Series of ink and scanography . glossy paper A4
Commissioned by Bisou records for the edition of a collection around my musical piece Echoplasme.
This series was made during the first lockdown in april 2020.
< Non-exhaustive choice
Family Catharsis on Compostela road
Variable size : Dog hair . bone . hoof
cloth . feather . eggshell . nail . horn
wild hanging in the woods
July 2019 Ariege France
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Borne - Milestone
code sacré - Sacred Code
Sound installation, ceramics and sound system 33 x 12 x 10.5 cm.
There are a lot of photos and film footage left over from World War I. In terms of sound, though, there is only one film that recorded a measure of the sound vibrations on Armistice Day. That representation of sound shows all the magnitude of the sound of the artillery on the Western Front in Moselle. It preserves the sound of one minute before and one minute after the Armistice on November 11, 1918. The first minute still reflects the clamor of weapons tearing through the soil, to be replaced at 11 o’clock sharp by a flatline : "the silence."
At the instigation of the Gamerz Festival (Aix-en-Provence), whose artistic mission is to explore the languages of machines in all their forms, I wanted to use this piece to re-inject, much like a temporal echo, the question of code into a historical context. The piece’s title refers to the milestones showcased in the work of French artist and WWI infantryman Gaston Deblaize, which were made out of ceramics and contained sacred battlefield soil from Verdun.
This sound piece is made up of 16 codes played randomly. These codes were created by Choctaw soldiers from the U.S. Army in October 1918, for the purpose of radio communication between regiments, battalions, etc.
Up until then, every country communicated in their own language, but Colonel A. W. Bloor knew that messages were being intercepted by the enemy. Under his initiative, the future Code Talkers were first tasked with adapting the polysynthetic Choctaw language to the military vocabulary of that time. So First Battalion became a grain of corn, a colonel became a deer, and a general became a buffalo. Those transpositions, which I find very poetic, inspired me to find those codes and to make them audible again.
The 18 Code Talkers of the 36th Division, Company E, used these codes via DeForest BC-14A military radios on the night of October 26, 1918. This new ruse disoriented the enemy and in the space of three days, it had retreated.
These volunteer soldiers, whose language was unfamiliar to the many ethnic groups fighting in the war, played a pivotal role in the enemy’s surrender. The Choctaws were guarantors of the code until it was declassified in 1968. Recognition and gratitude from the West were a long time coming.
Furthermore, the end of the Great War marked the beginning of the industrialization of agriculture, leading to a deep transformation of the land and landscapes and eventually to the genetic modification of living things. In these landscapes, now polluted to the extreme, the contrast with Native American cosmogony is glaring. As land is sacred and inviolable, the concept of wealth and the accumulation of goods are considered a mental illness. In their culture, the land on which they live does not belong to them because they are the land, they belong to the land.
"In the nineteenth century, an old Choctaw chief predicted that the language of his people would cross the ocean and save lives. "
Erikm 2018
My thanks to : Judy Allen, Dora M. Wickson, Mafalda Camara and Olivier Zol, François Martig & Emilie Roi, Diane Eberhardt.
The piece to integrate in 2019 the collection of Chahta Foundation
at Durant Oklahoma, Usa
Project by Erikm & Stéphane Cousot
Live streaming & real time
Erikm perform with Idiosyncrasy & Sound-map
Stéphane Cousot Perform with Rhizome
Image by Stéphane Cousot
Sound & Anamorphose light by Erikm
Vidéo editing by Erikm
Sound-map by Locus Stream
Espace multimédia Gantner, Festival Gamerz
Work Exhibition - 2013-2017
Monitor & TV screen
Dalle Lcd & Led or Cold Cathode
Since the beginning of 2010, eRikm uses the physical properties of "prepared" TV screen cathodes, in the musical sense of the term, to obtain "improvised" variations :
the degradations he applies beforehand to the screens he uses generate evolutionary images due to the gradual disappearance of the physical qualities of the screen and of the cathodes it contains. A paradoxical phenomenon, since the progressive death of the screen gives rise to new images, in an almost permanent recycling movement that lasts until either the power or the screen is turned off.
A Canopy of Accidents
Transposition and live version (2010) for Optical sound order.
www.acousticcameras.org
A Canopy of Accidents An acousmatic piece created for the outdoor, February 3, 2010. Commissioned as part of the project Sirènes et midi net (Sirens and noon on the dot) in Marseille. The sirens as sound objects and broadcasting tools.
Initially composed for a public area.
The online version is a sound imprint of the original acoustic projection.
The idea of transposing this sound piece to a home listening environment, by streaming and in relation to a webcam image, activates several different senses.
A temporal and symbolic crease between the memory of a work created for the outdoor, reactivated through a subjective image of reality.
This is still a sound piece connected to a public space outdoors, but its status is dematerialized through the filter of the Internet.
A Canopy of Accidents echoes the propagation of a sound and a specific sequence, which can be heard across an entire area at a time T.
An acousmatic web that brings back to mind the actual principle of the Web.(1)
The connection between the original accident (2) is intrinsically linked to the paradigm shift in this work, in an increasingly active political context,
ranging from discipline to control (3), the eye of the webcam.
...
A suspension, a snag
the heartbreak of our great collapse
the monthly truncations, preliminary to the disaster
collective revelations of an incident to the accident, these 4,500 siren horns
tear the acoustic and temporal landscapes of distant sound.
Erikm 2016
1 The World Wide Web (WWW), as in, literally, a spider web stretching across the world.
2 Paul Virilio, L’accident original, Éditions Galilée, 2005.
3 Didier Ottaviani, Foucault - Deleuze : de la discipline au contrôle, ENS Éditions, 2003.
Monitor 20 inch
GPU crash & shock screen
Saison 4 : Spring 2013
eRikm - Besançon La Chaux-de-Fonds
Creation of 9 unpublished compositions on a path 113 mn
A collaboration between the association Intermèdes Géographiques (Besançon) and ABC Cultural Center (La Chaux-de-Fonds), Crossings is a cycle of sound travels border to listen on the train that connects France and Switzerland , the actual line of Clockmakers.
Music scrolls the image of landscape, progressing in the GPS marks the route ; freely available via a downloadable application on his mobile phone (Android, iOS) or a broadcast system (housing and headset) - devices created specifically by ENSMM Besançon and made available to the public in major cities of the course.