La mouvance des flux

Streamed sound work, 2007

Presented at in midair sound works hong kong 2007 [associate program of the French May 2007]
open microphones [in partnership with locus sonus, Ecole Superieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Art de Nice Villa Arson]

“There is no absolute ear, the problem is that of having an impossible ear – to make audible forces who are not audible in themselves. In philosophy, it is the question of an impossible thought, that is, making thinkable, with very complex material, forces that are unthinkable.”
Gilles Deleuze, “the musical time”, conference at IRCAM, Paris, 1978.

A constant hum, hissing, white noise… then out of this background of noises, lending an ear to it, some frequencies stand out.
Birds, I suppose.
Then, a plane flies across an imagined blue sky. An emergency siren fades in and out to let place to whistling birds.
Everything seems in order again. Only irregular klaxons come to disturb it from time to time.
This is what could be heard on one of the streams from Marseille, France, on a regular Sunday, through the apparatus set up by the French-based audio art research group Locus Sonus. Open microphones located in different regions of the world broadcast their immediate soundscape. I add an open-microphones in Hong Kong to the existing ones.
la mouvance des flux takes its root in these streamed soundscapes and explores the idea of continuous listening, the complex relationships between flux and sound events. This work proposes to render audible the inaudible and the faraway in ways different from the radio, and to transfer the global streams within a sound field around the listener’s head. Sounds are mixed and intermingled, confusing the perception of background and foreground within the composed soundscape. It explores sound as a continuous dynamic stream, where sounds rub and crash against each other, and weave into each other to create new tensions. The experience of time is also a way to alter the nature of the listening activity – are these remote sounds static events, or are they changing by nature? In other words, what are we listening to?

in midair, sound works Hong Kong 2007
16/6– 15/7, 2007
curated by Yeung Yang
artists 藝術家 Felix Hess (Netherlands 荷蘭) Anson Mak 麥海珊 (Hong Kong 香港 ) Cedric Maridet (France, Hong Kong 法國,香港) Kawai Shiu (USA, Singapore, Hong Kong 美國,星加坡,香港) Su-Mei Tse (Luxembourg 盧森堡) Yeung Ngor-wah, Anthony 楊我華 (香港 Hong Kong) Yuen Cheuk-Wa 袁卓華 (香港 Hong Kong) special programme at habitus [habitus 特別項目] Hong Kong: City in Between (1997) by Robert Iolini (Australia 澳洲)
This exhibition is an associate program of the French May 2007.