "About" section of the OpenSea collection.
