Disrupt!on
Friday 28 March 2014, 7:30pm
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco - Villa Paloma
56 Boulevard du Jardin Exotique
98000 Monaco
T +377 98 98 44 84
f.larini [at] nmnm.mc
www.nmnm.mc
Facebook: Nouveau Musée National de Monaco
Friday 28 March, 6:30pm–April 13
news of the world
50 Resolution Way
London SE8 4NT
pierre [at] thecentreofattention.org
www.thecentreofattention.org
Facebook: news of the world
As part of its public programme, NMNM–Villa Paloma presents Disrupt!on, a performance installation by Julien Bayle, curated by François Larini (NMNM), which takes place simultaneously and live in Monaco and in London at news of the world space.
Julien Bayle is a minimalist sound and visual artist working at the juncture of sound, visual and digital data. Through successive digitally generated and evolving sequences, Disrupt!on explores the phenomenon of disturbance. It reflects how a deterministic system can progressively evolve—through its existence within a wider system and through external interventions—into something unpredictable.
The Disrupt!on performance at Villa Paloma is an electronic piece lasting about 30 minutes exploring and developing all the work’s concepts, producing its sounds and displaying the continuous flow of data. The performer interacts with sound, sometimes changing the oscillators’ parameters, sometimes altering time parameters without ever using a proper tempo, but every time destabilising the very system he created.
The Disrupt!on installation at news of the world space in London is triggered by the start of the live sound/visual performance in Monaco which activates some of the installation’s processes through the internet, using basic communication protocols. The data fed into the algorithms by the artist creates an aural and visual output which evolves from Monaco, informed, corrupted and ruptured by audience interaction through Twitter as the data travels the net to London. The higher the number of interaction, the greater the unpredictability of the system’s output.
After the end of the performance in Monaco, the London installation is fully launched, and the stimuli received from the present audience or remote participants, through the hashtag #blpmc on twitter, continue to disrupt the installation, creating glitches, reactions, random events and system degeneration. Each hashtag is sensed and contributes to increasing the global installation’s entropy.
Experimenting with the concept of control vs. chaos both in his installations and live performances, Julien Bayle draws from Richard Artschwager’s “blp” idea, seen as a kind of sudden burst of information within various landscapes. In our era of digital sound and “cloud computing,” the name itself—blp, pronounced “blip”—refers to an electronic sound suddenly appearing in our soundscape as a noise, an alarm or a tune…(like Artschwager’s blp suddenly appears in a landscape). Within a computer- and network-based audio-visual system, they can be translated into a behavior that would be new, uncanny and disruptive.
The original blps—an oblong shape developed by Richard Artschwager in 1967–1968—were flat painted pieces of wood, but he soon made them from spray paints and stencils, adhesive decals and rubberized hair. In 1971, the exhibition Sonsbeek buiten de perken (Sonsbeek Between Lawn and Order) took place in the Netherlands. Artschwager’s contribution, Utrecht Projekt, consisted of blps installed around the city and a catalogue of photo-documentation showing the blps in urban and rural settings. The catalogue was accompanied by an album that played the sound of a ticking clock on one side and that of a dripping tap on the other. He considered these mundane noises an auditory counterpart to his blps: background sounds that often go unheeded, but which, once noticed, are almost impossible to ignore.
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) – Villa Paloma presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date of Richard Artschwager’s (1923–2013) work from 20 February until 11 May. The exhibition is organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and curated by Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for curatorial affairs at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
